Behavioral ethics scholars tend to coalesce around either of two perspectives on ethical judgment and behavior: a rationalistic approach, which frames ethical judgment and behavior as a function of conscious, deliberative, and effortful reasoning (Kohlberg, Reference Kohlberg1981; Rest, Reference Rest1986), and the nonrationalistic approach, which frames ethical judgment and behavior as a function of unconscious, nondeliberative, and effortless psychological processes (Monin, Pizarro, & Beer, Reference Monin, Pizarro and Beer2007; Sonenshein, Reference Sonenshein2007; Weaver, Reynolds, & Brown, Reference Weaver, Reynolds and Brown2014). Adherents of the latter lament the former’s “worship of reason,” criticizing the relegation of noncognitive domains of the psyche to the “irrational” fringes, where they are viewed as “conceptual errors that [bind] one to the material world and therefore to a life of misery” (Haidt, Reference Haidt2001: 815). It can be argued, then, that the nonrationalistic approach is an attempt to make holistic, and to humanize, ethical judgment and behavior, wherein traditionally marginalized elements of the human psyche (e.g., intuitions, heuristics, mimicry) are highlighted as playing a prominent role in affecting ethical judgment and behavior.
At the forefront of the nonrationalistic approach stands research on moral intuition, specifically as espoused in moral foundations theory (MFT) (Graham, Nosek, Haidt, Iyer, Koleva, & Ditto, Reference Graham, Nosek, Haidt, Iyer, Koleva and Ditto2011; Haidt & Joseph, Reference Haidt and Joseph2004). A central premise of MFT is that moral intuitions determine ethical judgment and behavior. Moreover, MFT proposes that the specific content of moral intuitions can be organized around distinct moral systems or foundations. These foundationsFootnote 1 are theorized to be innate to the design of the “normal” human brain, meaning that they are built into humans’ neural tissues, beginning in utero and continuing throughout adulthood (Graham et al., Reference Graham, Haidt, Koleva, Motyl, Iyer, Wojcik, Ditto, Devine and Plant2013). MFT has enumerates six “best candidate” foundations that have been ingrained within humans and passed down generationally and cross-culturally: harm, fairness, purity, authority, in-group loyalty, and liberty. Scholars accounting for the morality of foundations—that is, what makes these foundations “moral”?—have relied predominately on a functionalist narrative rooted in evolution and biology. This narrative has highlighted the ancestral functionality of foundations as a key contributing factor to the morality of such foundations. As Graham et al. (Reference Graham, Haidt, Koleva, Motyl, Iyer, Wojcik, Ditto, Devine and Plant2013: 63) summarized, “MFT proposes that the human mind is organized in advance of experience so that it is prepared to learn values, norms, and behaviors related to a diverse set of recurrent adaptive social problems” (emphasis added). Critics of MFT, however, have voiced concerns over the social utility argument as its center (Jost, Reference Jost2012; Kugler, Jost, & Noorbaloochi, Reference Kugler, Jost and Noorbaloochi2014). Jost (Reference Jost2012: 416), for instance, argued that some “allegedly” moral foundations possess “a striking resemblance to authoritarianism” and pose a challenge to social cohesion and inclusion. These critiques have surfaced an important and enduring question about whether, and to what extent, a functionalist account can serve as the main explanatory narrative for the foundations’ morality. Specifically, it is questionable whether the functionalist account can sufficiently explain and predict how individuals actually experience these foundations. Beyond these questions, it is unclear whether functionality holds sufficient normative power to justify the morality of these foundations. In other words, the functionalist account may be limited on explanatory, predictive, and normative grounds.
To address these issues, I draw from the philosophy of Charles Taylor (Reference Taylor1989, Reference Taylor1992, Reference Taylor1994) to advance a novel understanding of the morality of foundations—an understanding that honors MFT’s functionalist account but also crucially takes a human-centered approach to expand on it. Taylor’s work has been used to address various phenomena and issues, from multiculturalism (Gutmann, Reference Gutmann, Gutmann and Taylor1994) to political organization (Rorty, Reference Rorty1994) to constitutions of selfhood and morality (Smith, Reference Smith2013). Within organizational studies, scholars have applied aspects of Taylor’s philosophy to the study of practical rationality (Sandberg & Tsoukas, Reference Sandberg and Tsoukas2011), the formation of communitarian organizations (Selznick, Reference Selznick1994), and integrative social contracts theory (Donaldson & Dunfee, Reference Donaldson and Dunfee1994, Reference Donaldson and Dunfee1999, Reference Donaldson and Dunfee2002, Reference Donaldson, Dunfee, Heugens, van Oosterhout and Vromen2003). I focus specifically on Taylor’s thinking surrounding what can be called his “work of retrieval.” This work is “at once normative, critical, and explanatory” (Calhoun, Reference Calhoun1991: 234). It is explanatory insofar as it explains “people living their lives” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 58). It is critical and normative insofar as it foregrounds what Taylor believes to be an essential, if not the essential, aspect of “people living their lives”: the human desire to know and be oriented toward the good. For Taylor, the living of life necessitates reference and connection to a vision of the good—so much so that his “strong thesis” argues that humans “cannot but orient ourselves to the good” and that “our being selves is essentially linked to our sense of the good” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 51). He laments that, because “we have read so many goods out of our official story,” we must engage in a project of retrieval—a project whose aims are to “unbury” such goods so that we can allow them to empower us, “make claims on us,” and restore our humanity (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 520).
At first glance, the notion that Taylor’s work of retrieval can add value to MFT may seem odd, given that the latter has presented itself as an empirical, descriptive, and value-free project on morality (Graham et al., Reference Graham, Haidt, Koleva, Motyl, Iyer, Wojcik, Ditto, Devine and Plant2013). Yet, as some critics have charged, there are “clearly normative (and not merely descriptive) arguments” within MFT that persist, “whether their [moral intuition] proponents realize it or not” (Kugler et al., Reference Kugler, Jost and Noorbaloochi2014: 415). I propose that tenets of Taylor’s work of retrieval can help uncover the tacit normative arguments underlying MFT’s conceptualization of foundations. Specifically, Taylor’s work gives us a useful theoretical apparatus for providing a more expansive and comprehensive understanding of the morality of foundations as delineated within MFT. This expanded understanding honors MFT’s functionalist narrative regarding the morality of foundations as predicated, to some extent, on a combination of evolution, biology, and social utility. Crucially, however, Taylor’s philosophy can help push deeper into this narrative to retrieve the substantive experiential moral goods that underlie and empower it. Overall, Taylor’s philosophy may provide a “better account” for the morality of foundations—that is, it may help to better explain and predict individuals’ experiences of foundations’ morality.
In what follows, I provide an overview of MFT. I then discuss the key tenets of Taylor’s work of retrieval and how this work can advance MFT both conceptually and empirically. Moving beyond MFT, I then discuss how Taylor’s project can yield insights for business ethics research more generally. First, Taylor’s philosophy may have interesting implications for how ethical leadership is conceptualized—as normatively driven and/or socially constructed. Second, his thinking may yield insights for behavioral ethics research by expanding its theoretical scope from an interiority-focused explanation of ethical/unethical behavior to an exterior-focused one, highlighting how individuals’ felt experiences of normativity can influence or guide their behaviors. And third, Taylor’s philosophy may contribute to ethics pedagogy by encouraging students and practitioners to look outward toward moral sources.
MORAL FOUNDATIONS THEORY
According to MFT, moral intuitions are the primary determinants of ethical judgments and behaviors. Moral intuitions are defined as “the sudden appearance in consciousness, or at the fringe of consciousness, of an evaluative feeling (like-dislike, good-bad) about a person or event without any conscious awareness of having gone through steps of weighing evidence, crafting evaluative arguments, or inferring a conclusion” (Haidt & Björklund, Reference Haidt, Björklund and Sinnott-Armstrong2008: 188). From the perspective of MFT, ethical judgments and behaviors are more a “product of the gut than the head” (Graham et al., Reference Graham, Haidt, Koleva, Motyl, Iyer, Wojcik, Ditto, Devine and Plant2013: 66). In other words, the emergence of moral intuitions in an individual’s psyche is what informs the individual of the rightness/wrongness and goodness/badness of encountered stimuli. Moral foundations scholars have argued that the content of moral intuitions can be organized and categorized into distinct modules or foundations. Although these same scholars have clearly stated that these categories are not definitive, research has coalesced around six “best candidate” foundations that are theorized to underlie intuitions. These include harm/care (alleviating others’ suffering), fairness/cheating (ensuring equality), in-group/loyalty (group-oriented devotion and sacrifice), authority/subversion (respecting and upholding the social order and meeting the obligations of hierarchical relationships), purity/degradation (keeping oneself physically and spiritually clean to protect the group from contaminants), and liberty/oppression (resisting attempted domination) (Haidt, Reference Haidt2012). One or more of these foundations being violated leads to the emergence of a moral intuition.
But what makes these foundations “moral”? In other words, what accounts have been provided for the morality of foundations? According to MFT, foundations are “moral” in a descriptive and empirical sense. Specifically, MFT scholars have defended the morality of foundations on anthropological and evolutionary/biological grounds. Regarding the former, early articulators of MFT sought to ascertain whether commonly referenced foundations or virtues could be found across different cultures and societies. These articulators were not moral relativists, believing that just because a foundation is prevalent within various cultures or societies meant that the foundation should be afforded moral status. Rather, MFT makes the pivotal claim that there is a small set of universal foundations found across most cultures/societies. Although scholars here have noted that cultures/societies may differ in terms of how ardently they instantiate within their practices and customs the elements necessary to support a particular foundation or foundations (Haidt, Reference Haidt2012), a key argument of MFT is that all individuals, regardless of their cultural/social memberships, are innately predisposed to view morality in accordance with these six “best candidate” foundations.
To support this universalist argument, MFT scholars turned to a functionalist narrative to account for why and how certain foundations have become cross-culturally universal, and thus why and how those foundations should be attributed moral status. The functionalist narrative itself relies on an evolutionary and biological story. Specifically, MFT scholars “sought out theorists who took an evolutionary approach, trying to specify universals of human moral nature” (Graham et al., Reference Graham, Haidt, Koleva, Motyl, Iyer, Wojcik, Ditto, Devine and Plant2013: 60). From an evolutionary perspective, what makes a foundation moral is its evolutionary functionality—that is, foundations became “moral” in MFT terms insofar as they allowed humans to survive within their ancestral environments. This evolutionary account birthed a biological one, which portrayed foundations as moral insofar as they were “built into multiple regions of the brain and body” (Haidt, Reference Haidt2001: 826). Taken in tandem, the evolutionary-cum-biological account argues that issues like harm/care and fairness/cheating recurred regularly in early human societies and groups. This resulted in the development of an ingrained moral system—one built into neural tissues, beginning in utero and continuing throughout adulthood (Graham et al., Reference Graham, Haidt, Koleva, Motyl, Iyer, Wojcik, Ditto, Devine and Plant2013)—that allowed individuals to identify and respond to moral issues quickly (Haidt, Reference Haidt2001). This system was then passed down such that individuals across different cultures/societies were—and are—born predisposed to view morality in accordance with distinct foundations (e.g., the six “best candidate” foundations outlined earlier).
As discussed, although MFT’s accounts for the morality of foundations are predicated on both anthropological and evolutionary/biological grounds, the language of MFT has afforded to the latter a stronger moral claim. To be clear, this is not to suggest that moral foundation scholars have reduced the morality of foundations to evolution and biology alone. Instead, this is to suggest that MFT has emphasized to a greater extent the evolutionary-cum-biological account in their discussion of foundations. This is perhaps by design, as MFT aims to be a scientific rather than an anthropological theory of morality. Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (Reference Graham, Haidt and Nosek2009: 70), for instance, describe MFT as “an alternative approach to defining morality. . . . Rather than specifying the content of a truly moral judgment [w]e specified the functions of moral systems” (emphasis original). Perhaps this may also be due to subsequent interpretations of MFT that have fixated on the evolutionary/biological claims endemic within the theory itself. Regardless, the evolutionary-cum-biological narrative has played a central role in justifying the morality of foundations within MFT. For example, Weaver et al. (Reference Weaver, Reynolds and Brown2014: 107) note that “the origins of intuitive moral categories [i.e., moral foundations] are often explained in evolutionary terms” and that “the evolutionary bases offered for moral intuitions undergird broad categories of intuition.”
The focus on the evolutionary-cum-biological account is further evidenced in Haidt’s notion of externalization—a notion that affords to biologically ingrained foundations, contra anthropological and cultural forces that are presumed to shape them, an air of ontological primacy. Haidt (Reference Haidt2001: 826) claims that because foundations are “built in [to the human design] by evolution, then the most important developmental question about intuitions is not, ‘How do they get into the child?’ but rather, ‘How do they get out?’” He refers to this process as the externalization of foundations, namely, when innate “cognitive models manifest themselves as part of normal maturation” (826). What externalization suggests is that foundations exist independently of—and, in the “state of nature” prior to—any sociocultural experiences, forces, institutions, and so on. As Sadler-Smith (Reference Sadler-Smith2012: 364) summarizes, “the biological bases of the moral modules exist independently of the institutional frameworks” that could have the power to amend them.
Although MFT scholars may not have intended it, the functionalist narrative rooted in evolution-cum-biology has dominated our understanding of the morality of foundations. This dominance—whether intentional or not—is curious, given that MFT is a pluralistic theory of morality in which distinct and diverse foundations are theorized to populate the moral space. And yet, ironically, the account provided for the morality of these pluralistic and quite varied foundations seems to rest on a monist narrative. This is problematic in at least three respects.
First, this approach is limited in its capacity to explain the totality of the human moral experience. For example, a functionalist narrative would suggest that when explaining their moral beliefs, individuals will reference only a small set of predetermined criteria (e.g., functionality vis-à-vis evolution and biology) that represent the foundations. Empirically, however, research by MFT scholars (e.g., Haidt, Reference Haidt2012) and by other scholars (McAdams, Albaugh, Farber, Daniels, Logan, & Olson, Reference McAdams, Albaugh, Farber, Daniels, Logan and Olson2008; Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, Reference Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, Park, Brandt and Rozin1997) has shown that when individuals explain their moral beliefs and why they hold them, they reference a variety of sources (e.g., religions, caretakers, epiphanies) that may or may not include explanations driven by functionality. It seems, then, that the pluralism of MFT—long a cornerstone of the theory—advocates for a pluralism of foundations and not necessarily a pluralism of moral explanations and/or moral experiences.
Second, in light of research demonstrating that individuals rely on diverse sources to understand the morality of foundations (McAdams et al., Reference McAdams, Albaugh, Farber, Daniels, Logan and Olson2008; Shweder et al., Reference Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, Park, Brandt and Rozin1997), a dominant discourse based on a singular narrative of functionality may be limited in its predictive power. For instance, it may be useful in predicting how some individuals in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) and secular countries account for the morality of foundations but less useful in predicting accounts in non-WEIRD and less secular countries.
And third, the functionality narrative may be limited on normative grounds. Although this may seem like a nonissue given that MFT scholars have emphasized that theirs is a descriptive and not a normative moral theory (Graham et al., Reference Graham, Haidt, Koleva, Motyl, Iyer, Wojcik, Ditto, Devine and Plant2013; Haidt, Reference Haidt2012), other scholars have suggested that “[MFT’s] frequent use of terms such as ‘virtues,’ ‘moral truths,’ ‘moral worth,’ and ‘moral knowledge’ clearly implies normative, prescriptive conclusions” (Kugler et al., Reference Kugler, Jost and Noorbaloochi2014: 415; see also Jacobson, Reference Jacobson and Sinnott-Armstrong2008). To this objection, MFT scholars may counter that this critique is really one of semantics—that the terms moral truths and virtues are used in a descriptive rather than a prescriptive sense. In other words, MFT scholars may argue that they are not suggesting that any one person or culture should or should not endorse justice, care, loyalty, and so on, as moral foundations. And yet, this (hypothetical) rebuttal would be at odds with (clearly) prescriptive statements made by MFT scholars who advocate for a “six-factor” moral channel in which all “best candidate” foundations are relied on and utilized (Haidt, Reference Haidt2012; Duarte, Crawford, Stern, Haidt, Jussim, & Tetlock, Reference Duarte, Crawford, Stern, Haidt, Jussim and Tetlock2014). Indeed, MFT scholars have labeled “morally color-blind” those who adopt only a subset of the “best candidate” foundations (Haidt & Graham, Reference Haidt, Graham, Jost, Kay and Thorisdottir2009: 389)—suggesting, then, that there is inherent goodness within the foundations that merit humans’ endorsement and allegiance. The functionality account as it is currently described in MFT, however, is limited in explaining the normative materiality embedded within these foundations.
The discussion thus far suggests that an expanded understanding of the morality of foundations—one that moves beyond an evolution-cum-biological account—may be needed. Indeed, as “unabashed pluralist[s]” who believe in the diversity of foundations (e.g., care, loyalty, liberty) (Graham et al., Reference Graham, Haidt, Koleva, Motyl, Iyer, Wojcik, Ditto, Devine and Plant2013: 55), what may be needed is an expanded understanding of the morality of foundations: one that is pluralistic while also descriptive and normative in scope. To help provide guidance for what this expanded understanding may look like, it is useful to return to one of the theoretical motivations of MFT, namely, to provide a more humanistic account of morality that brought to the fore the human experience. Indeed, both past and present articulators of MFT sought to humanize ethical judgment and behavior by rescuing from the fringes certain marginalized elements of the human experience, traditionally perceived as antithetical to moral judgment/behavior. Returning to this theoretical motivation, can the morality of foundations be rooted within a more phenomenological, human-centered narrative? That is, in looking at foundations from the perspective of the humans who experience and endorse them, can a more human-intelligible account be provided for the morality of foundations? To these questions, Taylor’s philosophy provides a way to uncover an understanding of the morality of foundations: a way that honors a key element of MFT—the foundations’ functionality—while also crucially rooting that element within the human moral experience.
CHARLES TAYLOR’S WORK OF RETRIEVAL
Several scholars have provided notable reviews of Taylor’s extensive body of work (e.g., Abbey, Reference Abbey2000; Calhoun, Reference Calhoun1991; Rorty, Reference Rorty1994; Smith, Reference Smith2013; Tully, Reference Tully1994). I focus on Taylor’s moral philosophy, specifically, on his arguments surrounding the work of retrieval. As the name suggests, this work involves the retrieval of something—presumably something hidden from view or lost. For Taylor, that “something” is an explicit and unapologetic focus on individuals and their moral experiences. Taylor laments that most moral theories, despite their attempts to discern how humans think and act, tend, ironically, to omit the human experience itself from their purview. His moral theory focuses on placing persons “back in the center of moral thought” and, from there, on “grasping the nature of the person who will live or aspire to this good life” (Calhoun, Reference Calhoun1991: 223). Placing the human moral experience at the center of his thinking, he then sketches the “enduring features of moral life” (Abbey, Reference Abbey2000: 10). Several key arguments follow, which are summarized in Table 1.
Table 1: Key Themes in Taylor’s Work of Retrieval
“Making Sense” through “Best Accounts”
Taylor argues that a defining feature of human life is the need to “make sense” of oneself. This includes “making sense” of “strong evaluations,” which are “discriminations of right or wrong, better or worse, higher or lower, which are not rendered valid by our own desires, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which they can be judged” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 4). Taylor argues that humans are fundamentally strong evaluators,Footnote 2 meaning that although individuals have multiple desires, goals, and wants in life, they discriminate between them, ascertaining which are more important and worthier of pursuit.
Having a strong evaluation is not equivalent to making sense of one’s strong evaluations. To “make sense” is to be self-intelligible: to explain, in terms that are self-resonant, one’s beliefs, reactions, evaluations, and so forth. “Making sense” is to select terms that provide the “clearest, most insightful statement of the issues before me,” such that “if I were denied this term, I wouldn’t be able to deliberate as effectively, to focus the issue properly—as, indeed, I may feel (and we frequently do) that I was less capable of doing in the past, before I acquired this term” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 57). The antithesis of “making sense” is embodied in the modus operandi of “contemporary computer-struck cognitive psychology,” which has declared “‘phenomenology’ irrelevant”—and, in so doing, has attempted to jettison terms that are indispensable to self-explanation and day-to-day living (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, Reference Dreyfus and Dreyfus1991).
Taylor (Reference Taylor1989) argues that “making sense” is achieved by providing “best accounts” of ourselves. This yields the “best account” principle, which he describes as follows:
The terms we select have to make sense across the whole range of both explanatory and life uses. The terms indispensable for the latter are part of the story that makes best sense of us, unless and until we can replace them with more clairvoyant substitutes. The result of the search for clairvoyance yields the best account we can give at any given time, and no epistemological or metaphysical considerations of a more general kind about science or nature can justify setting this aside. The best account… is trumps (58).
From this “best account” principle emerges another key feature of Taylor’s philosophy: that the “best accounts” of “strong evaluations”—that is, the “clearest, most insightful statement” one can find to explain one’s own “strong evaluations”—refer to, and are inextricably linked to, moral sources (i.e., a vision of the good life) that are experienced by the individual as ontologically prior and independent of human will, desire, and preference. This point is elucidated in the following pages.
Moral Sources
I use the term moral sources to capture Taylor’s notion of the good, as this term is broad enough to encompass several of the constructs that Taylor (Reference Taylor1989) discusses as pertaining to the good life (e.g., moral frameworks, hypergoods, horizons of significance, constitutive goods). I will examine three subpoints regarding the concept of moral sources: their ontology, the necessity of their retrieval, and their self-resonance.
Ontology of Moral Sources
As discussed, Taylor believes that individuals cannot help but make strong evaluations and that the “making sense” of these evaluations requires individuals providing “best accounts.” From this, he takes a descriptive-normativist stance (Abbey, Reference Abbey2000) to suggest that the “best accounts” that individuals provide inevitably reference an exogenous/independent moral source (the descriptive claim) and that moral theories must take individuals seriously and impute ontological significance to the moral source that individuals reference (the normative claim).
Abbey (Reference Abbey2000) explains this argument in the following manner. She notes that a common misconception of normative morality is that all normativists believe in an objective moral truth: one that can be discovered by and yet can exist without human beings. (In other words, gravity can exist without a single human being present on Earth to watch an apple fall.) She then notes that Taylor holds neither to this claim nor to the claim that moral truth is entirely subject to individuals’ own personal beliefs and social customs/norms/mores. Taylor contests both claims. “Unlike Plato, he does not think that it makes sense to see these moral goods [moral sources] as existing without human beings to know them. Unlike projectivists, he thinks it is wrong to construe these goods as existing solely through human artifice” (Abbey, Reference Abbey2000: 31). Rather, Taylor occupies the middle ground, viewing moral sources as having an independent/ontic existence because that is how humans experience them. In other words, he argues that humans perceive moral sources as having an existence and moral worth independent of their own human desires and preferences. Because humans experience moral sources as goods independent of human will and desire, Taylor argues that we must take this experience “seriously” and “impute ontological significance to it.” That is, we must give ontological primacy to moral sources because humans “experience the goods that command their respect in a non-anthropocentric way, as not deriving solely from human will or choice nor depending only on the fact of individual affirmation of their value” (Abbey, Reference Abbey2000: 31).
Rather than listing what is and what is not a moral source, Taylor instead describes their characteristics. They are substantive, in that they “define the content of the moral theory” and designate what is “valuable, worthy, [and] admirable” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1992: 92). They are motivational, in that our love for them “empowers us to do and be good” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1992: 93). Finally, they define for us what is “comparatively higher” in a way independent of human subjects. That is, moral sources offer a “picture of what a ‘better’ or ‘higher’ mode of life would be, where ‘better’ and ‘higher’ are defined not in terms of what we happen to desire or need, but offer a standard of what we ought to desire” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1992: 16). Taylor offers several examples of moral sources, and even draws from existing moral theories to identify or, as he puts it, to “unbury” the moral sources implicit within these theories. For Plato, the moral source is reason, but the “hegemony of reason is understood substantively. To be rational is to have a vision of rational order, and to love this order. . . . For Plato the constitutive good is the order of being, or perhaps the principle of that order, the Good” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 92–93). For Augustine, the moral source is God (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 93). For Kant, the moral source is rational agency: it is the “courageous disengagement… rational will. . . . In Kant’s theory, rational agency is the constitutive good” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 94). Suffice it to say, for Taylor, many things can serve as moral sources, including animate entities (e.g., God, relationships such as parent–child, friend) as well as inanimate ones (e.g., principles, rational will). Their unifying characteristic is that they are experienced as intrinsically good and ontologically prior. “I can find fulfilment in God or a political cause, or tending the earth. Indeed, the argument above suggests that we will find genuine fulfillment only in something like this, which has significance independent of us or our desires” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1992: 82, emphasis added).Footnote 3
It should be noted here how Taylor’s thinking differs from that of proceduralist scholars like Habermas (Reference Habermas1984, Reference Habermas1988, Reference Habermas1990), who may contest the notion of ontic, substantive moral sources without considering the social processes by which these sources have been established and developed. Habermas’s discursive approach to ethics, for instance, proposed that notions of the good should be grounded in the quality of the discourses used to produce them. As Calhoun (Reference Calhoun1991) pointed out regarding Habermasian philosophy, the discursive approach cannot help but refer to, and rely on, some ontologically prior moral good. Calhoun observed that, although a proceduralist take seems to rely “purely” on “procedural notions of ethics,” and although articulators of the proceduralist stance (like Habermas) refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of moral sources without consideration for the discourses used to produce them, nonetheless, by “enshrine(ing) his hypergoods (i.e., moral sources) in procedure rather than in substance,” Habermas “imposes certain hypergoods in his procedural discussion” (323; see also Scholz, de los Reyes, & Smith, Reference Scholz, los Reyes and Smith2019).
Taylor also views moral sources as plural: multiple moral sources exist, and they can often conflict. Although conflicts between them are inevitable, such conflict does not negate the intrinsic goodness of moral sources. Instead, conflict presupposes that same goodness—there would be no conflict if competing moral sources were not themselves morally meritorious in some way. Taylor does not offer a definitive resolution to this conflict. He argues that conflict represents a genuine dilemma—one that should move us to seek out further, and more deeply, the moral sources in conflict with one another. Knowing and being oriented to these conflicting moral sources allows us to pursue epistemic/ethical gains, not definitive solutions.Footnote 4
Finally, Taylor does not take a functionalist approach in his conceptualization of moral sources. Indeed, he argues that it may be true that a moral source is both inherently good and linked to undesirable outcomes. He states that theorists are often “quick to jump to the conclusion that whatever has generated bad action must be vicious.” He argues that such conclusions stem from a narrowing of morality’s ineradicable pluralism: that what these conclusions obscure from sight are “genuine dilemmas,” wherein “following one good to the end may be catastrophic, not because it isn’t a good, but because there are others which can’t be sacrificed without evil” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 503).
Retrieving Moral Sources through Language
From this analysis, we can now account for the retrieval of moral sources. As previously discussed, Taylor believes that individuals cannot help but make strong evaluations. However, he argues that retrieving moral sources to help us make sense of our strong evaluations is difficult because of the modern imperative of interiority. The interiority imperative is the notion that individuals have an intrinsic moral sense: that “goodness and generosity are natural to us” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 260) and that, therefore, we do not need to look outside ourselves to seek and to find moral sources. This imperative comprises the idea that our strong evaluations regarding the goodness of, say, engaging in charitable acts toward needy children do not depend on some ontic moral source (e.g., benevolence) but rather emanate from something within us—from our own ingrained, and biologically determined, moral sensibilities. In Taylor’s analysis, modern culture has assigned great moral weight to interiority—to “a kind of contact with myself, with my own inner nature” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1992: 29). To retrieve the good in the modern era is to retreat inward, as “access to the significance of things is inward, that it [i.e., the capacity and ability to understand the significance of human life] is only properly understood inwardly” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 371).
Given his belief that moral sources exist independently of the individual, however, Taylor sees interiority as a flawed strategy for their retrieval. Instead, Taylor views the retrieval of moral sources as an endeavor that requires the individual to look outward because the moral sources which can help individuals provide their own “best accounts” are found beyond themselves. He views language—broadly understood as encompassing not only spoken words but also “other modes of expression whereby we define ourselves, including the ‘languages’ of art, of gesture, of love, and the like” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 33)—to be the medium through which moral sources can be retrieved.Footnote 5
Self-Resonance
The final component of moral sources is their self-resonance. Taylor views moral sources as having an ontological existence independently of individuals, and independently of the social/communal language that individuals use to access them. However, Taylor does not view moral sources as worthy of our respect and esteem simply because of their ontological primacy. This view is endorsed by some normativists, who claim that certain moral principles are ontologically prior and thus deserve our allegiance (e.g., Kant’s categorical imperative, Plato’s notion of a cosmic order). Returning to his phenomenological account, Taylor argues that moral sources are meaningful to individuals—that individuals feel moved to abide by, respect, and esteem moral sources—not only because of their ontological primacy but also because they resonate with the self. That is, just as “reading a good, powerful novel may give me the picture of an emotion which I had not previously been aware” (Abbey, Reference Abbey2000: 61), so, too, does the search for and finding of moral sources allow individuals to attain a “truer or more perspicacious” (61) understanding and interpretation of themselves. The work of retrieval is ultimately a “search for moral sources outside the subject through languages which resonate within him or her, the grasping of an order which is inseparably indexed to a personal vision” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 510).
TAYLOR-ING MORAL FOUNDATIONS THEORY
Taylor’s work of retrieval may seem incompatible with MFT in that the latter has presented itself as a descriptive and value-free project. However, similarities between Taylor’s philosophy and MFT make their integration mutually advantageous. One striking similarity is that both aim to provide a humanistic account of morality—one that explains how people actually live their lives. For MFT, this meant a change in focus, shifting from deliberative processes underlying moral thought and action to intuitive processes formerly stigmatized as antithetical to morality. For Taylor, this entailed a phenomenological approach to morality that sought to understand how individuals explain and account for their moral experiences. Another area of overlap between MFT and Taylor’s philosophy is that both strongly advocate for a pluralistic conceptualization of morality. Moral foundation theorists are “unabashed pluralists” (Graham et al., Reference Graham, Haidt, Koleva, Motyl, Iyer, Wojcik, Ditto, Devine and Plant2013: 57) who view the moral domain as populated with diverse foundations (e.g., harm, fairness, purity). Taylor is also an unabashed pluralist and views modern life as overflowing with distinct moral sources that often compete with and even contradict one another.
One place where MFT scholars and Taylor diverge is in points of emphasis—particularly in the accounts they provide for morality. As previously discussed, MFT draws off the discourses of neutral science, in which scholars have emphasized the morality of foundations from a functionalist perspective grounded in evolution and biology. (As a matter of clarity, and to avoid confusion moving forward, “moralityMFT” will be used in places to denote MFT’s evolutionary-cum-biological account of the morality of foundations.) Taylor, by contrast, takes a decidedly phenomenological approach, rooting this morality in the experiential lives of individuals. For Taylor, what makes something moral is the human experience of it, namely, the experience individuals have that some force, entity, or principle (e.g., purity, loyalty, authority, liberty, care, justice) has an existence independent of any human will or desire for it. Taylor concludes that it is through the grasping of this force, entity, or principle that the individual can gain a truer and more perspicuous understanding of her life. (For clarity, we can refer to Taylor’s phenomenological account of morality as moralityTAY.)
Another point of divergence between moralityMFT and moralityTAY is the former’s interiority-focused strategy for explaining the morality of foundations. Locating morality within the neuroanatomical structure of the brain implies that one can find and discover the mysteries of human morality by looking inward, quite literally, within the human body itself. Indeed, MFT presents itself as a cognitive-modular theory of morality in which moral judgment and behavior are located in “discrete cognitive modules” or “‘little switches in the brain of all animals’ ‘triggered’ by ‘specific moral inputs,’ such as harm or purity, with ‘distinct cognitive computations’ for each kind of moral content… such that judgments about harm (inflicting physical and emotional suffering) involve fundamentally ‘distinct cognitive computations’ than those regarding purity (violations of spirit or body)” (Gray & Keeney, Reference Gray and Keeney2015: 859). These claims, however, have yet to be supported empirically. Although brain scans have revealed that areas of the brain associated with emotions are integral to moral judgment and behavior, research has yet to verify that distinct moral modules within the brain correspond to distinct foundations (e.g., an area of the brain that corresponds to purity; for a review, see Cameron, Lindquist, & Gray, Reference Cameron, Lindquist and Gray2015). Nonetheless, the interiority-focused strategy of MFT can be contrasted with Taylor’s work of retrieval, which attempts to move the morality of foundations outside the brain and locate it within exterior sources. As the organizational scholar Staw (Reference Staw2016: 13) recently observed, there is a “trend toward inward discovery (or reductionism)” that “has been heightened by the use of neurological and other forms of physiological measurement.” He goes on to question whether such inwardness “really provide an advance, and if so, are they worth the added difficulty and expense?” (13). Staw’s observation and Taylor’s work of retrieval are both calls for outward rather than inward discovery. For Taylor specifically, the call is to look outward to moral sources that help individuals provide “best accounts” of their moral experiences.
In the following sections, I advance a “Taylored” exploration of MFT. This Taylored exploration yields conceptual and empirical advancements. Briefly, Taylor suggests that foundations are moral to the extent that individuals experience them as connected to a moral source—a source that both exists outside the individual and is self-resonant. These external moral sources give individuals a more clairvoyant, self-interpretable, and self-intelligible understanding of the morality of foundations. In a Taylored reading of MFT, three propositions can be advanced regarding the morality of foundations: foundations are moral to the extent that they 1) advance the moral sources already implied within MFT’s supposedly value-neutral functionalist account, 2) advance moral sources beyond those implied within MFT’s functionality account, and 3) are experienced as moral sources in and of themselves. In addition, moralityTAY can have implications for the empirical study of MFT. These points are expanded upon in the following pages.
Reading the Normative Back into the Functionalist Account
The first theoretical proposition that can be advanced is that foundations are moral to the extent that they are functional in a Taylored sense. Taylor’s notion of functional is based on evolution and biology, but in the more normative sense of advancing moral goods or moral sources than in the descriptive sense implied by the evolution/biology narrative.
In circling back to MFT’s functionalist account, Taylor would argue that moral sources or moral goods beneath the functionalist account can better explain the morality of foundations. This “better account” refers to ontic moral sources that resonate with individuals and inspire their allegiance and love. Note here that Taylor would not necessarily reject moralityMFT altogether. He would, however, question them in terms of their explanatory power and “everyday life uses.” Taylor would ask whether these narratives provide the best available accounts of what humans actually live by and whether these narratives are self-resonant with individuals. For instance, suppose an individual has the intuitive reaction that caring for the immunocompromised during the COVID-19 pandemic is a good thing to do. Does the individual who experiences this intuition “make sense” of it vis-à-vis reference to the evolutionary functionality of care and/or to the fact that caring for others is ingrained within one’s neural tissues and thus morally meritorious? Is there a deeper, more normative moral source— à la Taylor—that is presupposed and/or implicit within moralityMFT? Is there, as Kugler et al. (Reference Kugler, Jost and Noorbaloochi2014: 415) and other critics have claimed, “clearly normative (and not merely descriptive) arguments” within MFT research and its concepts (see also Jost, Reference Jost2012; Nagel, Reference Nagel2012; Narvaez, Reference Narvaez and Sinnott-Armstrong2008, Reference Narvaez2010)?
To these questions, Taylor’s answer would be a resounding yes: that deeply normative moral sources are presupposed within moralityMFT. Taylor provides some examples of what these moral sources could be. We see this most clearly in Taylor’s (Reference Taylor1989) discussion of the work of E. O. Wilson—a scholar who has achieved “prophetic” status among intuition scholars for suggesting that ethics “be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized” (Wilson, Reference Wilson1978: 562). Taylor (Reference Taylor1989: 407) points out that Wilson’s biologized account is itself told as an “evolutionary epic” that reveals an “evolutionary ethic” (emphasis added). The ethic (i.e., moral source) that is revealed in the epic includes various goods, such as
the courage to detach ourselves from the limited perspective, the flattering or consoling myth, to see the age-long struggle for survival as a whole, and then to be moved to go beyond narrow egoism to carry it on to greater heights. It is a kind of self-responsible freedom, a transcendence of particularity, which underlies our efficacy and which we should cultivate (407).
Taylor concludes his discussion of Wilson with the observation that a “moral vision burns at the heart of the [biologized] epistemology” (407)—that what are revealed and made manifest in Wilson’s sociobiological epistemology are the moral sources of community, collaboration, suppression of egoism, self-responsibility, self-transcendence, and so on. Connecting back to moralityMFT, Taylor provides the insight that, indeed, moral sources are already embedded within the theory’s functionalist accounts (e.g., community, collaboration, suppression of egoism) and that it is reference to these moral sources that explains why individuals experience foundations as moral. Translating this insight more precisely within the moralityMFT framework, the following proposition can be advanced: the “best candidate” foundations of purity, loyalty, authority, care, justice, and liberty are moral foundations because they are instrumental (i.e., functional) in advancing moral sources—for example, community, collaboration, or suppression of egoism. These sources are moral—for example, community, collaboration, or suppression of egoism—because they are experienced by individuals as self-resonant and as having an ontological existence independently of any human will or preference.
For MFT moving forward, these insights suggest pushing scholars to retrieve other ontological moral sources that underlie the functionalist account. So, though Taylor would not reject moralityMFT, he would encourage scholars to “dig deeper” and uncover the moral sources that empower the functionalist narrative to begin with. Stated differently, he does not reject the notion that foundations have functionality (and that they may have been evolutionarily useful and thus biologically ingrained). Rather, he regrets the exclusive focus, whether intentional or not, on the functionalist narrative, which has downplayed the moral sources that are unavoidable in how individuals can explain and make sense of their intuitions. Taylor would thus encourage MFT scholars to push past the “goods” of naturalism (e.g., biology/evolution/innateness) to uncover the moral sources that are more indispensable for humans in their interpretations and understandings of why foundations are moral foundations.
A Broader Set of Accounts for the Morality of Foundations
The second proposition that can be advanced is that foundations are moral to the extent that individuals experience them as advancing moral sources beyond those tied to MFT’s functionalist narrative. That is, Taylor would press beyond moralityMFT to find other ontological moral sources that empower foundations and make them moral. Taylor is a pluralist in his belief that multiple moral foundations occupy the moral space and in his belief that individuals draw on multiple ontological sources to account for the morality of foundations. This latter point differentiates moralityTAY from moralityMFT.
Interestingly, in the same way that MFT’s aim was to rescue from the “irrational” fringes the importance of intuition and emotion in determining ethical judgment and behavior (Haidt, Reference Haidt2001), Taylor’s insights seek to rescue from the fringes a broader range of moral sources on which individuals rely to make sense of the morality of foundations. These may include, for instance, sources that scientific and purportedly value-free theories of morality (like MFT) have disregarded as irrational: religious teachings, deities, traditions, cultural norms, family teachings, political/social causes, and so on. For Taylor, what is pivotal is that individuals experience these sources as existing independently of human desire, will, and artifice. Overall, what this suggests for MFT is that, just as there are pluralistic foundations, there are pluralistic accounts that can be provided for the morality of foundations. And, contra MFT, Taylor does not emphasize one type of account over others—e.g., a functionalist one over a deity-based one. Rather, he is expansive in describing the types of moral sources that individuals reference in their accounts of morality. As an example, when trying to explain why purity of thought, body, and soul is a moral foundation that deserves one’s esteem and love, an individual may reference a religious belief or traditional practice in her culture (Haidt, Reference Haidt2012). In a Taylored reading, rather than discount religion or tradition as “legitimate” sources for morality (as is often the case in scientific studies of morality), these are viewed as moral sources on account of the human experience of them as ontologically prior and self-resonant.
Taylor’s insights here help address not only the explanatory issues within MFT but also the predictive issues identified earlier. While some individuals or cultures may certainly rely upon an evolutionary-cum-biological account alone, to explain why foundations are moral, individuals in non-WEIRD countries may be less likely to do so. While a Taylored reading of MFT may not be able to predict what types of moral sources individuals rely on to make sense of a foundation’s morality, it would predict the ontic normative experience individuals have regarding a foundation’s morality.
Decoupling the Foundations from the Functionalist Account
The third proposition that can be advanced suggests that foundations are moral because humans experience them (e.g., justice, care, loyalty) as moral sources. Whereas the other two propositions propose that foundations are moral to the extent that they are connected to other moral sources—sources embedded within the functionalist narrative and/or ones beyond this narrative—this proposition suggests that foundations are morally meritorious on their own normative standing.
As described previously, MFT scholars identified the “best candidate” moral foundations through anthropological and cross-cultural studies in which individuals were asked to explain why they believed certain acts/situations were right/wrong. In individuals’ accounts, they uncovered numerous references to themes like justice, care, purity, and so forth. MFT scholars then sought to establish the universality of these themes—that is, their moral goodness—by claiming that they must also serve some evolutionary function, causing them to then be ingrained in the brains and bodies of humans.
In response, Taylor might ask why the experiential account individuals provided was insufficient to establish the morality of foundations in the first place. For Taylor, if it was found that individuals referenced goods of authority, justice, and so on as reasons for their perception of certain acts/situations as moral (a descriptive finding), then moral theories must take individuals seriously and impute ontological significance to these goods (a normative claim). It should be emphasized here again that Taylor is not a moral subjectivist who believes that what is moral/immoral is subject to individuals’ own personal beliefs and social customs/norms/mores. Put simply, just because an individual says that purity is “good” does not make it so. What is crucial for Taylor is that individuals experience purity in a “non-anthropocentric way, as not deriving solely from human will or choice nor depending only on the fact of individual affirmation of their value” (Abbey, Reference Abbey2000: 31). Taylor would thus push back on research (including studies found within the moral foundations tradition) that discounts individuals’ own narratives of morality. Indeed, a methodological strategy in some moral psychology research is the attempt to “dumbfound” individuals by repeatedly interrogating them as to why they believe goods like purity are worthy of their allegiance and esteem (Haidt, Reference Haidt2012). In this approach, an individual’s answer that purity is a moral good because having a pure body, mind, and soul “has significance independent of us or our desires” (Taylor, Reference Taylor1992: 82) may not count as a good enough “moral” answer compared to an answer that links purity to its evolutionary functionality. For Taylor, such “dumbfounding” is aligned with reductive theories that attempt to rid individuals of explanations they rely on to make sense of themselves. Regarding reductive theories, Taylor (Reference Taylor1989: 57) states,
Proponents of a reductive theory may congratulate themselves on explanations which do without these or those terms current in ordinary life, e.g., “freedom” and “dignity.”… Suppose I can convince myself that I can explain people’s behavior as an observer without using a term like “dignity.” What does this prove if I can’t do without it as a term in my deliberations about what to do, how to behave, how to treat people, my questions about whom I admire, with whom I feel affinity, and the like?
In a Taylored reading, then, foundations identified in MFT may be morally meritorious and worthy of esteem and allegiance owing to their indispensability to the human capacity to make sense of moral experiences. That is, if we were to rid humans of the concepts of justice, care, purity, and so forth, humans would not be self-intelligible.
Empirical Implications for MFT
The conceptual advances offered earlier can yield implications for the empirical study of MFT. To date, the primary instrument used to study MFT is the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham et al., Reference Graham, Nosek, Haidt, Iyer, Koleva and Ditto2011). The questionnaire presents participants with statements aligning with each foundation and asks them to rate how relevant the statements are to their moral judgments. There is utility to the scale in that it has been validated among certain samples (Kivikangas, Fernández-Castilla, Järvelä, Ravaja, & Lönnqvist, Reference Kivikangas, Fernández-Castilla, Järvelä, Ravaja and Lönnqvist2021), and it can be administered to a large population (e.g., to date, 192,870 respondents have taken the questionnaire via the website YourMorals.org; Kivikangas et al., Reference Kivikangas, Fernández-Castilla, Järvelä, Ravaja and Lönnqvist2021). The benefits of the questionnaire are obvious, although researchers should also be mindful of recent issues concerning the questionnaire’s generalizability and psychometric properties (e.g., Davis et al., Reference Davis, Rice, Van Tongeren, Hook, DeBlaere, Worthington and Choe2016; Kivikangas et al., Reference Kivikangas, Fernández-Castilla, Järvelä, Ravaja and Lönnqvist2021).
Beyond these issues, the questionnaire may not be able to capture fully the Taylored reading of MFT presented herein. If, as per Taylor, individuals experience foundations as moral because of the foundations’ association with independently felt and ontologically prior moral sources, then the questionnaire does not capture why people experience foundations like justice, care, harm, and so on as moral foundations that should be relevant/pertinent to their thinking. In other words, the questionnaire may capture the fact that people endorse certain foundations but not why the foundations are experienced as moral. The latter was likely not intended by the questionnaire’s authors. Nonetheless, if we are to seek a comprehensive understanding of the foundations’ universality and experiential goodness, then empirical studies should seek to uncover the moral sources that empower the foundations.
This could be assessed via qualitative methods.Footnote 6 A recent notable example is the qualitative research of McAdams et al. (Reference McAdams, Albaugh, Farber, Daniels, Logan and Olson2008). The purpose of their study was to examine how religious and politically active participants described their beliefs and worldviews. After open-ended interviews with participants, the authors used MFT as a schema to code whether participants’ descriptions referenced foundations of care, justice, purity, and so on. Their empirical findings show support for MFT’s claims, insofar as they demonstrate that people across religious and political spectrums seem to endorse certain foundations, such as justice and purity, as morally meritorious. Yet what was interesting in the study proved to be the exogenous moral sources that individuals invoked to make sense of why foundations like justice, purity, and so on should be ascribed moral status. Specifically, what was not revealed in the descriptions was an evolutionary-cum-biological account for the inherent goodness/moral worthiness of the foundations. That is, the foundations were not explained to be moral because of their evolutionary functionality and subsequent biological hardwiring. Instead, participants referenced sources from which they learned these lessons (e.g., parents, mentors, God, a difficult life experience) to explain how the foundation became manifest to them, how they then came to appreciate or love the foundation, and how the foundation continues to make a “claim on them” vis-à-vis demanding their respect and allegiance (Taylor, Reference Taylor1992). The results from this study are suggestive, but they point to the notion that, in providing the “best account” of one’s moral foundations, the terms/concepts that proved indispensable referred to nonfunctionalist sources, such as parents, God, and tradition. Future research could expand on these findings and uncover the pluralistic and experiential moral sources that help provide individuals with a clearer and more self-intelligible understanding of the morality of foundations.
IMPLICATIONS
A Taylored reading of MFT may have implications for ethical leadership, behavioral ethics research, and ethical pedagogy.
Ethical Leadership
In their review of the literature, Weaver et al. (Reference Weaver, Reynolds and Brown2014) note that although MFT has gained popularity across various disciplines, its integration into business ethics has been relatively rare. The authors mention ethical leadership as a relevant domain to which MFT could contribute insights. Taylor’s reading of MFT—particularly the argument that retrieving moral sources can promote self-understanding—can offer unique insights for how ethical leadership is studied and understood.
Ethical leadership has been typically defined as “the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making” (Brown, Treviño, & Harrison, Reference Brown, Treviño and Harrison2005: 120). Recently, some scholars have advanced a constructivist approach, in which ethical leadership perception is viewed not as “solely founded on the demonstration and promotion of a narrow set of universally desirable behaviors (e.g., honesty and trustworthiness)” but rather as a function of “social construction” (Fehr, Yam, & Dang, Reference Fehr, Yam and Dang2015: 184; see also Egorov, Kalshoven, Verdorfer, & Peus, Reference Egorov, Kalshoven, Verdorfer and Peus2019; Giessner, van Quaquebeke, van Gils, van Knippenberg, & Kollée, Reference Giessner, van Quaquebeke, van Gils, van Knippenberg and Kollée2015). Integrating MFT into the constructive process, Fehr et al. (Reference Fehr, Yam and Dang2015) theorized that ethical leadership perception hinges on the match between leaders’ and followers’ moral foundations. For instance, followers who endorse the moral foundation of justice will be more likely to view leaders as ethical to the extent that leaders’ behaviors are also consistent with the same moral foundation. The constructivist perspective brings followers’ moral selves—their moral foundations—explicitly into view, emphasizing the importance of self-referentiality in the ethical leadership perception process. In sum, followers will view leaders as ethical to the extent that leaders’ behaviors resonate with followers’ own moral foundations.
A Taylored reading provides a way to integrate these seemingly disparate approaches into ethical leadership perception. The crucial insight derived from the work for retrieval consists of the notion that foundations are experienced as moral owing to their association with moral sources—sources which are themselves experienced as ontologically independent from the self. Foundations are thus clearly self-referential in that they are personal to the individual and reflect what a person senses to be good/bad, right/wrong, and so on. Yet just because foundations are self-referential and personal does not mean that they are detached from notions of the good or from a moral vision.
If we apply that insight to ethical leadership perception, we can see how the constructivist and normativist claims are integrable. On one hand, followers’ personal endorsement of foundations influences the extent to which they perceive leaders as ethical. A leader’s behavior must be felt as personally significant and must resonate with a follower vis-à-vis eliciting/activating the follower’s endorsed foundations. On the other hand, what is experienced as personally significant—that is, the leader behavior(s) that elicit/activate followers’ endorsed foundations—is not subjectively determined neither by followers nor by leaders themselves. Constructivist scholars concede this point, noting that not all leader behaviors elicit/activate followers’ endorsed intuitions. Rather, these scholars draw from MFT to claim that it is leader behaviors aligned with the “best candidate” universal foundations (e.g., harm, purity) that activate followers’ endorsed intuitions and that lead to the construction of ethical leadership perception. Using Taylor’s insights, we can propose that ethical leadership perception is 1) constructivist, insofar as the leader’s behavior must resonate with the individual in some way vis-à-vis eliciting/activating endorsed foundations (Fehr et al., Reference Fehr, Yam and Dang2015), and 2) normative, insofar as what elicits followers’ endorsed foundations are leader behaviors linked to, and aligned with, foundations (justice, benevolence, care, compassion, loyalty, etc.) that have significance independently of followers’ and leaders’ desires, preferences, and so on.
Behavioral Ethics
Moral Intuitionism
As noted previously, behavioral ethics scholars have coalesced around a rationalistic or nonrationalistic approach: the former posits that individuals can arrive at moral judgments from “cold” processes of logical deduction and rational thinking; the latter approach posits that moral judgments are determined largely by “hot,” nondeliberate processes, including intuition and heuristics. That being said, scholars have acknowledged that the approaches overlap and have begun to shift the question from one of “either/or” to one of “how they are related” (Reynolds, Reference Reynolds2006). For instance, Monin et al. (Reference Monin, Pizarro and Beer2007) argue that situations that call for immediate reaction may be those in which nonrationalistic processes are more determinative, whereas situations that call for careful analysis may be those in which rationalistic processes are more consequential. A Taylored reading of MFT incorporates elements from both approaches and suggests that, when the two are complementary, there is the possibility of a more clairvoyant understanding of one’s moral experiences. As with the nonrationalistic approach, Taylor would likely agree that individuals have an affective reaction regarding the goodness/badness of encountered stimuli without having deliberated on it in an effortful manner. However, Taylor also assigns to language (broadly understood) an integral role in individuals’ capacities to connect intuitions to an exogenous moral source experienced as ontologically prior. Absent this connection, an intuition may become nothing more than a moral frisson that soon subsides. So, in a Taylored reading of MFT, the implication is that both intuition and the use of language to connect that intuition to moral sources beyond the self are essential in producing a perspicacious and self-intelligible understanding of one’s moral experiences. By no means is this implication meant to solve the rationalistic or nonrationalistic debate. Instead, it contributes to an integrative approach (e.g., Reynolds, Reference Reynolds2006) that portrays rationalistic and nonrationalistic processes as operating in complementary ways.
A Taylored reading of MFT also has implications for how ethics scholars (particularly intuition scholars) think about the role and purpose of post hoc sense making. Currently intuition scholars largely view sense making as post hoc rationalizations that individuals use to justify their own intuitions to others (Haidt, Reference Haidt2012). This frames sense making as wholly other serving, akin to a legalistic defense of one’s already codified and assured intuitions to a jury of one’s peers. And yet, per Taylor, sense making could also facilitate self-understanding and discovery. Indeed, without this sense making—and the connection to moral sources that such sense making facilitates—intuitions may not be hindered in their capacities to experience intuitions as emanating from moral foundations. All in all, Taylor’s perspective on MFT casts post hoc cogitations in a more normative manner, suggesting that individuals do not seek merely to justify their intuitions to others using readily available excuses but that these sense-making efforts can in fact be conduits whereby individuals come to know, and orient themselves toward, the good.
Interiority and Exteriority
Finally, although this article focused exclusively on the integration of Taylor to MFT, his work can provide some insights into behavioral ethics research more generally. His potential contribution to behavioral ethics is to expand the scope of theorizing from an interior-focused explanation of ethical/unethical behavior to an exterior-focused examination of how individuals’ connections to moral sources can help guide their capacities to act ethically.
For Taylor, modernity has become infatuated with interiority: the idea that individuals have a “moral sense from within” and must therefore retreat inward to become connected to the moral and the good (for a critique of interiority in organizational studies, see Staw, Reference Staw2016). The interiority imperative has had, and continues to have, profound implications for how morality is understood today. Within the social sciences, Carl Rogers (Reference Rogers1961: 187) advocated for a person-centered approach to psychology, in which there was an “increasing trust in one’s organism.” Among behavioral ethics research, scholars have generally echoed Rogers’s view, arguing that individuals have, for example, an internal moral compass (e.g., Bennett, Reference Bennett1995; Huntsman, Reference Huntsman2010) or an “inner voice that tells us what we should and should not do” (Moore & Gino, Reference Moore and Gino2013: 55). To become less “ethically adrift,” scholars have proposed that individuals regain “control of our moral compasses … even in the face of the social processes that facilitate moral neglect, justification, and inaction” (Moore & Gino, Reference Moore and Gino2013: 71). Behavioral ethics constructs like moral identity (Aquino & Reed, Reference Aquino and Reed2002) and moral conation (Hannah, Avolio, & May, Reference Hannah, Avolio and May2011) have tended to frame ethical/unethical actions as dependent on individuals’ capacity to develop internal moral compasses, ones on which individuals can rely to guide and direct their actions.
On one hand, Taylor would agree with this approach insofar as he, like the interiority-focused scholars described earlier, believes that explaining ethical/unethical behavior requires a focus on the individuals themselves and how their internal moral compasses can guide and direct their ethical behaviors. On the other hand, he would suggest a slightly different narrative regarding what types of moral compasses are “best.” For Taylor, the “best” moral compasses are not ones that point individuals toward ever more internal, isolated, and atomistic self-reflection. Instead, the moral compasses that may be “best” are ones that direct individuals outward, to find and discover moral sources that are experienced as ontologically prior and that self-resonate. That is, rather than advocating a retreat inward to discover “the right thing to do,” Taylor’s work of retrieval argues that it is only in the finding of, and connection to, a nonegoistic source or sources of the good that individuals’ moral compasses can be recalibrated. Indeed, for Taylor, unethical conduct may be less a function of a faulty moral compass and more a function of the moral compass having lost its bearings, vis-à-vis its disconnect from the moral sources that made it functional in the first place.
Interpreting exterior yet self-resonant moral sources as crucial to ethical behavior could have implications for the study of behavioral ethics. Indeed, some experimental research has started down this path by examining how exogenous moral sources, such as moral rules (Shu & Gino, Reference Shu and Gino2012) and moral symbols (Desai & Kouchaki, Reference Desai and Kouchaki2017), can affect ethical behavior. Desai and Kouchaki found in their study that when subordinates displayed moral symbols—particularly religious symbols—in their workspaces (e.g., on their desks or cubicle walls), supervisors were less likely to ask those subordinates to perform unethical acts. In addition, Shu and Gino showed in their study that when individuals were conditioned to forget moral rules, they were more likely to engage in unethical conduct. Both studies suggest that connection to moral sources that are both exogenous and self-meaningful may be crucial in promoting ethical conduct.
Following this, Taylor’s insights could also help focus scholarly attention on uncovering the implicit moral sources (e.g., religion, family, moral rules, moral principles) that guide and direct individual behavior. Rather than leaving tacit the moral sources that direct behavior, scholars could engage in their own work of retrieval, in which they uncover these visions of the good. This idea aligns with recent calls in business ethics for scholars to be explicit about the normative—that is, what is the “good”—in so-called morality-based studies. As Baur and Palazzo (Reference Baur and Palazzo2011) noted, when normative standards are ambiguous or left unspecified, claims of “morality” boil down to empty phrases with no tractable, normative reference point. For Taylor, the normative reference point is likely an exogenous, independent, and ontologically prior moral source that allows individuals clearer understandings of themselves. Research should thus theoretically and, if possible, empirically uncover the moral sources that guide individuals’ unethical/ethical behaviors.
Ethics Pedagogy
Finally, Taylor’s philosophy can have implications for business ethics pedagogy. Given that within the social sciences, the nonrationalistic approach has burgeoned only within the last twenty years, it is perhaps unsurprising that most ethics pedagogy is rooted in the rationalistic approach (Reynolds & Dang, Reference Reynolds and Dang2017). The general goals of this approach are to enhance students’ and practitioners’ awareness of codes of conduct and to improve their capacities to deliberate ethical dilemmas consciously (Weber & Wasieleski, Reference Weber and Wasieleski2013). To incorporate the nonrationalistic approach, scholars have suggested that a pedagogical goal could be “developing an ability to exert some degree of cognitive control over intuition, so that trained individuals are better prepared to manage their immediate intuitive reactions to situations” (Weaver et al., Reference Weaver, Reynolds and Brown2014: 119). Scholars have further suggested that this “control” may be achievable via processes of emotion regulation and/or information gathering.
In a Taylored reading of MFT, “controlling” intuitions may depend, not necessarily on regulating felt intuitions, but rather on a more normative process in which individuals seek moral sources that make interpretable their intuitions. In practical terms, this may mean that ethics curricula should focus on ways to encourage students to look outward toward moral sources, to help them make interpretable their intuitions. Although seemingly simple, this may prove difficult in today’s workplaces, where many employees are asked or even demanded to disconnect themselves from notions of the good and to view their jobs and business as domains separate from the moral sources that govern social life. The adages of “business and ethics being oxymoronic” and “nice guys finish last” attest to the nihilistic unbelief in an ontic, independent, moral source that pervades corporate settings. This unbelief normalizes employees “stepping outside” of moral sources, thereby allowing them to act unethically. Business ethics curricula could thus focus on a form of introspection and discovery—in which the focus is not on introspecting and discovering what the individual finds to be personally and self-meaningful, or on discovering and developing strategies to regulate and suppress one’s intuitions. Instead, a Taylored curriculum would potentially focus on developing individuals’ capacities to connect to ontological visions of the good—visions with significance to these individuals independent not only of their own desires but also of those of their supervisors, bosses, and organizations.
CONCLUSION
Taylor’s (Reference Taylor1992: 72) thesis asks that we “undertake a work of retrieval” in which we “identify and articulate the higher ideal behind … practices, and then criticize these practices from the standpoint of their own motivating ideal.” His insights are particularly relevant to MFT, which is rooted in an evolutionary-cum-biological approach of morality as innate and ingrained within the individual. Various social scientists (Wilson, Reference Wilson1975, Reference Wilson1978), psychologists (Haidt, Reference Haidt2012), and philosophers (Hutcheson, Reference Hutcheson1769/2003) have advocated for some version of the sociobiological/innate viewpoint on morality. This view perceives individuals as enshrined with a “superior Sense, which I call a Moral one,” in which “Some Actions have to Men an immediate Goodness” (Hutcheson, quoted in Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 260). Taylor’s work of retrieval argues that behind this “superior moral sense” are moral sources experienced by individuals as intrinsically good and ontologically prior. Applying the work of retrieval to contemporary MFT, the goal of this article has been to present a Taylored reading of MFT—and, in so doing, to demonstrate that individuals’ innate moral senses are inextricably indexed to external, ontological, and self-resonant visions of the good.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the former editor, Bruce Barry, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive inquiries and thoughtful guidance throughout the review process. I also thank Scott Reynolds for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this article and Suzanne Bratt for her copyediting assistance.
Carolyn T. Dang ([email protected]) is an assistant professor in organizational behavior at the Pennsylvania State University’s Smeal College of Business. She earned her PhD in organizational behavior with a minor in research methods at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Her research explores ethical issues within organizations, with an emphasis on incorporating normative and descriptive ethical theories (behavioral ethics) to explain and predict organizational phenomena.
Open access
