These essays represent my continuing effort to help bring moral psychology into more direct contact with contemporary moral theory. By “moral psychology” I mean the philosophical study of the psychic capacities involved in moral agency and moral responsiveness – emotion, perception, imagination, motivation, judgment. Moral philosophers have been too focused on rational principle, on impartiality, on universality and generality, on rules and codes in ethics. The importance of the psychological dimension of the moral life – that is, on moral life and experience themselves – has been masked, implicitly denied, or at least neglected. In such a moral and psychological inquiry, one cannot remain content with a strict separation between the disciplines of philosophy and psychology (and the social sciences more generally). Philosophers and psychologists engaged in studies of morality are concerned about the same phenomena and need to learn from one another.

Iris Murdoch's 1970 collection The Sovereignty of Good first steered me in this direction. Murdoch laments philosophy's inability to “encounter” an expanding domain of psychology, and she says, “A working philosophical psychology is needed which can at least attempt to connect modern psychological terminology with a terminology concerned with virtue.” Clearly much progress has been made in this direction since these words were written. Virtue theory is close to being a mainstream concern in moral philosophy. (Yet at the same time, much of the virtue literature fails to explore adequately the psychologically rich territory that an understanding of the virtues actually requires.) A few philosophers have begun to mine social and cognitive psychology for its moral theoretic insights.