Psychology as a Moral Science

Svend Brinkmann

Psychology as a Moral Science

Perspectives on Normativity

Svend BrinkmannDepartment of Communication and Psychology University of AalborgKroghstræde 39220 AalborgDenmarksvendb@hum.aau.dk

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For Signe

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Foreword

Since the 1970s, a steadily mounting wave of criticism has threatened to engulf what passed as psychology in the mid-twentieth century. The grounds of complaint have ranged from the irrelevance of “laboratory” psychology to any issue of every-day life, to fundamental objections to the conceptual naiveté of academic psychol-ogy, in particular the uncritical adoption of a causal metaphysics as the structuring principle of the flow of human thought, action, feeling, and perception. Among the sources of the pseudoscientific nature of mainstream experimental psychology has been a prevailing ignorance of the natural sciences adopted as ideals, and a steadfast refusal to take account of the role of moral orders in the formation and management of human life forms.

The effect of 50 years of efforts at reform can now be seen in the growth of qualitative and cultural psychologies as significant components of a well-rounded and useful training in the basic elements of genuinely scientific psychology. It is scarcely credible that even a decade or two ago students could be introduced to the principles of social psychology without the central role of language as the medium of social interaction even being mentioned! Choice of pronoun can have profound consequences for a social relationship if you are French or Japanese. In this and many other psychologically relevant matters, the overwhelmingly Anglophone character of psychology has stood in the way of forging an authentic identity for psychology as a discipline. These developments should have brought the tacit sub-scription to a causal metaphysics under scrutiny and stimulated reflection on the ultimate consequences of tasking up the insight that psychological phenomena are meanings and that the principles of their ordering into coherent processes are nor-mative. Indeed they have to some extent. However, the most profound consequence that is the focus of this study is the renewed emphasis on psychology as a moral science, much in the way that the nineteenth-century pioneers of a scientific approach to understanding personal and social life was proposed.

In this important book, Svend Brinkmann has provided a brilliantly argued and, one hopes, a definitive account of how psychology will look when the shift to an explicit moral science has finally come about. The thrust of the argument is to show that moral issues and concepts as to how one should live as a human being among others are not just add-on bits to the psychological paradigms that already exist, but are the very roots from which psychology should spring. We do not need a

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psychology of morality, in the manner of Piaget or Kohlberg, but a moral science. Emotions are not to be taken as displays of this or that moral judgment, but as the products of the moral orders in which human beings live. Psychology should self-consciously return to the “ethology” in the original acceptation of the word, the study of meaningful conduct.

This is the “interpretative-pragmatic” view of what psychology ought to become. A key step in the overall project is the setting aside of the famous Humean claim that factual and valuational aspects of the discourses that make up the substance of human life are radically disjoint – the refusal to accept the alleged naturalistic fal-lacy. The argument that defuses this famous “fallacy” is as simple as it is profound. All accounts of morality must rest on evaluative premises – true – but aren’t they independent of the facts of human life, such as those the evolutionary psychologists reveal with their hypothesis that the lineaments of our present lives were laid down in the conditions of the paleolithic era? But that life was itself ordered in accor-dance with norms – how else could it have been? Our hominid ancestors did not simply respond in ways that their genes predisposed them to. Our genetic endow-ment is the result of the normative framing of life along the banks of the lakes in the Olduvai Gorge. In a more philosophical vein, we have the arguments of Wittgenstein and Searle to the effect that the very possibility of a rule-ordered life depends on the existence of public institutions – morality cannot be based on the accidental or even forced coherence of private, subjective feelings of pleasure or approval. Neither can one obey a rule only once nor can one sustain a normative framework for action alone – how could one know that one had remembered yes-terday’s rule correctly if one had only one’s own memory as an authority?

One can only hope that this subtle and profound analysis of the proper founda-tions for a science of people thinking, acting, feeling, and perceiving will attract the attention it deserves. Finally, this may be the last push that enables psychology to turn the corner from the darkness of conceptual confusion into the light of a moral science.

Georgetown Rom HarréApril 2010

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Preface

The ideas of this book were originally presented in my PhD dissertation, which I defended in 2006 at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The text has since been thoroughly revised, new chapters have been added, and old ones deleted. The con-tents of some of the chapters have also appeared as individual journal articles, but I have tried in this book to state my arguments in the form of a coherent, book-length account of psychology’s complex relationships to moral issues.

This text contains materials that have previously appeared in:

Brinkmann, S. (2009). Facts, values, and the naturalistic fallacy in psychology. New Ideas in Psychology, 27(1), 1–17.

Brinkmann, S. (2008). Changing psychologies in the transition from industrial society to con-sumer society. History of the Human Sciences, 21(2), 85–110.

Brinkmann, S. (2006). Mental life in the space of reasons. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 36(1), 1–16.

Brinkmann, S. (2005). Human kinds and looping effects in psychology: Foucauldian and herme-neutic perspectives. Theory & Psychology, 15(6), 769–791.

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I wish to express my gratitude to my PhD supervisor, the late Steinar Kvale, from whom I learned how to be an academic. I am grateful in so many ways for what I learned from working with and for Steinar. I would also like to thank the members of my PhD committee, Rom Harré, Alan Costall, and Benny Karpatschof. They provided me with valuable feedback, and I have learned a lot from conversations with all of them (and from reading their work). I am particularly thankful to Rom Harré, who encouraged me to publish my ideas as a book. As a PhD student I profited greatly from discussions with Shyam Cawasjee, Donald Polkinghorne, Lene Tanggaard, Claus Elmholdt, Peter Musaeus, Jacob Klitmøller, Johan Trettvik, and Klaus Nielsen. I am particularly grateful to Daniel N. Robinson for his proficient supervision and valuable discussions, especially during my visits to Oxford University in 2002 and 2004, where many of the ideas of this book were conceived. I would also like to thank my new colleagues at the University of Aalborg, where I have worked while I have finished the present text. I am thankful to everyone for welcoming me in a very kind way. Finally, I want to thank my wife Signe Winther Brinkmann for her encouragement and acceptance of the strange practice of academic work. I dedicate this book to her, sine qua non.

Acknowledgments

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Contents

1 Psychology and Morality: An Interpretive-Pragmatic View................. 1

Part I The Place of Value in a World of Psychology

2 The Psychological Social Imaginary........................................................ 17

3 Changing Psychologies, Subjectivities, and Moralities ......................... 39

4 How Psychology Makes Up People .......................................................... 57

Part II An Inescapable Morality

5 Facts, Values, and the Naturalistic Fallacy in Psychology .................... 79

6 Moral Realism ........................................................................................... 95

7 Moral Practices ......................................................................................... 123

8 Conclusions ................................................................................................ 145

References ........................................................................................................ 161

Index ................................................................................................................. 173

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About the Author

Svend Brinkmann is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Communication and Psychology at the University of Aalborg, Denmark. His research areas are general psychology and qualitative methods, and he is codirector of the Center for Qualitative Studies at the University of Aalborg and also editor of the journal Qualitative Studies. Svend Brinkmann has published books in Danish about the mind, identity, and the philosopher and psychologist John Dewey, and he is coau-thor (with Steinar Kvale) of the English language book InterViews. In addition, he has published several journal articles about the philosophy of psychology, qualita-tive methods, moral inquiry, and approaches to human science such as pragmatism, hermeneutics, and discourse analysis.