Moral philosophy comprises a variety of subfields, which include meta-ethics, normative ethics (ethical theory), moral psychology, and applied ethics. We (Karen Stohr, Cheshire Calhoun, and Jules Holroyd) are actively engaged in launching a new subfield of moral philosophy—positive moral philosophy. We are currently working toward a small workshop, two public conferences (US and Europe), an APA symposium, and a book series devoted to Positive Moral Philosophy. Calhoun and Stohr are applying for an NEH convening grant for the US conference.

Background 

The resemblance of the proposed field name—“positive moral philosophy”—to another relatively new and explosive field—“positive psychology”—is non-accidental.  Positive psychology took off after Martin Seligman’s brief 1998 presidential address to the American Psychological Association. Seligman drew attention to psychology’s almost exclusive focus on diagnosing mental pathology and repairing psychological damage. He proposed a counterbalancing positive orientation for a distinct field of psychological research—positive psychology. Positive psychology did not aim to replace a psychology of malfunction but to take up the under-explored terrain of what enables and would enhance ordinary, everyday mental health. 

Moral philosophy is not obviously negative in the sense of being solely about pathology or malfunction. It is not narrowly focused on wrong-doing, vice, violation of rights, evil. Indeed, moral philosophy would seem to be neutral. Normative ethics provides us with criteria for determining the normative status of actions (obligatory, permissible, prohibited) and for determining which traits are virtues or vices; moral psychology provides accounts of what moral agency consists in, the nature of moral responsibility, the varieties of moral motives, attitudes, and emotions; applied ethics addresses specific areas of moral concern such as new technologies and environmental issues.  

Nevertheless, as a matter of contingent fact, the standard foci of moral philosophical work invite us to dwell on the “negative” in moral life, or the ways in which human beings tend to malfunction, morally speaking. Thus, standard topics of discussion include, among other things, agents’ potential (and actual) failure to fulfill normative expectations; attitudes of resentment, indignation, guilt, and shame toward wrongdoers; the function of moral blame and nature of blaming practices; morality’s conflict with, and imposition of restraints on, self-interest; the potential over-demandingness of duties of beneficence and theoretical justifications for limiting morality’s demands; psychological and social factors that undermine agency, such as weakness of will or addiction; and social moral decline. Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that normative ethical theories are typically presented as primarily theories of obligation. They tell us what we are required to do, what may be demanded from us by others, and what, absent a passable excuse, we are blameworthy for failing to do. Likewise, theories of moral responsibility typically focus on what persons must be like if they are to be held accountable and blamed. Both sorts of theory thus tend to foreground what is potentially sanctionable via expressions of blame, moral protest, and social if not also legal penalty. Equally, they tend to emphasize potential moral failures that merit negative reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, contempt, disappointment, guilt, and shame. Normative ethical theories can, of course, also tell us what we “ought,” or have good moral reason, to do beyond what’s required. And accounts of moral responsibility can, of course, tell us what persons must be like to deserve praise, gratitude, appreciation, and admiration or simply deserve basic trust. Nevertheless, supererogation and positive reactive attitudes receive remarkably little attention. The “negativity” of normative ethics and accounts of moral responsibility emerges from a pattern of focusing on demandable requirements and accountability for failures. That pattern extends to applied ethics whose subject matter is largely moral problems and the identification of an ever-expanding list of moral requirements, whose violation makes individuals liable to blame.

The pattern of focusing on the required and the resentable is connected with a longstanding presumption that morality functions as a burdensome constraint on naturally dominant self-interested motives–motives that make wrong-doing attractive. Thus, a key question that has to be addressed is “Why be moral?” As Barbara Herman observes, “There is a familiar story that begins this way. Morality constrains. Liberty-loving people chafe, and demand justifying explanation. One might almost regard this as modern moral philosophy’s primal scene.” That primal scene makes it difficult to appreciate that morality, although sometimes a burdensome yoke, is often just part of normal to-be-expected social life. Well-socialized people comply automatically with many moral and social norms. In addition, morality is an object of aspiration, not just a burdensome constraint. People commonly adopt moral ideals, admire morally exemplary actions and persons, and desire to maintain a morally acceptable social identity. And yet, moral philosophy rarely takes up empirical and theoretical questions about the nature of routine morally responsible agency, its acquisition in childhood moral education, the social factors that support successful moral performance, and the nature and role of moral ideals. 

Moreover, the presumed burdensomeness of morality produces an oddly one-sided approach to beneficence. Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence and Morality” and Bernard Williams’s critique of utilitarianism for requiring that we be prepared to give up our ground projects launched a philosophical discussion of the potential over-demandingness of moral theories and a search for a theoretical justification for limiting morality’s demands. This is an important issue. But a focus on limiting morality’s demands has two unfortunate side-effects. One is inattention to beneficence (required or not), the forms it takes, the capacities or skills involved in being beneficent, and how to encourage more and more effective beneficent activities. The other unfortunate side-effect is that when “What am I obligated to do?” is the central question, it may seem that good but non-obligatory options can be safely ignored both in moral philosophy and in our own lives. 

Standard philosophical work in moral psychology as well invites us to focus on the negative—on factors that undermine agency—addiction, weakness of will, nudges, adaptive preferences—rather than on the ways that agency can be enhanced. The moral psychology of psychopathy and dehumanization receives attention but not positive dimensions of moral psychology such as faith in humanity and benevolence. Altruism, particularly when viewed through the lens of game theory’s presumption that individuals are self-interest maximizers, seems surprising rather than an expectable part of the psychology of individuals steeped in social practices of everyday helpfulness. 

In terms of interpersonal relationships of moral appraisal, the focus on individual failures of agency, and failures to meet normative expectation, facilitates a focus on negative reactive attitudes of resentment and blame: what these attitudes are and when they can be justified. Moreover, the view of these attitudes is itself negative—as burdens to be justified, rather than as potentially constructive parts of interpersonal relationships. Further, the role of positive reactive attitudes, such as praise and admiration, and their role in fostering moral agency, is less scrutinized, and has a more marginal status in moral philosophy and moral psychology.

At the social level, attention focuses on factors contributing to a general state of moral decline—individualism, consumerism, neoliberalism, the breakdown of community, and the spread of incivility on social media, in politics, in everyday life. Absent is a similar focus on the ways that moral communities support morally desirable behavior or the factors that enable collective moral progress and moral revolutions. 

What is positive moral philosophy? 

Positive moral philosophy is devoted to investigating the nature of and the social, interpersonal, and intrapersonal contributors to moral success and progress; it attends to the reparative, appreciative, generous, and hopeful dimensions of our relation to self and other, as well as to the attractions of morality and aspirational ideals; it emphasizes varieties of elective, non-demandable moral action over demandable moral requirements. Positive moral philosophy does not pick out an ethical theory even if some ethical theories, such as virtue ethics or care ethics might largely qualify as ways of doing positive moral philosophy. 

What makes a work in moral philosophy “positive” is not just one thing. It includes (but isn’t limited to) work that focuses on

• constructive accounts of how individual moral performance and character can be improved, and how social moral norms and attitudes can be improved; accounts of collective moral progress and moral revolution.

• the nature and function of positively valenced moral attitudes, such as gratitude, appreciation, praise, moral admiration, empathy, sympathy, benevolence, faith in humanity, normative hope.

• alternatives to blaming and punitive responses to wrongdoers, such as restorative justice, truth and reconciliation processes, forgiveness, scaffolding improved moral agency.  

• the attractiveness of morality, expressed, for example, in moral aspirations and ideals, admiration of moral exemplars, moral striving, and routine compliance with social moral norms.

• actions that exceed what is morally required, from saintliness and heroism to ordinary volunteerism, the taking on of responsibilities, philanthropy.

• positive duties of beneficence, care, or supportiveness, rather than negative duties of restraint.

• positive virtues like hope, compassion, kindness, trustworthiness, integrity, reverence, cheerfulness, and neighborliness. 

• the social infrastructure of morality, including ordinary social practices of politeness, generosity, and helpfulness; childhood moral education; good moral communities; creating cultures of giving; social supports of virtue; solidarity relations.

• models of the moral agent that challenge the homo economicus model of the self-interest-maximizing agent.

• models of moral communities that exemplify moral ideals and aspirations, or that articulate pathways for collective moral improvement.

• social transformations, and the role of moral philosophy and moral psychology in articulating the tools for effecting them.

Of all of the subfields of philosophy, positive moral philosophy is especially well-suited for empirically-grounded approaches. We need, for example, empirical studies to identify realistic techniques for changing social moral norms and behavior and to determine the factors that support both norm compliance and elective pro-social behavior. We need empirically well-informed accounts of the economic, historical, social, and political conditions under which moral revolutions take place. Positive moral philosophy is also well-suited to inclusion of work in non-Anglo-European moral philosophy, for example, Confucian theories of self-cultivation, Buddhist accounts of loving-kindness, and African relational ethics. Philosophical work on moral education of children—work that is currently isolated from mainstream moral philosophy—would have a natural home in the field of positive moral philosophy. And of course, both analytic and continental approaches and literatures are equally well-suited. In short, positive moral philosophy promises to bring together an atypically diverse range of methods and approaches.

Rationale for the field

Although there is, as yet, no recognized field named “positive moral philosophy,” there is already a body of work fitting the proposed new field’s aim, published in excellent venues, and by a wide range of philosophers. However, as indicated in the previous section, work in moral philosophy can be “positive” in quite different ways. Absent a unifying name for this diversely positive work, philosophers working on, say, social norm change, character development, supererogation, empathy, or positive reactive attitudes, are unlikely to see conceptual connections between these different topics or the way each contributes to a larger project in ethics. Nor is this diverse literature likely to be brought together in a single undergraduate or graduate course. A good analogy here is the field designation “moral psychology.” Moral psychology is an internally diverse field, including work on the nature of agency, moral emotions, virtues, moral responsibility, egoism and altruism and the relation between moral judgment and motivation. Absent the field name “moral psychology,” that work would have been conceptually disaggregated into such fields as metaethics, virtue ethics, philosophy of emotion, and philosophy of human nature. Field names stimulate new scholarship by enabling scholars to appreciate how seemingly diverse work contributes to a common project and by creating a new scholarly community.

The available field names for any piece of scholarship also has a significant effect on whether that scholarship will be perceived as “central” or “fringe” in the field. Consider, for example, the way that the very best work on the concepts of race and gender, if framed as a contribution to the field of metaphysics, is bound to seem marginal given shared conceptions among metaphysicians about what the main problems, important scholarship, and methodological approaches are. Framed as a contribution to feminist philosophy or critical race theory, however, work on the concepts of race and gender would of course be centrally important. Despite the quality of publication venues and stature of its authors, work in positive moral philosophy largely occupies a fringe status. This is because of the way moral philosophers standardly conceive the main problems, important scholarship, and central methodological approaches in moral philosophy. This is unfortunate given the human significance, morally constructive, and socially transformative potential of work in positive moral philosophy. One of the effects of the rise of positive psychology was to legitimate extant work, for example, on happiness and thereby prompt an explosion of new work (as for example, happened in the case of happiness and well-being studies). Or, in philosophy, one might think of the legitimating, and thereby scholarship-stimulating effects of introducing field names for feminist philosophy and experimental philosophy. We anticipate the introduction of positive moral philosophy to have a similar effect in moral philosophy. Fields develop when new questions, new lines of enquiry, and new models of scholarship are opened up. This is what we aim to achieve with positive moral philosophy. We hope it will inspire moral philosophers to take up new projects and develop them into manuscripts that might not otherwise have been written. The potential benefit is not just to philosophy. There’s a clear cultural need for positive approaches to the ethical life. We have come, culturally, to focus ever more exclusively on the negative, problematic, blame-warranting, and trust disappointing aspects of our moral lives together. An aim of establishing this new field is to change this dynamic.