The Missing Moral Compass - Part I
In our previous article on the absence of teleology in modern psychology, we explored how the rejection of final cause reduced the human person to mechanisms and processes, stripping away any sense of inherent purpose. This article continues that investigation by focusing on a closely related problem: the absence of moral foundation in contemporary psychology.
Without teleology, moral discourse easily collapses into relativism or is dismissed as a mere byproduct of cultural conditioning, resultig in a variety of negative consequences. For this reason, we will analyze how psychology arrived at this morally neutral stance and why it is deeply problematic. In other words, we will diagnose one of the core problems afflicting modern psychology and its effects. The remedy — how returning to the Thomist tradition can guide psychology back to an ethical foundation — will be explored in a second part.
The Rise of Moral Neutrality in Psychology
A further Consequence of Eschewing Teleology
Modern psychology, which emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries eager to establish itself as a natural science, deliberately discarded the old philosophical notion of the soul and any talk of final causes or ultimate purposes in human life. As Hubert Gruender observed, “modern psychology is essentially a psychology without a soul,” taking a materialistic turn by denying any spiritual principle in man. William James captured this ethos, noting that in this scientific climate “matter shall hold all the power,” reflecting a field determined to ground itself purely in physiology and laboratory data. The result was a psychology that bracketed off the concept of telos as unscientific, focusing instead on the description and prediction of behavior, not on how humans ought to live.
This moral neutrality is evident across major schools: Freud’s psychoanalysis reduced morality to psychic conflict between the superego and the id; Skinner’s behaviorism dismissed free will as an illusion, viewing man as an “animal regulated by reflexes,” as Robert Brennan put it; and even the more philosophically inclined William James treated truth pragmatically, confessing that pure determinism “is a bad moral fit” but offering only a personal belief in free will rather than re-establishing a moral foundation.
This leaves a vacuum in understanding conscience, moral growth, or the search for purpose — a vacuum that even psychology itself has felt. By the mid-20th century, movements like humanistic psychology and Victor Frankl’s logotherapy arose to reintroduce meaning and purpose, reacting against the sterility of a psychology without telos.
However, the trend was already set: psychology would explain how people think and behave, but not how they should. Morality, if addressed at all, was treated as an outcome of socialization, biology, or personal preference, to the point that the influential psychologist Gordon Allport observed that many scientific thinkers simply assumed that “what human beings actually do is what they ought to do,” effectively equating human nature with animal nature and collapsing the ought into the is. If humans are viewed as just another animal, guided by the same evolutionary drives, then moral norms become nothing more than ingrained survival strategies or cultural rules — not objective truths.
Why Is This Troubling?
The Illusion of Scientific Neutrality
At first glance, keeping morality out of psychology might seem like a prudent delimitation of science. After all, a neutral, fact-based discipline can avoid bias or cultural prejudice. However, moral neutrality cannot be achieved at all since human nature is inherently teleological, and therefore, moral — to claim otherwise, has come at a tremendous cost for the science itself and the subjects it studies.
Thomistic scholars began warning decades ago that a value-free psychology is in fact a distorted psychology, one that misunderstands its subject. Brennan argued that “to look at man scientifically, without studying him in his philosophic nature, must inevitably result in a false purview of his real being.” We can omit some scientific details about humans and still grasp the truth of human nature, he notes, but if we omit the philosophical — the deeper questions of soul, purpose, and meaning — we lose any “sound notion of what man really is.”
Modern psychology, by reducing man to reflexes or instincts, may experience that they are morally neutral, but in reality, what they are doing is ended up with incomplete and fundamentally wrong views of the person.
Slippery Fulfillment
Another immediate problem is that a psychology without a moral framework struggles to account for the striving for fulfillment. The very existence of inner conflict — the clash between what we want to do and what we feel we ought to do — points to a dimension of the psyche that cannot be explained by stimulus-response loops or unconscious drives alone.
As Magda Arnold and father John Gasson observed, no animal feels pangs of conscience or agonizes over right and wrong — but humans do, universally. This suggests that humans are oriented toward an ideal of behavior that transcends immediate impulses. It “should occur to a psychologist,” Arnold writes, “that the assumption which equates what is with what ought to be in human conduct, and equates human nature with animal nature, is contradicted by the very fact that human beings wrestle with the problem of morals.” In ignoring the inherente teleological orientation of human beings toward some fulfillment (some ultimate good), psychology risks overlook the very phenomena it should explain.
Ethical Distortions in Society
Another concern is that a morally neutral psychology can easily lead to ethical missteps in practice. If one sees moral values as mere subjective feelings, there is little basis to uphold human dignity or ethical standards in psychological research and therapy. Brennan noted that modern psychology’s theories, once translated into practice, have caused “untold disorder in education, ethics, religion, and politics.” For example, radical behaviorism’s denial of free will and moral responsibility fueled an attitude that individuals are not accountable for their actions since behavior is just conditioned — an attitude with obvious implications for education and law. Likewise, Freudian theory’s reduction of all moral and religious striving to neuroses or sublimated sexual energy bred excessive skepticism about genuine ethical ideals.
Psychology, said Brenan, being “the theoretic root of all the moral disciplines,” inevitably influences how society approaches moral education and policy. If that root is compromised — if it presents a picture of humans as aimless machines or pleasure-driven animals — the branches will suffer distortions. Little wonder that moral relativism and nihilism found fertile ground in a culture increasingly told by its science of mind that there are no objective values or inherent purposes.
Nicolás Eyzaguirre Bäuerle
Editor-in-chief
