A Circumplex Model of Moral Motivation
Abstract
Most moral psychology focuses on moral judgments and emotions with only a little research on moral sensitivity and actual actions. The field needs more studies on moral motivation to understand the relation between moral judgment and action (Why do people do acts that they know are wrong or fail to do acts that they know are good?) and to develop interventions to improve moral motivation and action (How can we make people avoid bad acts and do good acts?). Unfortunately, previous theories of moral motivation postulate only a single factor or dimension, so they are unable to account for the complexity of conflicting motivations. To fill this gap, we distinguish and cross both approaching and avoiding both the good and the bad. These four general motivations can be built into a new model that resembles previous circumplex models of emotion and of school achievement. We explain our new model, show how to represent conflicting motivations, discuss how to empirically confirm the model in general and in specific cases, and how to expand it to incorporate changes over time and different kinds of good and bad acts. We explore, in particular, how people can be motivated to do the bad and to avoid the good.
Speakers: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke) and Paul McKee (Duke)
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He has secondary appointments in the Law School and the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, and he is core faculty in the Duke Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, and the Duke Center for Interdisciplinary Decision Sciences. He serves as Resource Faculty in the Philosophy Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Partner Investigator at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, and Research Scientist with The Mind Research Network in New Mexico. He has visited at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, the Macquarie Research Center for Agency, Values, and Ethics in Australia, and the National Institutes of Health in Washington. He has received fellowships from the Harvard Program in Ethics and the Professions, the Princeton Center for Human Values, the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University, and the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has served as co-chair of the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association, co-director of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project, and co-PI of the project on the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Free Will and Moral Responsibility at Chapman University. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College and his doctorate from Yale University. He has published widely on ethics (theoretical and applied as well as meta-ethics), empirical moral psychology and neuroscience, philosophy of law, epistemology, philosophy of religion, and informal logic. Most recently, he is the author of Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, Morality Without God?, and Moral Skepticisms; co-author with Robert Fogelin of Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, and with Jesse Summers of Clean Hands: Philosophical Lessons of Scrupulosity; and editor of Moral Psychology, volumes I-V. His numerous articles have appeared in a variety of philosophical, scientific, and popular journals and collections. He performs various experiments in moral psychology and brain science with his Moral Attitudes and Decisions (MAD) Lab. He is working on one book on moral artificial intelligence and another book that will develop a contrastivist view of freedom and responsibility. He co-directs Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (SSNaP) with Felipe De Brigard and teaches a popular MOOC, Think Again, on the Coursera website with Ram Neta.
Everyone interested is welcome to attend.
The meeting will be held in English.
Participation is strongly recommended for students of the Doctoral School in Philosophy and Human Sciences and for students of the Doctoral School “The Human Mind and its Explanations: Language, Brain, and Reasoning”.
Where: Online
When: 29/10/2025 – 17:00 CET
Attendance: Attendance is free and open to all, but registration is needed by email [angelica.kaufmann@unimi.it]