BRINGING MORAL EVALUATIONS INTO PSYCHOTHERAPY: A BRIEF INTERVENTION BASED ON VIRTUE ETHICS

<p dir="ltr">Various schools of psychotherapy discourage deontic moral evaluations, meaning judgments about good or right behavior that one ought to do for moral reasons. But there is reason to think that such judgments may be beneficial. The current study develops a brief, single-session decision making tool based on virtue ethics that has the user think through a dilemma they face in terms of which option is more morally virtuous. Compared to a decisional balance sheet (DBS), the virtue intervention increased scores on a novel self-transcendence measure, partially increased the experience of moral elevation, and did not affect hedonic and eudaimonic motivation. Exploratory factor analysis indicated a two-factor structure for the self-transcendence measure (reduced self-focus; reaching beyond oneself to a higher purpose). The virtue condition significantly reduced self-focus relative to the DBS without impacting the other factor. Additional exploratory results indicated that neither condition produced greater motivation or guilt, but that the virtue condition increased moral identity. This study serves as proof-of-concept that increasing, rather than decreasing, focus on deontic moral evaluations in psychotherapy may be worthwhile.</p>