Over the past 40 years or so a collection of research into the psychology of morals has built up. Researchers in this area are sometimes labeled cultural anthropologists, cultural psychologists, or moral psychologists. The Wikipedia entry for Moral Psychology describes it as "a field of study in both philosophy and psychology." Historically, morals or ethics have been considered the domain of philosophy, but in contrast with the extensive body of traditional philosophical literature on ethics, meta-ethics, moral sentiments, and moral justice, moral psychology starts out by postulating that humans have moral feelings that exist due to human psychology. From this perspective, many moral sentiments can be traced to evolutionary and biological origins, traditional upbringing and cultural influences, and are located deeply within the brain. The field of moral psychology seeks to understand what already exists in terms of moral sentiments, not what ought to be, in contrast with much of the current literature in the field of ethical philosophy.
Since it is a human study, there is a significant amount of overlap with other fields of human study, including anthropology, sociology, economics, and religion. One strongly connected field is Prospect Theory, initiated and developed primarily by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and all of behavioral economics, which I hope to cover in a near future essay.
Overview of Moral Foundation Theory
A particular flavor of moral psychology has been developed by a group of researchers that goes by the name Moral Foundation Theory. It was developed from Shweder's foundational work by Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph and Jesse Graham. Some the researchers using the MFT framework include Ravi Iyer, Jonathan Haidt, Sean Wojcik, Matt Motyl, Gary Sherman, Jesse Graham, Sena Koleva, and Pete Ditto.
A core idea is that moral feelings are the result of subconscious or "system 1" thought (as described in Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman), a fast and automatic part of the brain. Though the conscious ("system 2") part of the brain can think about morals too, it is much slower, and is often rushing to catch up and explain why the fast subconscious system 1 decided what it did. John Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind uses the analogy of an elephant and its rider to describe this arrangement, where the elephant is big and decides on its own where it wants to go, while the much smaller rider on top is trying hard to provide guidance, but is very dependent on the elephant's decisions too.
The programming for moral reasoning comes from evolution, childhood development, culture, or a combination of all of them. Haidt relates evidence from research showing that moral intuition arises in babies, long before acculturation is possible. Certain parts of the brain are wired for making moral judgments; if those parts are impaired, moral reasoning is impaired.
This structure therefore matches Hume's insight from A Treatise of Human Nature: "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
Moral Dimensions
Within this framework, it is proposed that there are "dimensions" of moral reasoning that are used to make motivational moral judgments. Each dimension is like an aspect of taste (salt, sugar, bitter, sweet). Research has found good evidence for five, with a sixth proposed for which there may be some evidence. Haidt writes extensively on these moral dimensions in his book The Righteous Mind. They are:
Care/harm: kindness and empathy, infant and child raising
Fairness/cheating: reciprocal altruism, punishing defectors from agreements
Loyalty/betrayal: group, tribe, clan membership and defense of the home group
Authority/subversion: efficiency of leadership and coordination of group efforts
Sanctity/degradation: avoidance of disease and parasites, preventing contamination
Liberty/oppression: freedom of action, self-agency
Not everyone has the same degree of sensitivity to these moral dimensions. Haidt's book has an extensive analysis of how different political leanings are correlated with different weightings of these moral dimensions. Published research on this is in the paper "Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations". It is a very worthwhile treatment of the topic, which I will refrain from commenting on here, because you ought to either read the paper or Haidt's book for the full explanation of the methodology and results.
References for Moral Foundation Theory
You can find more information on MFT at MoralFoundations.org, which contains abstracts of a large number of scientific papers and links to some of them, and YourMorals.org, which is designed to allow anyone with an interest to answer a survey about their own moral sentiments.
The paper Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism is available free at SSRN. It provides a fairly complete description of MFT.
Commentary: Relevance of Moral Psychology and Moral Philosophy
Market prices of goods, services, equity and debt prices are driven by human decisions, and if moral reasoning is an important part of the decisions humans make, then an investor or equity trader may find it quite useful to have a more highly evolved understanding of it. If we especially believe that moral reasoning is fast and subconscious, that impacts how we model the decision-making of others. Furthermore, understanding people may help us understand what is happening politically, to the economy, within companies especially, and to make predictions about what will happen in the future, including probabilities of existential risks.
I've not made any mention of moral philosophy in this essay because so far it has had very little to do with predicting how people think, understand the world, and make decisions. Moral philosophers have had thousands of years to extract profound truths from their contemplation of the human mind. So far, what we have seen is that the pinnacle, in philosophy, may have been reached with David Hume in 1739. Although ethics remains among the most popular sub-disciplines of philosophy, much modern ethical philosophy has an activist, normative taste. Normative treatments, lacking objective models, tend to be poor at predicting outcomes, and investors tend to have an interest in accuracy of predicting outcomes, or at least being able to put bounds on the limits of prediction. That severely limits the utility of modern moral philosophy.
The only intersection so far I can imagine between moral philosophy and investing is that some moral philosophers might say that investors ought not to make a profit, especially if some aspect of the investment is zero-sum. Of this, I can say primarily that such a normative judgment would be repugnant, morally speaking, as it ignores the positive sum aspects of investment practice. Hence, their rational argument would collide with my own moral disgust. I think the elephant would, and should, win.
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