Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘moral’ is never a settled concept but a contested site at which psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and mythology converge and argue. Nietzsche’s genealogical assault on received morality — tracing ‘good and evil’ to power relations, resentment, and caste — reverberates through Jung, Hillman, and beyond. Jung reframes morality as a psychic function whose demands shift with the individuation process: what is morally required of one psychological type may be the opposite of what is required of another, and the unconscious itself exercises a ‘subliminal moral judgment.’ Hillman radicalizes this by insisting that moralities are mythically grounded — imaginal powers making claims through archetypal figures — so that the question of good and evil must be seen through rather than answered. McGilchrist’s neurological evidence assigns the foundation of moral sense to the right hemisphere, implicating empathy, context-sensitivity, and theory of mind, in contrast to the reductive utilitarian calculus the left hemisphere favours. Ricoeur situates moral predication within selfhood, arguing that ‘good’ and ‘obligatory’ are not opposed to description but constitute a reflexive path back to the self. Aurobindo and Evans-Wentz press the relativity of all moral standards against an absolute that lies beyond good and evil altogether. The corpus thus spans from genealogical deconstruction to neurological grounding to mythic re-imagination, with the tension between moral universalism and moral relativism remaining persistently unresolved.
Rather than looking at myths morally, archetypal psychology looks at moralities mythically. By considering morals as the claims of the imaginal powers, morality itself becomes imaginal.
Hillman inverts the usual hierarchy: myths are not to be judged morally; instead, morality is to be understood as an expression of archetypal, imaginal powers residing in psychic images.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
Moral values are not something that we work out rationally on the principle of utility, or any … analytic retrospection misleads us as to the nature of what we are seeing, since it reconstructs the world according to left-hemisphere principles.
McGilchrist argues that moral sense is primordial and holistic, distorted by analytical retrospection that imposes left-hemisphere rationalism upon what is fundamentally a right-hemisphere, empathic capacity.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
a mass of research of differing kinds suggests strongly that the right hemisphere is more important for morality, too… Both right hemisphere damage and frontal lobe damage are independently associated with more utilitarian judgments.
Neurological evidence demonstrates that genuine moral evaluation depends on right-hemisphere capacities — theory of mind and emotional responsiveness — whereas their suppression produces reductive utilitarian reasoning.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
a mass of research of differing kinds suggests strongly that the right hemisphere is more important for morality, too… Brain-injured patients tend to assess personal moral dilemmas based solely on cognitive criteria.
A near-duplicate passage reinforcing the neurological argument that moral judgment properly requires emotional and contextual integration unavailable to purely cognitive processing.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
the presumption of the ego can only be damped down by moral defeat. This is necessary… It is not a question of relaxing morality itself but of making a moral effort in a different direction.
Jung argues that individuation demands morality be redirected rather than abandoned: what is morally required depends on the psychological condition of the individual, not on a fixed external code.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
The concept of good and evil has a dual prehistory; first, in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes. Whoever has the power to repay good with good, evil with evil… is called good.
Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis traces ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to social power relations and the capacity for reciprocity, dismantling their claim to transcendent moral authority.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887thesis
human good and evil are relative and the standards erected by ethics are uncertain as well as relative… an amalgam of all these view-points is the determining heterogeneous idea, constitutes the complex substance, of morality.
Aurobindo contends that conventional morality is a heterogeneous amalgam of relative standards that addresses symptoms rather than the deeper spiritual root of the human malady.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
There being nothing which is good per se or evil per se, Good and Evil, like all dualities, are hallucinatory concepts of the sangsārically constituted mind… Nirvāna is beyond good and evil.
The Tibetan doctrinal framework dissolves the moral binary altogether, treating good and evil as relative, mind-constructed illusions transcended by liberation.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954thesis
The ethical and moral determinations of action will be treated here as predicates of a new kind, and their relation to the subject of action as a new mediation along the return path toward the self.
Ricoeur positions moral predicates (‘good,’ ‘obligatory’) as reflexive mediations that constitute selfhood, refusing the Humean split between descriptive and prescriptive discourse.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
in what form did the moral imperative present itself to the Greeks? What, in successive periods, were their notions about virtue? What reasons did they advance for a moral behaviour?
Snell frames the history of Greek ethics as a study of how moral imperatives were formulated rather than whether historical figures lived virtuously, focusing on the structure of ethical thought.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
the use of force, even where punishment is deserved, is still a far cry from true morality; the same is true of the kind of just doing which springs from fear of punishment.
Snell argues that true morality transcends both legal compulsion and fear of punishment, pointing toward an inner ethical orientation that justice alone cannot secure.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
the use of the two categories, ‘moral’ and ‘non-moral’ suggests to numerous writers on the topic that the cases to be investigated fall into two neatly demarcated and opposed categories.
Nussbaum challenges the sharp moral/non-moral dichotomy, arguing that ethical life presents a complex spectrum of cases not reducible to binary taxonomy.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
the subliminal moral judgment accords with the moral code, the dream has behaved in the … complementary or compensatory function of the unconscious.
Jung identifies a subliminal moral judgment in the unconscious, suggesting that the psyche exercises its own ethical function independently of conscious deliberation.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964supporting
the Standard Issue Moral Judgment Interview… concerned the developmental stage of moral reasoning. Presented with a social situation that poses a conflict between two moral imperatives, the subject is asked to indicate a solution.
Damasio uses Kohlberg’s moral reasoning assessment to demonstrate that brain-damaged subjects may retain high-stage moral reasoning while still failing in real-world ethical decision-making, implicating emotion in practical morality.
, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994supporting
evil as embodied in murderous totalitarianism necessarily offends every version of morality that Arendt discusses… Christian goodness, a kind of love, goes beyond morality and even supererogation.
Through Arendt, the passage distinguishes five distinct versions of morality and observes that totalitarian evil constitutes a violation of all of them, while Christian love exceeds the moral sphere altogether.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
It is roughly true that Arendt does not find moral conduct existentially interesting except when it requires a distinctive human capacity like thinking or judging, or a trait like courage.
Arendt’s existential priorities subordinate morality as such to those dimensions of conduct that express distinctively human capacities, revealing her ambivalence toward conventional moral philosophy.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
dream figures, which the waking-ego judges to be psychopathic because they are not affected by the moral values of the dayworld and because they do not change.
Hillman notes that psychopathic dream figures, immune to dayworld moral values, represent permanent underworld inhabitants whose existence challenges the ego’s moral assumptions.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
the illogical and impracticable nature of the moral standards of the unenlightened multitude would be… War, being an abrogation of ethical and cultural systems, recognizes no standard of good and evil.
Evans-Wentz exposes the incoherence of conventional moral standards by showing how states systematically violate in wartime every ethical principle they enforce in peacetime.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
morally elevated individuals not only seek moral excellence but are also less tolerant of others who fail to act with moral excellence.
Empirical research on moral elevation demonstrates its dual social function: inspiring prosocial behavior while simultaneously heightening intolerance of moral violations in others.
, The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting
the whole question is therefore whether a moral system, which does not have the support of the judicial institution, is capable of establishing its own coherence.
Ricoeur asks whether morality can ground its own coherence independently of legal enforcement, tracing the relationship between the moral system and the judicial order.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
it is symptomatic of Arendt’s uncomfortable orientation to even the best morality that she sees Socrates as purely nonmoral in his passion for thinking.
The interpreter reads Arendt’s treatment of Socrates as symptomatically revealing her deeper discomfort with morality, which she subordinates to thinking, judging, and authentic political action.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
Williams seriously questions the view that moral claims are the only ones to which an agent can, and should, attach the most serious practical value.
Nussbaum notes Bernard Williams’s challenge to the priority of moral claims in practical deliberation, opening the question of what properly counts as a ‘moral’ consideration.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986aside
the daimonion of Socrates, the moral voice of the most moral of all Greeks, never said: ‘Do this,’ but merely warned: ‘Do not do this.’
Snell observes that across Greek, Hebraic, and modern ethical traditions, moral commandments characteristically prohibit rather than prescribe, pointing to the essentially negative structure of codified morality.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953aside
Plato and Aristotle undoubtedly had available to them all the material surveyed here… they might well be held to have analysed, summed up, and improved upon their predecessors.
Adkins situates his study of moral responsibility within a broader genealogy of Greek values, arguing that the philosophical tradition culminating in Plato and Aristotle synthesized earlier moral vocabulary.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960aside