The Hoffman Report scandal demonstrates that ethics is not objective and ahistorical, contradicting the comforting progressive story about ethics many students receive. This modern-day ethical failure illustrates some of the weaknesses of the current ethics code: it is rule-based, emphasizes punishments for noncompliance, and assumes a rational actor who can make tricky ethical decisions using a cost–benefit analysis. This rational emphasis translates into pedagogy: the cure for unethical behavior is more education. Yet such an approach seems unlikely to foster ethical (...) behavior in the real world, either for students or for mature scientists. This article argues for an alternative ethical system and a different way of teaching ethical behavior. Virtue ethics emphasizes the development of ethical habits and traits through regular practice and reflection. We show how virtue ethics complements a feminist approach to science, in which scientists are encouraged to reflect on their own biases, rather than attempting to achieve an impossible objectivity. Our article concludes with pedagogical suggestions for teaching ethical behavior as a practical and intelligent skill. (shrink)

This article explores two very different forms in which immoral conduct was problematized over the course of the 19th century. It does this by contrasting the sexual purity politics of the Vice Society and the medicalization of morality as `moral insanity'. Early in the century the Vice Society promoted coercive legislation with the aim of `suppressing vice'. From mid-century, moral insanity theories sought to grapple with vice by disaggregating `moral' from other forms of insanity. These two movements had quite distinct (...) and incompatible lines of development; and they never overtly engaged with each other. The article makes its key argument by demonstrating the way in which such dissimilar trajectories came together towards the end of the century in the `moral hygiene' movement, mobilizing discourses of `degeneration' (and `feeblemindedness') with projects promoting sexual purity. (shrink)

The encounter between the Christian Churches and Psychology has, for all its evident cultural importance, received little attention from disciplinary historians. During the period between the two world wars in Britain this encounter was particularly visible and, as it turned out, for the most part relatively amicable. Given their ostensive rivalry this is, on the face of it, somewhat surprising. Closer examination, however, reveals a substantial convergence and congruence of interests between them within the prevailing cultural climate, and considerable overlapping (...) of membership. The character of their meeting was, it is argued, determined more by these factors than by fundamental divergences in intellectual and theoretical orientation. Such divergences were diplomatically sidelined, on the religious side, by viewing Psychology as having certain ‘blind spots’ and, on the Psychology side, by invoking the argument that ‘science’ is concerned only with ‘facts’, not ‘values’. Only some hard-line psychoanalysts adopted an explicitly anti-religious stance. Religion’s concessions ultimately proved too high a price, and following this period the Churches began distancing themselves from Psychology. Their current relationship is very different from that which prevailed from 1918 to 1939. A fuller historical picture of the relationship between Psychology and religion awaits consideration of other sites and periods. (shrink)

Histories of psychology regularly celebrate the foundational role played in the development of early American psychology by Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, and in particular the development of functional psychology and behaviorism. In this article it is argued that although Darwin's theory did play an influential role, early American psychology did not generally reflect the hereditarian determinism of his theory of evolution by natural selection. However, early American psychologists did accept one critical implication of Darwin's theory, which is (...) that evolution by natural selection does not ensure the highest development of the human race. This partly explains the social interventive zeal that was a distinctive feature of early American psychology. (shrink)

The starting-point of this article is Graham Richards’ (1995) claim that American psychology includes a moral project present even before the discipline got underway as a modern institution. We accept this, but identify a different kind of moral project, stemming from the radical critique of morality by Ralph Waldo Emerson, rather than the moral aims of Noah Porter and James McCosh. This leads to a morality based on (but not reducible to) psychological events, and worked out, not in academic psychology, (...) but in the practical disciplines of counselling and psychotherapy. We trace its elaboration from Freud to the writings and practice of Albert Ellis and Carl Rogers. The critique is of a traditional morality of obligation with its discourse of ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’. A parallel is drawn with a similar (and contemporaneous) critique in moral philosophy. (shrink)