Abstract:

Moral motivation is the internal motives to promote people to generate and complete the behavior that has the moral significance. Among the theories that illustrate the moral motivation, MMM is a considerably comprehensive theory. The MMM present a new six-cell Model of Moral Motives that applies a fundamental motivational distinction in psychology to the moral domain. The rows of MMM represent proscriptive morality and prescriptive morality. The columns of the model represent three primary contexts for morality, involving behaviors focused on the self, others, and group. Through the comparison between MMM with the Dual-System Framework for Morality and MFT, its comparative advantages are discovered such as altruism, moral motivation focusing on self and the relationships between group-focused moralities and ideologies. Nevertheless, considering the model was proposed on the base of western ethics, its applicability in China needs to be investigated deeply.

Key words: model of moral motive, forms of regulation, proscriptive morality, prescriptive morality, moral context