Theoretical Views on Everyday Morality: “Let Me Tell You a Story”

Abstract

This paper discusses some theoretical and methodological deficiencies in morality psychology in understanding everyday morality and some possible methods to overcome. Morality theories using both the deductive approach and hypothetical dilemmas, especially thoe that are distant to ordinary life, have failed to understand everyday morality. Important structures such as context, culture, or language which affect how morality is constructed, given meaning, or transferred have had a very limited place in traditional morality theories. With the support of anthropological theories, contemporary theories which have had to consider cultural effects, still have not looked closely enough into natural morality conceptionalizations of the layperson. When these natural conceptualizations were investigated it was found that in daily life morality is handled in terms of personal characteristics instead of abstract moral principles. The paper suggests that the most appropriate approach to understanding everyday morality is to investigate these naturalistic conceptualizations.