Despite its explosive growth, there is considerable disagreement about the fundamental purpose of ESG. Two types of policies associated with ESG metrics and mechanisms give rise to at least two opposing views of their purpose: “profit-maximizing policies” versus “normative sustainable policies.” This chapter advocates the second type of strategy, arguing that corporate leaders who embrace ESG should be open to adopting a purpose that may undermine or even intentionally sacrifice shareholder wealth. In defending this view, the chapter considers the question of who has the legal, political, and moral authority to decide on ESG purposes. The chapter argues that business leaders already retain a great deal of legal autonomy in deciding whether or not to adopt some version of an ESG purpose as part of the firm's overall purposes. The chapter then discusses the challenges posed by what the authors call the Political Liberal Problem, which seems to suggest that corporate leaders should refrain from promoting a particular view of the good on behalf of their constituents or stakeholders. The chapter contends that a normative sustainable view of ESG purpose depends crucially on the ability to defend the relatively autonomous moral judgment of business leaders in setting ESG strategy.

This chapter of the handbook tackles a foundational question in moral psychology: What constitutes the moral domain? To answer this question, we first have to know how our minds determine right from wrong. The authors argue that our intuitive, culturally flexible perceptions of harm drive our judgments of the moral domain. This is not the dominant view of the moral domain, but the most popular models of the past and present need not be the most accurate ones. Instead, these paradigms reflect broader shifts in our values as a society and a field of research. The Turielian moral domain of the 1970s and 1980s took inspiration from the cognitive revolution, positing harm as a universal value that fully determines how people decide right from wrong. The Haidtian paradigm of today is influenced by the rise of cross-cultural psychology, arguing that harm is just one of many intuitive, culturally activated moral values. Ultimately, neither paradigm gets it completely right, but the authors argue that we can build a better paradigm by combining the strengths of each. In this model, harm is the key driver of moral judgments, but perceptions of harm are intuitive and culturally variable.

This chapter of the handbook introduces readers to the field of moral psychology as a whole and provides them with a guide to the volume. The authors delineate the landscape of morality in terms of five phenomena extensively studied by moral psychologists: moral behavior, moral judgments, moral sanctions, moral emotions, and moral communication, all against a background of moral standards. They then provide brief overviews of research on a few topics not assigned a dedicated chapter in the book (e.g., the moral psychology of artificial intelligence, free will, and moral responsibility), noting several other topics not treated in depth (e.g., the neuroscience of morality, links between moral and economic behavior, moral learning). In the last section of the chapter, the authors summarize each of the contributed chapters in the book.

This chapter of the handbook tackles the question of how first-person moral judgments and moral behavior are conceptually linked. The authors frame their discussion in terms of a philosophical puzzle known as “Hume’s Problem.” The puzzle arises from the conjunction of three ideas: Humeanism, the idea that beliefs alone do not suffice to motivate action; internalism, the idea that moral judgments are intrinsically motivating; and cognitivism, the idea that moral judgments are beliefs. These three ideas are jointly inconsistent, so at least one of them must be false. But which one? The authors focus their attention on two possible solutions to the puzzle: the externalist solution, which denies that moral judgments are intrinsically motivating (rescinding internalism); and the noncognitivist solution, which denies that moral judgments are beliefs (rescinding cognitivism). Based on the psychological and neuropsychological evidence bearing on these proposals, however, it appears that neither of these solutions to Hume’s Problem has solid empirical support.

This chapter of the handbook compares the major moral sanctioning behaviors of blame and punishment from two perspectives: their cultural history and their underlying psychology. The author draws a dividing line between two phases of human evolution – before and after human settlement – and proposes that, before that watershed, moral sanctions were informal, nonhierarchical, and often mild, akin to today’s acts of moral blame among intimates. Soon after settlement, hierarchies emerged, in which punishment took hold as a new form of sanctioning, typically exacted by those higher up in the hierarchy, and eventually by institutions of punishment. The author reviews the empirical evidence on the cognitive and social processes underlying each of these sanctioning tools and proposes that their distinct cultural histories are reflected in their psychological properties we can observe today. Whereas blame is, on the whole, flexible, effective, and cognitively sophisticated, punishment is often more damaging, less effective, and can easily be abused – as in past and modern forms of institutional punishment.

This chapter outlines a theory of moral perception, describes a structural analogy between perception and action, and indicates how perception can provide an objective basis for moral knowledge. It is shown to have a basis in the kinds of grounds that underlie the moral properties to which moral perception responds, such as the violence of a face-slapping. With this outline of a theory of moral perception in view, the chapter describes the presentational phenomenal character of moral perception. Prominent in this presentationality is the phenomenological integration between our moral sensibility and our non-moral perception of the various kinds of natural properties that ground moral properties. Moral perception is possible without moral judgment but commonly yields it. It is also possible without moral emotion but may arise from it in some cases and evoke it in others. Many perceptually grounded judgments are justified; many also express empirical moral knowledge.

Trolley dilemmas were first developed by moral philosophers engaged in reflection on the ethics of permissible harm. But they have since become central to psychological research into morality. One reason why psychologists have paid so much attention to trolley dilemmas is that they see them as a key way to investigating the contrast between deontological and utilitarian approaches to ethics. This framing, however, departs from the original philosophical purpose of trolley dilemmas, and can lead psychological research astray. In this chapter, we question the assumption that trolley dilemmas can shed general light about the psychological bases of utilitarian decision-making. Some lay responses to trolley dilemmas that psychologists routinely classify as "utilitarian" in fact have little meaningful relation to what philosophers mean by this term. Even when what underlies lay responses to trolley dilemmas partly echoes aspects of a utilitarian approach to ethics, this doesn’t generalize to other moral domains, and tells us little about the psychological roots of other aspects of utilitarianism. Properly used, trolley dilemmas have a useful role to play in psychological research. But once we get clear about what we can, and cannot, learn from them, the current centrality of the trolley paradigm in moral psychology will seem overblown.

This article addresses frequently asked questions about “trolleyology,” scientific research using trolley dilemmas to probe the moral mind:What are trolley dilemmas? What is the Trolley Problem? Why should philosophers or scientists care about the Trolley Problem? What have we learned from scientific research using trolley dilemmas? Do trolley dilemmas help us understand utilitarianism or other moral philosophies? Do hypothetical trolley judgments predict real judgments? Does it matter if they don’t? What about the relationship between the scientific (descriptive) Trolley Problem and the philosophical (normative) Trolley Problem? Can science really tell us anything about what’s right or wrong? What’s new in Trolleyology these days? Do you have any concluding thoughts?

There has been widespread consensus amongst professional philosophers on responses to initial variants of the Trolley Problem. However, those philosophers have all been from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. There is a growing literature that investigates whether judgments differ across cultures. If judgments differ, the implications for moral philosophy depend on whether this represents genuine moral disagreement and what are its causes. I survey the literature on cross-cultural variation in moral judgments in trolley problems. There is not much evidence and it is mixed. The higher acceptability of acting in Bystander compared to Footbridge is relatively consistent across cultures (small-scale societies may be an exception, but there is limited evidence); however, the level of acceptability of acting in the individual scenarios differs across cultures, especially in Footbridge. This preliminary inspection suggests that it is plausible that cross-cultural differences in judgments exist. Assessing their causes, they seem likely to be genuine moral disagreements, which result from differences in culture and institutions. This raises issues for the metaphysics and epistemology of moral judgments. If we are not to be skeptics about the existence of moral facts or the possibility of knowing them, then we may need to endorse a form of constructivist relativism.