Do moral beliefs motivate action? To answer this question, extant arguments have considered hypothetical cases of association (dissociation) between agents’ moral beliefs and actions. In this paper, I argue that this approach can be improved by studying people’s actual moral beliefs and actions using empirical research methods. I present three new studies showing that, when the stakes are high, associations between participants’ moral beliefs and actions are actually explained by co-occurring but independent moral emotions. These findings suggest that moral beliefs (...) themselves have little or no motivational force, supporting the Humean picture of moral motivation. (shrink)

Despite the increase in ethics education offerings of the past few decades, universities struggle to foster desirable ethical dispositions among developing professionals. Part of the reason is that the values implicit in the enculturation of students in higher education cut against the aims of explicit ethics education. To accomplish desirable ethical dispositions among future professionals we ought to broaden our understanding of what the cultivation of ethical professionals entails from a narrow focus on ethics education to a broad focus on (...) ethics enculturation. This paper offers a framework for theorizing ethics enculturation, using examples from recent engineering ethics education literature to demonstrate how the framework captures elements about the development of ethical dispositions and decision-making skills that literature with a narrow focus on ethics education overlooks. (shrink)