Morality

Morality. Simply put, morality is a system or collection of ideas of what is right or wrong conduct. However, within the context of psychology, we will focus on how we arrive at a sense of what is right and what is wrong. 

The main disciplines of psychological analysis have largely ignored this question of how we arrive at our morality. Cognitive, behavioral, biological, evolutionary, and humanistic psychologists have written off the importance of this development and believe this question to be irrelevant to the understanding of the human mind. I would argue that this question is incredibly important and can reveal a lot about how and why we make the decisions we do. After all, many of our decisions are influenced by our sense of what is right or wrong. 

The one discipline of psychology that has explored this question is Freud’s psychoanalysis. Freud proposed that our mind was broken into three distinct parts: the id, ego, and superego. The id is our animalistic part of ourselves that will do anything to achieve pleasure, the superego is our internal sense of morality, and the ego is the part of our mind that mediates conflicts of the superego and id. Freud’s theory includes and emphasizes the importance of the superego on our psychological processes and decision-making processes.

Conversely, I propose that our morality is inextricably tied to our “imagined self” and “actual self”.

We covered the concepts of the imagined self and actual self in the previous blog about anxiety. In review, imagined self is a term to describe the internalized construction you’ve created for yourself. Actual self is a term to describe the conception of yourself that is constructed through the actions you take. You can refer to the previous blog for a more expansive exploration of each of these terms. 

From a young age, we don’t have an imagined self, our main psychological processes are desires for warmth, food, sleep, etc. These are more primordial psychological functions. It isn’t until we continue to mature that we start to develop a sense of our imagined self. At a certain point, we start to observe the actions and instructions of those around us. We start to learn about what is right and what is wrong. This learning process gradually engrains its information with our imagined self and what we ought to be. 

This construction of our imagined selves is Hegelian in nature; we learn our sense of morality upon the recognition of an other. It is only by the recognition of another consciousness that we are able to develop any sense of right or wrong.

Since the construction of our morality and imagined self is contingent upon the recognition of another consciousness, we can readily conclude that our morality is also related to our actual self. In other words, your actual self cannot be viewed as moral unless your outward behavior is seen as moral.

Now that we have established the connectedness of our morality and our imagined/actual selves, we can look at the ramifications of such a structure. 

When we behave in a way that is immoral there are two reasons this makes us uncomfortable. Firstly, it makes us uncomfortable because there exists an incongruence between our imagined and actual selves. Secondly, it makes us uncomfortable because our minds have a desire to preserve our imagined self. In other words, immoral behavior shifts our beliefs about who we are (changes our imagined self) and this change makes us uncomfortable. There are select instances in which this incongruence does not bother the individual, however, this usually stems from an intrapersonal lie. The aforementioned mechanisms of change and intrapersonal lies are detailed in previous blogs.