jamesteufel.com

Through experience and reason, I categorize morality into five types: prescriptive, normative, reasoned, representative, and available morality.  These types of morality are not mutually exclusive meaning that more than one type of morality can be used by people at one time or across different time periods.  Additionally, the five morality types are not necessarily independent.  According to prescriptive morality, people make moral judgments based on tradition, rules, laws, and authority.  A person using normative morality will conform to contemporary morality of salient cliques, peers, groups, organizations, communities, or cultures.  Reasoned morality uses logic, context, discussion, argument, and cognition to make moral decisions or reach moral conclusions.  Representative morality builds off of the representative heuristic.  According to representative morality, moral judgments are made based on salient superficial characteristics of people or contexts at a specific time; stereotypes often are  a result of representative morality, and representative morality often reflects lower level cognitive processing.  Available morality relies on the availability heuristic and thereby utilizes the most salient parts of human experience across time to make moral decisions.  Available morality is bound by the similarity between one’s experiences and the actual moral landscape.  Critical Humanistic Health Promoters attempt to improve their abilities to use reasoned morality while recognizing the magnitude and frequency of the remaining types of morality.