Aristotle’s intuitionist approach to morality guides a new direction in moral psychology

Interdisciplinarity is widely endorsed yet difficult to enact, particularly when concepts travel between the humanities and empirical sciences. Moral psychology, positioned between moral philosophy and psychological science, offers a revealing case study of both the benefits and challenges of work that straddles these traditions. Past research in moral psychology has been organized largely around utilitarian and deontological templates from moral philosophy, which have shaped influential laboratory paradigms in the early 2000s. Yet more recent findings suggest that everyday moral evaluations more often hinge on character inference, relationships, and contextual meaning than on rule application or outcome calculation. These developments point to virtue ethics as a more compatible framework for describing how people judge moral situations. Accordingly, an Aristotelian approach is introduced as a concrete example of the “nuts-and-bolts” of humanities–science integration. The paper argues that Aristotle’s intuitionist virtue ethics—centered on practical wisdom, perception of particulars, and habituated character—can be translated into empirically tractable hypotheses that illuminate everyday moral judgment. A translational pathway is sketched for integrating concepts from virtue ethics into computational moral psychology by representing virtues as latent dispositions that guide attention, interpretation, and action across situations. This illustrates how philosophical constructs can be specified and formalized in models that remain sensitive to real-world context. Effective interdisciplinarity requires translation steps, shared vocabularies, and humility about disciplinary limits. Treated in this way, virtue ethics can inform moral psychology and help bridge science and the humanities to better understand real-world moral judgment.