Morality and Normative Cognition: Categories of Norms in Moral Psychology and Across Culture

Although the concept of morality is central to moral psychology, it is understood differently by different researchers, as evidenced by decades of unsuccessful search for its definition or other specification, as well as diversity of conceptions used throughout moral psychology literature. I overview the most popular ways of conceptualizing morality and argue that it is most appropriate to view it as a subset of normativity with fuzzy boundaries. Norms, beliefs, and attitudes, that subjects themselves label as moral, are characterized by a cluster of co-occurring properties. The degree to which this finding generalizes to non-Western cultures is uncertain, and probably not all cultures distinguish a special category of moral norms. However, morality may be a particular case of a more general phenomenon of a culture developing a category of norms it considers of special importance.