Moral Reasoning and Academic Integrity: Memory Impairment, Corrigenda, and the Pursuit of Knowledge

• DOI: 10.1177/0306624X20902301
• Date: 01 March 2020
• Author: Mark T. Palermo
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Subject Matter: Editorial

https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X20902301

International Journal of

Offender Therapy and

Comparative Criminology

2020, Vol. 64(4) 295 –298

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0306624X20902301

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Editorial

Moral Reasoning and

Academic Integrity: Memory

Impairment, Corrigenda, and

the Pursuit of Knowledge

In this issue, Verkade et al. (2020) present a most interesting contribution on con-

science. In their study, conscience can be viewed as a sophisticated psychological

device consisting of a finely tuned assemblage of empathy, guilt, shame, and moral

reasoning, which develops over time. A developmental approach is particularly wel-

come given its hopeful underpinning in terms of prevention, rather than retribution.

Moral reasoning, de facto, guides, implicitly and explicitly, most of our actions.

During my training years at the Johns Hopkins Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in the mid

90s, our Chairman, Paul R. McHugh, one of the clearest thinkers I have ever met and

from whom I learned about clinical discernment, made a recurrent comment relevant

to contemporary psychiatric inquiry: “If you think you have discovered anything new,

it is because you have not read the Germans.” He was referring, of course, to some of

the founding authors of modern psychiatry, such as Emil Kraeplin and Carl Jaspers,

whose clinical phenomenology and descriptive psychopathology so strongly influ-

enced contemporary behavioral science, and whose analysis of mental phenomena in

both illness and health has yet to be outmoded.

In the case of moral reasoning another German is to be credited with being one of

the seminal contributors to ethical theory. Immanuel Kant in his Foundations of the

Metaphysics of Morals, in 1785, introduced the a priori Categorical Imperative with

respect to moral law. Its imperative nature implies its prescriptive quality: an uncon-

scious obligation (Taylor, 1975). However, as Verkade and colleagues remind us

through their work, this obligation, ontologically, stems from experience: it is not a

priori. The prescriptive duty-oriented moral imperative struggles with the relativism of

real life and is more often than not supplanted by a Kantian Hypothetical Imperative,

a moral advisor of sorts, rather than law, which one could summarize with the word If:

“If you want to get an A on the next test in Ethics, you ought to study Kant diligently”

(Beauchamp, 1991). Clearly the “if” requires an “ought” if one is to hope for any per-

suasiveness relevant to the pursued goal . . .

One of the definitions of imperative (Rh Value Publishing, 1989) is “a fact that

compels attention” and among the synonyms of imperative is the word necessary. In

academia—which I will here loosely describe as a community of individuals pursuing

truth—and in life in general, for that matter, attention is important. It is, indeed,

necessary.

902301IJOXXX10.1177/0306624X20902301International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative CriminologyEditorial

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