Experimental Philosophy: Folk Morality

We report the results of a vignette experiment with a quota sample of the German population in which we analyze the interplay between need, equity, and accountability in third-party distributive decisions. We asked subjects to divide firewood between two hypothetical persons who either differ in their need for heat or in their productivity in terms of their ability to chop wood. The experiment systematically varies the persons’ accountability for their neediness as well as for their productivity. We find that subjects (...) distribute significantly fewer logs of wood to persons who are held accountable for their disadvantage. Independently of being held accountable or not, the needier person is always compensated with a share of logs that exceeds her contribution, while the person who contributes less is punished in terms of receiving a share of logs smaller than her need share. Moreover, there is a domain effect in terms of subjects being more sensitive to lower contributions than to greater need. (shrink)

A virtual reality translation of Judith Thomson's Violinist Analogy. These modules are free to download and use in the classroom and for research/x-phi purposes. -/- *Requires an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive and VR capable computer. To open the files, uncompress the downloaded .zip folder and run the executable (.exe) file.

A virtual reality module that incorporates a training room (for subjects to become accommodated to virtual environments) and VR translations of Philippa Foot's Trolley Problem and Judith Thomson's Violinist thought experiment. -/- These modules are free to use for classroom or research/x-phi purposes. This set of modules is optimized for the HTC Vive. If you have an Oculus Rift, please see our VR modules optimized for the rift. -/- *Requires an HTC Vive and VR capable computer. To access the simulation, (...) uncompress the .zip folder and run the executable (.exe) file. (shrink)

A virtual reality translation of Philippa Foot's original "Trolley Problem." These modules are free to download and use in the classroom and for research/x-phi purposes. -/- *Requires an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive and VR capable computer. To open the files, uncompress the downloaded .zip folder and run the executable (.exe) file.

A virtual reality translation of Robert Nozick's "Experience Machine" thought experiment from his "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" (1974). These modules are free to download and use in the classroom and for research/x-phi purposes. NPCs are randomized for gender during startup of each run. *Requires an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive and VR capable computer. To open the files, uncompress the downloaded .zip folder and run the executable (.exe) file. -/- V1.2 Fixed missing projector video footage during experience machine sales pitch.

Members of marginalized communities are often accused of being "too sensitive" when subjected to supposedly harmless acts of microaggression. This paper explores a simulated society consisting of marginalized and non-marginalized agents who interact and may, based on their individually held convictions, commit acts of microaggressions. Agents witnessing a microaggression might condone, ignore or condemn such microaggressions, thus potentially influencing a perpetrator's conviction. A prototype model has been implemented in NetLogo, and possible applications are briefly discussed.

Can morality be so demanding that we have reason not to follow its dictates? According to many, it can, if that morality is a consequentialist one. We take the plausibility and coherence of this objection – the Demandingness Objection – as a given and are also not concerned with finding the best response to the Objection. Instead, our main aim is to explicate the intuitive background of the Objection and to see how this background could be investigated. This double aim (...) leads to different albeit connected threads of inquiry. We first outline the Objection, its different forms and how intuition figures in them. After this, we move on to consider the ongoing debate about the use of intuitions in (moral) philosophy with a focus on two challenges: what intuitions are and how we can detect them. To answer these challenges, we propose an account according to which moral intuitions are seemings that are characterized by being non-inferential, spontaneous, non-doxastic, phenomenologically distinctive, non-sensory, intrinsically motivating, and stable. Armed with these seven “markers” of moral intuition, we put a forward a complex experimental methodology and raise and respond to possible problems with it. (shrink)

Imagine that only the state can meet the need for housing but decides not to do so. Unsurprisingly, participants in a vignette experiment deem this scenario unjust. Hence, justice ratings increase when the living situation improves. To a lesser extent, this also holds beyond the need threshold, understood as the minimum amount necessary for a decent life. Surprisingly, however, the justice evaluation function is highly convex below this point. The resulting S-shaped curve is akin to the value function in prospect (...) theory, with the need threshold providing the point of reference and inflection. A control treatment without needs-information supports this interpretation. Needs-information furthermore compresses the perceived injustice of arbitrary inequality. As in prospect theory, such reference dependency suggests biases in judgment and decision making. A consequence may be that the lot of the poorest in society does not receive the attention it would otherwise get. (shrink)

To investigate the impact of framing on rule-breaking behavior in social dilemmas, we incorporated a rule in a one-shot resource game with two framing-treatments: One frame was a give-some dilemma (i.e., a variant of a public goods game) and the other frame a take-some dilemma (i.e., a variant of a commons dilemma game). In each frame, all participants were part of one single collective sharing a common good. Each participant was initially equipped with one of five different endowments of points (...) from which they must give/could take amounts to/from the common good. The exact amounts of contributions/withdrawals were regulated by the rule. Participants decided whether to cooperate and comply with the rule or to break the rule to their own advantage and at the expense of the collective (i.e., giving lower/taking higher amounts). Results of an online-experiment with 202 participants showed a significantly higher proportion of individuals breaking the rule in the take-some frame than in the give-some frame. In addition, endowment size influenced the proportion of rule-breaking behavior in the take-some frame. However, the average amounts of points not given/taken too much were not different between the frames. (shrink)

Obituaries are an especially rich resource for identifying people’s values. Because obituaries are succinct and explicitly intended to summarize their subjects’ lives, they may be expected to include only the features that the author(s) find most salient, not only for themselves as relatives or friends of the deceased, but also to signal to others in the community the socially-recognized aspects of the deceased’s character. We report three approaches to the scientific study of virtue and value through obituaries. We begin by (...) reviewing studies 1 and 2, in which obituaries were carefully read and labeled. We then report study 3, which further develops these results with a semi-automated, large-scale semantic analysis of several thousand obituaries. Finally, we present the results of study 4 in which individuals were asked to write prospective obituaries. Geography, gender, and elite status all turn out to influence the virtues and values associated with the deceased. (shrink)

Background Ethics education can be developed in undergraduate nursing curriculum using a variety of teaching and learning strategies, and the content of narrative-based stories has rarely been evaluated in ethics courses. Objective This study aimed to compare the effect of teaching ethical principles through narrative ethics and lectures on the moral sensitivity of undergraduate nursing students. Methods This was a pretest and posttest quasi-experimental study with a control group. A total of 105 undergraduate nursing students from the nursing department of (...) Kerman University of medical science were included in the study. The narrative-based story and lecture lasted for four two-hour sessions. The outcomes were measured by a moral sensitivity questionnaire. Results The study results showed that teaching ethical principles had a significant effect on the mean score of moral sensitivity in the intervention groups after the intervention, but it was not significant in the control group. Based on the mean score of moral sensitivity, the students in the narrative story group got a higher score in all subscales of moral sensitivity questionnaire. Conclusion Based on this study’s findings, it can be concluded that narrative-based education is an effective way for undergraduate nursing students to promote their moral sensitivity and the ability to make ethical decisions. (shrink)

We present a vignette study conducted with a quota sample of the German population (n = 400). Subjects had to redistribute a good between two hypothetical persons who contributed equally to the available amount but differed in quantity needed and the reason for their neediness. On a within-subjects level, we tested for the effects of need, accountability, and resource availability on their third-party distribution decisions. Between subjects, we further varied the kinds of needs: The persons either needed the good as (...) a means to survive, to live a decent life, to participate in society, or to be autonomous. Despite equal productivity, the mean share allocated to the needier person was significantly higher than an equal share. However, this share turned out significantly smaller when the needier person was accountable for needing more than the other. Nonetheless, even if accountable, the needier person still got a share larger than their contribution would suggest. When there was a surplus of resources, the needier person got an even higher share than when resources were scarce. (shrink)

Recent empirical work on folk moral objectivism has attempted to examine the extent to which folk morality presumes that moral judgments are objectively true or false. Some researchers report findings that they take to indicate folk commitment to objectivism (Goodwin & Darley, 2008, 2010, 2012; Nichols & Folds-Bennett, 2003; Wainryb et al., 2004), while others report findings that may reveal a more variable commitment to objectivism (Beebe, 2014; Beebe et al., 2015; Beebe & Sackris, 2016; Sarkissian, et al., 2011; Wright, (...) 2018; Wright, Grandjean, & McWhite, 2013; Wright, McWhite, & Grandjean, 2014). However, the various probes that have been used to examine folk moral objectivism almost always fail to be good direct measures of objectivism. Some critics (Beebe, 2015; Pölzler, 2017, 2018) have suggested that the problems with existing probes are serious enough that they should be viewed as largely incapable of shedding any light on folk metaethical commitments. Building upon the work of Justin Khoo and Joshua Knobe (2018), I argue that many of the existing probes can be seen as good measures of the extent to which people think that the truth of one moral judgment excludes the possibility that a judgment made by a disagreeing party is also true and that the best explanation of the findings obtained using these measures is significant folk support for indexical moral relativism—the view that the content of moral judgments is context-sensitive. If my thesis is correct, many contemporary moral philosophers are deeply mistaken about the metaethical contours of folk morality in one very important respect. (shrink)

What constitutes a “good” life—not necessarily a morally good life, but a life that is good for the person who lived it? In response to this question of “well-being," philosophers have offered three significant answers: A good life is one in which a person can satisfy their desires (“Desire-Satisfaction” or “Preferentism”), one that includes certain good features (“Objectivism”), or one in which pleasurable states dominate or outweigh painful ones (“Hedonism”). To adjudicate among these competing theories, moral philosophers traditionally gather data (...) from thought experiments and intuition. In this chapter, we supplement that traditional approach with a pair of experimental studies that examine whether the three theories reflect laypeople’s intuitions about well-being. The empirical studies yield two primary findings. First, they provide evidence for lay "well-being pluralism": laypeople treat desire satisfaction, positive objective conditions, and happiness as all constitutive of well-being. Second, the studies provide evidence of "hedonic dominance": laypeople evaluate an individual’s happiness as more important to an individual’s overall well-being than desire satisfaction or objective conditions. (shrink)

Many philosophers in the field of meta-ethics believe that rational degrees of confidence in moral judgments should have a probabilistic structure, in the same way as do rational degrees of belief. The current paper examines this position, termed “moral Bayesianism,” from an empirical point of view. To this end, we assessed the extent to which degrees of moral judgments obey the third axiom of the probability calculus, ifP(A∩B)=0thenP(A∪B)=P(A)+P(B), known as finite additivity, as compared to degrees of beliefs on the one (...) hand and degrees of desires on the other. Results generally converged to show that degrees of moral judgment are more similar to degrees of belief than to degrees of desire in this respect. This supports the adoption of a Bayesian approach to the study of moral judgments. To further support moral Bayesianism, we also demonstrated its predictive power. Finally, we discuss the relevancy of our results to the meta-ethical debate between moral cognitivists and moral non-cognitivists. (shrink)

In four experiments, we offer evidence that virtues are often judged as uniquely important for some business practices (e.g., hospital management and medical error investigation). Overall, actions done only from virtue (either by organizations or individuals) were judged to feel better, to be more praiseworthy, to be more morally right, and to be associated with more trustworthy leadership and greater personal life satisfaction compared to actions done only to produce the best consequences or to follow the correct moral rule. These (...) results accord with claims made by some virtue ethicists. The current data contribute to a small but growing body of literature emphasizing both empirical soundness and philosophical rigor in the scientific study of virtue. Results also offer some guidance concerning how businesses, employees, and executives are evaluated and perceived. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

I analyse the relationship between the Doctrine of Double Effect and the Trolley Problem: the former offers a solution for the latter only on the premise that killing the one in Bystander at the Switch is permissible. Here I offer both empirical and theoretical arguments against the permissibility of killing the one: firstly, I present data from my own empirical studies according to which the intuition that killing the one is permissible is neither widespread nor stable; secondly, I defend a (...) normative principle according to which killing the one in Bystander at the Switch is not permissible. In conclusion, there just is no trolley problem. (shrink)

In contemporary Western moral philosophy literature that discusses the Chinese ethical tradition, it is a commonplace practice to use the Chinese term daode 道德 as a technical translation of the English term moral. The present study provides some empirical evidence showing a discrepancy between the terms moral and daode. There is a much more pronounced difference between prototypically immoral and prototypically uncultured behaviors in English (USA) than between prototypically bu daode 不道德 and prototypically bu wenming 不文明 behaviors in Mandarin Chinese (...) (Mainland China). If the Western concept of immorality is defined in contraposition to things that are matters of etiquette or conventional norms and thus tied to a more or less tangible moral / conventional distinction, then we are dealing with a different structure in Mandarin Chinese – the prototypically bu daode and bu wenming behaviors seem to largely overlap. We also discuss whether bu lunli 不倫理 and bu hefa 不合法 can be considered adequate candidates for translation of immorality and we answer in the negative. (shrink)

In this chapter, we outline the interdisciplinary contributions that philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience have provided in the understanding of the self and identity, focusing on one specific line of burgeoning research: the importance of morality to perceptions of self and identity. Of course, this rather limited focus will exclude much of what psychologists and neuroscientists take to be important to the study of self and identity (that plethora of self-hyphenated terms seen in psychology and neuroscience: self-regulation, self-esteem, self-knowledge, self-concept, self-perception, (...) and more). We will likewise not engage with many canonical philosophical treatments of self and identity. But we will lay out a body of research that brings together classic themes in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to raise empirically tractable philosophical questions, and philosophically rigorous empirical questions about self and identity. More specifically, in section 4.2, we will review some recent research that has treated traditional philosophical questions about self and identity as empirical questions. Within this body of work, we will be primarily concerned with the finding that morality (more so than memory) is perceived to be at the core of self and identity. Then, in section 4.3, we raise and respond to a variety of questions and criticisms: first, about the operationalization of identity concepts in the empirical literature; second, about the generalizability of the moral self effect; third, about the direction of change; fourth, about connections with recent work in neuroscience; and fifth, about the target of evaluation. Finally, in section 4.4, we consider a variety of implications and applications of this work on the moral self. Throughout, we aim to highlight connections between classical themes in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, while also suggesting new directions for interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

We conducted two experiments to determine whether common folk think that so-called tell-tale sign bald-faced lies are intended to deceive—since they have not been tested before. These lies involve tell-tale signs that show that the speaker is lying. Our study was designed to avoid problems earlier studies raise. Our main hypothesis was that the participants will think that the protagonists from our examples lied without intending to deceive, and the results of our surveys confirmed this hypothesis: most of our participants (...) rated tell-tale sign lies as lies not intended to deceive. Therefore, our analysis suggests that common folk think that some lies are not intended to deceive. (shrink)

Forgiveness theorists focus a good deal on explicating the content of what they take to be a shared folk concept of forgiveness. Our empirical research, however, suggests that there is a range of concepts of forgiveness present in the population, and therefore that we should be folk conceptual pluralists about forgiveness. We suggest two possible responses on the part of forgiveness theorists: (1) to deny folk conceptual pluralism by arguing that forgiveness is a functional concept and (2) to accept folk (...) conceptual pluralism and focus on a revisionary conceptual ethics project. (shrink)

A prevalent assumption in metaethics is that people believe in moral objectivity. If this assumption were true then people should believe in the possibility of objective moral progress, objective moral knowledge, and objective moral error. We developed surveys to investigate whether these predictions hold. Our results suggest that, neither abstractly nor concretely, people dominantly believe in the possibility of objective moral progress, knowledge and error. They attribute less objectivity to these phenomena than in the case of science and no more, (...) or only slightly more, than in the cases of social conventions and personal preferences. This finding was obtained for a regular sample as well as for a sample of people who are particularly likely to be reflective and informed (philosophers and philosophy students). Our paper hence contributes to recent empirical challenges to the thesis that people believe in moral objectivity. (shrink)

Are philosophical arguments as effective as narratives in influencing charitable giving and attitudes toward it? In four experiments, we exposed online research participants to either philosophical arguments in favor of charitable giving, a narrative about a child whose life was improved by charitable donations, both the narrative and the argument, or a control text (a passage from a middle school physics text or a description of charitable organizations). Participants then expressed their attitudes toward charitable giving and were either asked how (...) much they would hypothetically donate if given $10 (Experiment 1) or told they had a 10% chance of winning $10 and given the opportunity to donate from their potential winnings (Experiments 2–4). Across the four experiments, participants in all of the narrative conditions and in some of the argument conditions tended to express more positive attitudes toward charitable giving and donated about $1 more on average than did participants in the control conditions. These effects appear to have been mediated by the “narrative transportation” scale, which suggests that appeals to donate can be effective if they engage participants’ emotions, imagery, and interest. (shrink)

This study explores the impact of both individual ethics (IE) and organizational ethics (OE) on ethical intention (EI). Ethical intention, or the individual’s intention to engage in ethical behavior, is useful as a dependent variable because it relates to behavior which can be an expression of values, but also is influenced by organizational and societal variables. The focus is on EI in international business decision-making, since the international context provides great latitude in making ethical decisions. Results demonstrate that both IE (...) and OE influence EI. Ethical congruence is also discussed as a positive influence. Younger managers are more influenced by OE than older managers. The findings call for creating governance mechanisms to enhance ethical congruence, thereby increasing the likelihood of managers making ethical choices in organizational decision-making. (shrink)

Manipulation cases have figured prominently in philosophical debates about whether moral responsibility is in some sense deeply historical. Meanwhile, some philosophers have thought that folk thinking about manipulated agents may shed some light on the various argumentative burdens facing participants in that debate. This paper argues that folk thinking is, to some extent, deeply historical. Across three experiments, it is shown that a substantial number of participants did not attribute moral responsibility to agents with manipulation in their histories. The results (...) of these experiments challenge previous research indicating that folk thinking is not historicist. To the extent that folk thinking is relevant to philosophical debates about the nature of moral responsibility, the results helpfully illuminate the dialectical burdens facing competing conceptions of responsible agency. The present research also adds to the psychological literature by elucidating how lay conceptions of about free will and personal identity predict folk historicism. (shrink)

In a series of ten preregistered experiments (N=2043), we investigate the effect of outcome valence on judgments of probability, negligence, and culpability – a phenomenon sometimes labelled moral (and legal) luck. We found that harmful outcomes, when contrasted with neutral outcomes, lead to increased perceived probability of harm ex post, and consequently to increased attribution of negligence and culpability. Rather than simply postulating a hindsight bias (as is common), we employ a variety of empirical means to demonstrate that the outcome-driven (...) asymmetry across perceived probabilities constitutes a systematic cognitive distortion. We then explore three distinct strategies to alleviate the hindsight bias and its downstream effects on mens rea and culpability ascriptions. Not all are successful, but at least some prove promising. They should, we argue, be taken into consideration in criminal jurisprudence, where distortions due to the hindsight bias are likely considerable and deeply disconcerting. (shrink)

One of the moral questions concerning autonomous vehicles (henceforth AVs) is the choice between types that differ in their built-in algorithms for dealing with rare situations of unavoidable lethal collision. It does not appear to be possible to avoid questions about how these algorithms should be designed. We present the results of our study of moral preferences (N = 2769) with respect to three types of AVs: (1) selfish, which protects the lives of passenger(s) over any number of bystanders; (2) (...) altruistic, which minimizes the number of casualties, even if this leads to death of passenger(s); and (3) conservative, which abstains from interfering in such situations. We differentiate between scenarios in which participants are to make their decisions privately or publicly, and for themselves or for their offspring. We aim to answer two research questions: (1) whether the public visibility of the choice of an AV type choice make this choice more altruistic and (2) which type of situation makes it more difficult to choose altruistically: when choosing for society as a whole, when choosing only for oneself, or when choosing only for one’s offspring. Our results show that respondents exhibit a preference for an altruistic strategy for AVs and that it is reinforced when signaled to others. The altruistic preference is strongest when applies to everybody else, weaker when it reflects a solely personal choice, and weakest when choosing for one’s own child. We conclude that a public choice is considerably more likely to pressure consumers into accepting a more socially beneficial solution. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers rely almost exclusively on quantitative surveys that potentially misrepresent participants’ multifarious judgments. To assess the efficacy of qualitative methods in experimental philosophy and reveal limitations with quantitative surveys, a study was conducted on the Kantian principle that ‘ought implies can’, which limits moral obligation to actions that agents can do. Specifically, the think aloud method and a follow-up interview were employed in a modified version of a prominent experiment that recorded participants’ judgments of ability, blame, and obligation using (...) quantitative surveys. The modified version produced quantitative results similar to the original experiment along with qualitative data that reveal that the surveys fundamentally misrepresented participants’ judgments. The qualitative transcripts from 40 participants are analyzed to show that ‘ought implies can’ judgments are complex and multifarious, that ‘ought implies can’ judgments are misrepresented by quantitative survey questions, and that the majority of participants uphold or preserve ‘ought implies can.’ The results suggest that experimental philosophers can more accurately capture judgments by using qualitative methods, and that studies which rely on quantitative surveys possibly misrepresent participants’ judgments. (shrink)

We report the results of a vignette study with an online sample of the German adult population in which we analyze the interplay between need, equity, and accountability in third-party distribution decisions. We asked participants to divide firewood between two hypothetical persons who either differ in their need for heat or in their productivity in terms of their ability to chop wood. The study systematically varies the persons’ accountability for their neediness as well as for their productivity. We find that (...) participants distribute significantly fewer logs of wood to persons who are held accountable for their disadvantage. Independently of being held accountable or not, the needier person is partially compensated with a share of logs that exceeds her contribution, while the person who contributes less is given a share of logs smaller than her need share. Moreover, there is a domain effect in terms of participants being more sensitive to lower contributions than to greater need. (shrink)

Can experimental philosophy help us answer central questions about the nature of moral responsibility, such as the question of whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Specifically, can folk judgments in line with a particular answer to that question provide support for that answer. Based on reasoning familiar from Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, such support could be had if individual judges track the truth of the matter independently and with some modest reliability: such reliability quickly aggregates as the number of judges (...) goes up. In this chapter, however, I argue, partly based on empirical evidence, that although non-specialist judgments might on average be more likely than not to get things right, their individual likelihoods fail to aggregate because they do not track truth with sufficient independence. (shrink)

Two main types of philosophical arguments have been given in support of the claim that the citizens of affluent societies have stringent moral duties to aid the global poor: “positive duty” arguments based on the notion of beneficence and “negative duty” arguments based on noninterference. Peter Singer’s positive duty argument (Singer 1972) and Thomas Pogge’s negative duty argument (Pogge 2002) are among the most prominent examples. Philosophers have made speculative claims about the relative effectiveness of these arguments in promoting attitudes (...) and behaviors that could lead to the alleviation of poverty. In this article we present the results of two empirical studies that evaluate these claims, and suggest that both arguments have a modest effect on people’s attitudes and behaviors regarding global poverty. In a replication of the second study, the negative duty argument, in particular, had a statistically significant effect on donations. We discuss the theoretical and practical significance of these results and suggest directions for further research on the role that philosophical arguments can play in engendering concern and action on pressing moral problems. (shrink)

We present experimental evidence that supports the thesis :602–625, 2015, Br J Philos Sci 70:77–102, 2019; Bradley in Decisions theory with a human face, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017; Goldschmidt and Nissan-Rozen in Synthese 198:7553–7575, 2021) that people might positively or negatively desire risky prospects conditional on only some of the prospects’ outcomes obtaining. We argue that this evidence has important normative implications for the central debate in normative decision theory between two general approaches on how to rationalize several common (...) patterns of preference, which are ruled out as irrational by orthodox decision theory, namely the re-individuation approach and the non-expected utility approach. (shrink)

Consent governs innumerable everyday social interactions, including sex, medical exams, the use of property, and economic transactions. Yet little is known about how ordinary people reason about the validity of consent. Across the domains of sex, medicine, and police entry, Study 1 showed that when agents lack autonomous decision-making capacities, participants are less likely to view their consent as valid; however, failing to exercise this capacity and deciding in a nonautonomous way did not reduce consent judgments. Study 2 found that (...) specific and concrete incapacities reduced judgments of valid consent, but failing to exercise these specific capacities did not, even when the consenter makes an irrational and inauthentic decision. Finally, Study 3 showed that the effect of autonomy on judgments of valid consent carries important downstream consequences for moral reasoning about the rights and obligations of third parties, even when the consented-to action is morally wrong. Overall, these findings suggest that laypeople embrace a normative, domain-general concept of valid consent that depends consistently on the possession of autonomous capacities, but not on the exercise of these capacities. Autonomous decisions and autonomous capacities thus play divergent roles in moral reasoning about consent interactions: while the former appears relevant for assessing the wrongfulness of consented-to acts, the latter plays a role in whether consent is regarded as authoritative and therefore as transforming moral rights. (shrink)

Morality meters are a commonly used mechanic in many ethically notable video games. However, there have been several theoretical critiques of such meters, including that people can find them alienating, they can instrumentalise morality, and they reduce morality to a binary of good and evil with no room for complexity. While there has been much theoretical discussion of these issues, there has been far less empirical investigation. We address this gap through a qualitative study that involved participants playing a custom-built (...) visual novel game (The Great Fire) with different intuitive and counter-intuitive morality meter settings. Overall, we found that players’ attitudes towards the morality meter in this game was complex, context sensitive and variable throughout gameplay and that the intuitiveness of the meter encouraged participants to treat the meter more ‘as a moral guide’ that prompts reflection and less ‘as a score’ to be engaged with reactively. (shrink)

The current study investigates whether self-talk phrases can influence behavior in Ultimatum Games. In our three self-talk treatments, participants were instructed to tell themselves (i) to keep their own interests in mind, (ii) to also think of the other person, or (iii) to take some time to contemplate their decision. We investigate how such so-called experimenter-determined strategic self-talk phrases affect behavior and emotions in comparison to a control treatment without instructed self-talk. The results demonstrate that other-focused self-talk can nudge proposers (...) towards fair behavior, as offers were higher in this group than in the other conditions. For responders, self-talk tended to increase acceptance rates of unfair offers as compared to the condition without self-talk. This effect is significant for both other-focused and contemplation-inducing self-talk but not for self-focused self-talk. In the self-focused condition, responders were most dissatisfied with unfair offers. These findings suggest that use of self-talk can increase acceptance rates in responders, and that focusing on personal interests can undermine this effect as it negatively impacts the responders’ emotional experience. In sum, our study shows that strategic self-talk interventions can be used to affect behavior in bargaining situations. (shrink)

Future-biased individuals systematically prefer pleasures to be in the future and pains to be in the past. Empirical research shows that negative future-bias is robust: people prefer more past pain to less future pain. Is positive future-bias robust or fragile? Do people only prefer pleasures to be located in the future, compared to the past, when those pleasures are of equal value, or do they continue to prefer that pleasures be located in the future even when past pleasures outweigh future (...) ones? Some arguments against the rationality of future-bias require positive future-bias to be robust, while others require it to be fragile. We empirically investigate and show that positive future-bias is robust. (shrink)

According to the ‘expertise defence’, experimental findings suggesting that intuitive judgments about hypothetical cases are influenced by philosophically irrelevant factors do not undermine their evidential use in (moral) philosophy. This defence assumes that philosophical experts are unlikely to be influenced by irrelevant factors. We discuss relevant findings from experimental metaphilosophy that largely tell against this assumption. To advance the debate, we present the most comprehensive experimental study of intuitive expertise in ethics to date, which tests five well- known biases of (...) judgment and decision-making among expert ethicists and laypeople. We found that even expert ethicists are affected by some of these biases, but also that they enjoy a slight advantage over laypeople in some cases. We discuss the implications of these results for the expertise defence, and conclude that they still do not support the defence as it is typically presented in (moral) philosophy. (shrink)

The relationship between ethics and performance has previously been addressed in the literature, although there are still some gaps, for example, the relationship of ethical ideologies to student performance. This work aims to contribute to the literature with a statistical evaluation using partial least squares path modelling (PLS-PM) regarding whether university students’ ethical ideologies and moral meaningfulness influence their level of student performance and academic achievement. Results indicate that the ideologies of justice and deontology increase moral meaningfulness, moral meaningfulness in (...) turn increase student’s citizenship behaviours and student’s in-role performance, and finally, student’s in-role performance positively influences academic achievement. This research provides resources applicable to the fields of pedagogy and ethics to encourage performance during the study and highlight the value of the ideologies of justice and deontology. (shrink)

Moral abolitionists claim that morality ought to be abolished. According to one of their most prominent arguments, this is because making moral judgments renders people significantly less tolerant toward anyone who holds divergent views. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that morality’s tolerance-decreasing effect only occurs if people are realists about moral issues, i.e., they interpret these issues as objectively grounded. We found support for this hypothesis (Studies 1 and 2). Yet, it also turned out that the intolerance associated (...) with realism is mediated by moral conviction and perceived consensus. People tend to feel more strongly about those moral issues they ground objectively and, in doing so, are more prone to display the vice of moral smugness toward those who disagree with them. The remedy for this that has been recommended is humility which we found (Study 3) is indeed related to reduced intolerance, in part by predicting a reduction in realism, but also in part through a direct connection to intolerance. These results put pressure on abolitionists’ “argument from intolerance.”. (shrink)

The corporate scandals of the twenty-first century have necessitated ethical behavior as a major component of the organizational process. These scandals occurred despite the ethical rules and laws in place, implying that rules and laws might not be effective in ensuring the ethical behavior of organizational participants at all times. Hence, a better approach to handling ethical decisions may be virtue ethics which demand the building of ethical character that intrinsically drives ethical behavior. Prudence was studied as a virtue which (...) builds character and can moderate ethical behavior. The moderating role of prudence was studied in the context of organizational political behavior. Employee political behavior in organizations can have either positive or negative consequences; hence, it is in the realm of ethical decision-making. Since studies have not identified how individuals can self-regulate their desire for political behavior, the study proposed political prudence, a character-building virtue, as a self-regulating variable which can be used by individuals to avoid drifting to the dark side of political behavior. The study participants were drawn from three organizations in Lagos, Nigeria, and a cross-sectional research design was adopted for data collection. The results confirmed that political prudence moderated the effects of political will on political behavior such that individuals engaged in benevolent political will and avoided self-serving political will. The importance of the findings is that organizations have a means of steering participants away from the dark side to the bright side of political behavior which is useful for productivity. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance refers to cases in which one’s otherwise flexible imaginative capacity is constrained by an unwillingness or inability to imaginatively engage with a given claim. In three studies, we explored which specific imaginative demands engender resistance when imagining morally deviant worlds and whether individual differences in emotion predict the degree of this resistance. In Study 1 (N = 176), participants resisted the notion that harmful actions could be morally acceptable in the world of a narrative regardless of the author’s (...) claims about these actions but did not resist imagining that a perpetrator of harm could believe their actions to be morally acceptable. In Study 2 (N = 167) we replicated the findings of Study 1 and showed that imaginative resistance is greatest among participants who experience more negative affect in response to imagining harm and are lower in either trait anxiety or trait psychopathy. In Study 3 (N = 210) we show that this is the case even when the harms assessed include both low-severity (i.e., emotional harm) and high-severity (i.e., killing) cases. Thus, people’s moral beliefs constrain their ability to imagine hypothetical moral alternatives, although this ability systematically varies on the basis of stable individual differences in emotion. (shrink)

This study investigated the relationship between death anxiety and experienced meaning in life. Six hundred and forty-eight Chinese college students were surveyed using the Death Anxiety Scale, the Prosocial Behavior Scale, and the Meaning in Life Scale. The results showed that death anxiety predicted experienced meaning through three pathways: the first one was through search for meaning singly; the second one was through prosocial behavior singly; and the third one was through search for meaning and prosocial behavior serially, which accounted (...) for the highest proportion of the total effect. This study highlights the positive side of death anxiety. (shrink)

Obituaries represent a prominent way of expressing the human universal of grief. According to philosophers, obituaries are a ritualized way of evaluating both individuals who have passed away and the communities that helped to shape them. The basic idea is that you can tell what it takes to count as a good person of a particular type in a particular community by seeing how persons of that type are described and celebrated in their obituaries. Obituaries of those killed in conflict, (...) in particular, are rich repositories of communal values, as they reflect the values and virtues that are admired and respected in individuals who are considered to be heroes in their communities. In this paper, we use natural language processing techniques to map the patterns of values and virtues attributed to Australian military personnel who were killed in action during World War I and World War II. Doing so reveals several clusters of values and virtues that tend to be attributed together. In addition, we use named entity recognition and geotagging the track the movements of these soldiers to various theatres of the wars, including North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. (shrink)

When faced with a dilemma between believing what is supported by an impartial assessment of the evidence (e.g., that one's friend is guilty of a crime) and believing what would better fulfill a moral obligation (e.g., that the friend is innocent), people often believe in line with the latter. But is this how people think beliefs ought to be formed? We addressed this question across three studies and found that, across a diverse set of everyday situations, people treat moral considerations (...) as legitimate grounds for believing propositions that are unsupported by objective, evidence-based reasoning. We further document two ways in which moral considerations affect how people evaluate others' beliefs. First, the moral value of a belief affects the evidential threshold required to believe, such that morally beneficial beliefs demand less evidence than morally risky beliefs. Second, people sometimes treat the moral value of a belief as an independent justification for belief, and on that basis, sometimes prescribe evidentially poor beliefs to others. Together these results show that, in the folk ethics of belief, morality can justify and demand motivated reasoning. (shrink)

Moral realists often assume that folk intuitions are predominantly realist, and they argue that this places the burden of proof on antirealists. More broadly, appeals to intuition in metaethics typically assume that folk judgments are generally consistent across individuals, such that they are at least predominantly something, if not realist. A substantial body of empirical work on moral objectivism has investigated these assumptions, but findings remain inconclusive due to methodological limitations. Objectivist judgments classify individuals into broad categories of realism and (...) antirealism, but they do not address more specific conflicts in the metaethical literature between different types of realism and antirealism, such as between nonnaturalism and divine command theory, or between noncognitivism and error theory. Further, the data currently show that the folk are objectivists about some moral claims but not others, raising questions that have not been addressed in previous studies about how much of the moral domain is judged to be objective, and about how endorsements of different types of realism and antirealism are distributed among different types of moral claims. Here, I present a new survey that addresses these limitations. The results challenge both of the empirical assumptions identified above, with important implications for metaethical methodology. (shrink)

Purpose. Nietzschean proponents classify people into seemingly two distinct groups: those possessing 'Master' moralities and those with 'Slave' moralities. Each type of person is characterized to have certain qualities, traits, ideologies, and methods of dealing with everyday situations. This paper attributes these moralities to the personnel working in the corporate sector of Pakistan to observe their prospects of success. Originality. A specialized survey instrument was designed to gauge different Morality Types of the study subjects by calculating a Morality Quotient. The (...) respondents were then categorized into three categories possessing, Slave, Master and Neutral or Mixed traits. These traits are then contrasted to the position held by the subjects to see which morality type was more prevalent in higher management levels and whether the association was significant. Conclusions. Our results prove to be contradictory to common wisdom and shows that despite the leadership-like qualities of those with Master moralities, the proportion of those with Slave moralities was significantly higher at senior management levels of the corporate sector in Pakistan. Moreover, a trend of declining Master morality traits is observed with the rise in managerial level. In addition, an association between work experience and Morality type was also observed indicating adaptability of cross morality traits with increasing job experience. These findings are in line with the increasing focus on democratic and adaptable leadership instead of autocratic leadership styles in contemporary organizations. (shrink)

The present study evaluated the relationship between job satisfaction and unethical pro-organizational behavior, directly as well as indirectly, through organizational commitment. Multidimensional constructs were utilized for job satisfaction and organizational commitment to provide a granular understanding of how these constructs can motivate employees to engage in UPB, which can threaten organizations' success and diminish the public's confidence in organizations. In order to test these relationships, a diverse sample of 617 participants was recruited through the online survey distribution platform Amazon Mechanical (...) Turk to test the theoretical model using structural equation modeling. The results indicated that identification, affiliation, and exchange commitment served as intervening variables between growth satisfaction and UPB, while no significant indirect effect of internal work motivation on UPB was found. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)