While psychological practice continues to expand, the sobering decline of mental health identified by Hillman and Ventura (1993) is evidenced by increased rates of suicide (Weir, 2019; Hedegaard, 2021; Stone et al., 2018) and psychopathology (Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, 2018; Twenge et al., 2010). Charles Taylor identified, in the same time frame as the noted decline of mental health, a malaise of modernity (1991), that is, the loss of meaning and transcendence in the modern world. Throughout the history of psychology and Western thought and culture, increased rates of psychological distress certainly coincide with what I will refer to as the malaise of psychology: the reliance on immanence-based theories that locate meaning and purpose within (i.e., emergent from) persons themselves, as opposed to being anchored in any genuine transcendence, that provides meaning and purpose to persons by calling them out of themselves, to something higher. Psychological practice has, ironically, come to reject the autonomous individual in favor of a socially/relationally constructed persona while at the same time locating the source of meaning and truth within the individual person and honoring the individual desires and needs as the definitive source of the meaning of life itself. This movement contrasts sharply with a genuinely transcendent approach which recognizes the importance, and even grants the ontological status, of higher goods and commonalities, that is, the existence of something higher in our humanity itself that calls us at once into being and into responsibility. I will propose that to remedy the malaise of psychology, we must locate the foundation of meaning, purpose, healing, and transformative change in our ethical obligations and responsibilities toward others, a recognizing and striving towards being for the other (e.g., P. Marcus, 2008) as opposed to being simply for oneself, within oneself, and, thus, merely with the other. Furthermore, I argue that being for the particular other cannot occur unless human beings are genuinely responsible moral agents capable of an individual power and potential to act for the sake of that responsibility (Williams et al., 2021). That is, only in the transcending encounter with the other wherein we are called out of our self to something greater beyond us can we achieve fundamental and lasting change in mental health and healing for self and others. I will support this assertion by drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Charles Taylor, and C. Terry Warner, as well as others. Psychology, I will argue, must include this conception of an inherently moral system of human relationships in which each human being is responsible (i.e., able to respond) to the felt moral imperative from the other. Such obligation one might only be able to fulfill as one is attuned to and disposed to be for the other. This mode of being is distinctly not a systemic, nor a technological, solution to be achieved by strategic inner change or insight. Rather, it consists in the recognition and amalgamation of many individual acts of being for the other—by unique individuals for the sake of other unique individuals. I will end by outlining one possible model of application of this approach to clinical practice, viz., Alterity Focused Therapy© proposed by Burdge, Burdge, and Major (2022).

This study analyzed moral psychology's “moral judgment-moral action gap” research and found that morality was being described as a secondary phenomenon produced by underlying substrates (such as identity and self constructs, “brain modules,” and “evolved emotional systems”) which are themselves non-moral. Deriving morality from “the non-moral” presents a kind of ontological gap in the moral psychology research. Researchers implicitly close this gap assuming it is possible to get moral judgments and actions out of non-moral substrates. But the difficulty remains how the moral as “moral” becomes infused into any moral psychology models. Morality is not a secondary phenomenon arising out of something else. This study argues that there is a need to shift our understanding of what it means to be human, to a view in which the moral is fundamental. An alternative foundation for assessing the moral is found in the work of Emmanuel Levinas who sees ethics as a metaphysical concern. This means that he sees the essential moral character of human life and the reality of human agency as ontologically fundamental, or constitutive of human nature itself. In other words, the ethical is the “first cause” in regards to understanding the nature and action of the self. Thus morality is not merely epiphenomenal to some more fundamental reality. Levinas holds that as humans, we are called to the Other. This call of obligation to the Other comes before all other human endeavors. After presenting Levinas's alternative foundation of obligation to the Other which herein is labeled Felt Moral Obligation (FMO), C. Terry Warner's conceptualizations of FMO in relation to the moral judgment-action gap are presented. In light of these conceptualizations, this study argues that there is actually no moral judgment-moral action gap, but only holistic events of moral self-betrayal. Warner illustrates that rejecting FMO is a single moral event, a holistic act performed by a moral agent that involves moral responses of self-justification, offense-taking, and rationalization. The person finds him or herself in a state of self-betrayal. Levinas and Warner implicitly assert that such self-betraying responses are not fundamentally biological or rational, but rather, fundamentally moral.