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The sources of moral agency: Essays in moral psychology and Freudian theory. By J. Deigh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996. Pp. 254. 14.95. ISBN 0 52155622 8.
There is an enduring tension between philosophers and psychologists. It is nowhere more obvious than in the field of moral psychology. Philosophers lay out all the conceptual options and decide amongst them on the basis of careful argument; 'evidence' as psychologists understand it, is peripheral. Psychologists on the other hand are driven by a belief in data, and tend to forget that the questions they ask are embedded in taken-for-granted assumptions about mental and social processes which have a long history. In the domain of moral psychology, it should be difficult to ignore the philosophical debates, for conceptions about what constitutes 'morality' are explicitly tied to beliefs about human nature. Some people manage to, however.
This book is therefore salutary for psychologists. The `moral psychology' of its title does not refer to a field of research, but to questions about motivation and reasoning. Indeed, Deigh mentions fewer than five contemporary `moral psychologists'-and only in footnotes, and he treats Freud's ideas as philosophical 'thought experiments'. But the essays that...