What is Morality?

Evidence for MFT

"When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to your thinking?" - Liberals cared more about harm and fairness than any other foundation - Conservatives care about all foundations more equally and cared more about binding foundations (authority/purity) than liberals Follow-up study: How much money would someone have to pay you to violate each foundation (e.g., "kick a dog in the head" =harm; "renounce your citizenship" = loyalty)• For foundations that are very important, people should require more money or say they would never do the action regardless of how much money they were offered

Kohlberg's model

- 6 stages - expansion of Piaget's model - Heinz Dilemma: Heinz is married to someone who is very sick, he cannot afford to buy the medicine from the pharmacy. Should he steal it? - Focus on how children justify their responses, not what responses they give - Two people who give different answers can be in the same stage Pre-conventional - Level 1: obedience and punishment - Level 2: self-interest Conventional: - Level 3: social norms and wanting to be a good girl/boy - Level 4: following the rules and obeying authority Post-conventional: - Level 5: the social contract - Level 6: universal ethical principles - According to Kohlberg, not everyone gets to this level

Evidence for Intuitionist Model

- Circumvent Reasoning: speeded reaction time tasks or neural evidence Example Study: - Participants heard about another person's choice in one of 3 contexts: Trolley Dilemma (switch lever), Footbridge Dilemma (push one person), or non-moral question (take the bus or the train) - MRI signals showed that people who were asked the personal scenario had greater brain activity in areas associated with emotion and less activity in areas associated with working memory

Critiques of Moral Monism

- Doesn't accurately describe all cultures - Doesn't necessarily account for evolutionary processes: Humans have faced numerous adaptive challenges. Why would we solve all of these challenges with one moral framework?

Where do intuitions come from?

- Selective loss: Children are born with a predisposition to develop intuitions regarding autonomy, community, and divinity. As children grow and are exposed to cultural teachings, certain aspects of their innate predispositions may be emphasized or reinforced, while others might be downplayed or diminished. - Immersion in Customs: Example: Customs in Orissa, India, emphasize divinity &frequently enforce divinity norms (e.g., teaching children what is pure vs. impure, how to show deference, etc.) U.S. customs emphasize autonomy (e.g., teaching children how to do things for themselves & being independent) - Peer socialization• Peers teach children what is moral. "Sensitive period" approximately between ages 9 and 15 years. Interacting with peers from a different culture before this age led to relatively shallow learning with little lasting effect. Interacting with peers from a different culture after this age led to confusion and culture shock

Dyadic Model - Counterclaims

- Takes issue with the claim y that people perceive harmful acts as immoral - Counterexample: unintentional harms and socially sanctioned harms - Example: On average, participants reported that it was morally permissible for one person to breakup with another, even if the break-up caused harm to the dumpee - Main conclusion: "moral cognition is far too complex to be reduced to a template" - Harm is neither necessary nor sufficient for judgments of immorality

Dyadic Model of Morality

- consistent with a monistic model - what seems harmful seems wrong - what seems wrong seems harmful - creating a loop: something seems harmful therefore it seems wrong therefore it seems MORE harmful

Moral Foundations Theory

- harm is only one component of morality Individuating Foundations (more to do with actions of one individual, i.e. a person can be harmful or a person can be fair): - care/harm - fairness/cheating Binding Foundations (relationships between groups): - loyalty/betrayal - authority/subversion - purity/degradation Other claims: - There is a first draft of the moral mind (nativism) - The first draft gets edited during development within a culture - Intuitions come first, consistent with intuitionist model

Intuitionist Model Reasoning

- people readily provide explanations for phenomena that they cannot actually explain - EXAMPLE: experimenters gave participants a really hard problem and then gave them a clue without them knowing. when asked how they figured out the problem, people came up with other reasons - moral behavior is more closely linked to emotion than reasoning - judgements can be driven by processes other than logical evaluation - DEMONSTRATION: brother and sister having intimate relationships

Rationalist approach

- people reason about what is right and wrong - cognitive process - example: kants categorical imperative - what if everyone were to act in the way im thinking about acting? would the world be a good place? if not, then i should change how i act

Rationalist Models

- stage models: conceptualize development as a linear process, advancing through stages in the same order, do not go back to earlier stages or skip stages - most current models are more fluid

Morality and True Self - Explanations

1. motivated social cognition: People hold certain views because of an external need or desire - Example: self-enhancement (I want to be better so i think of myself as good) - Example: interpersonal trust (If i think other people around me are good then i can trust them) 2. Domain-general cognitive processes - Example: essentialism - The idea that certain characteristics constitute an innate, internal, immutable "essence" (i.e. race is immutable we don't learn it) - If people see essences as good, they may see humans & non-humans (i.e. corporations) as essentially good

Intuitionist approach

Approach to morality where people feel that something is right or wrong, then come up with reasons to justify their feeling

Evidence for Dyadic Model

CLAIM: participants may mentally fill in harm even when experimental stimuli don't include it - Participants read vignettes & indicated whether or not there were victims - Purity vignettes: having sex with a corpse, covering a Bible in feces - Harm vignettes: sticking a stranger with a pin, beating one's wife - Neutral vignettes: eating toast, riding the bus - Half of the participants could take their time - Half of the participants had to respond quickly - greater percentage of victims indicated for harm vignettes

Piaget - Early Rationalist Model

Heteronomous Morality: (~5 to 10 years old) where moral reasoning is based on consequences - if i get punished for something then i know it is morally wrong - Autonomous morality: (~10 years through adolescence) where moral reasoning becomes more flexible and considers cultural norms, intent, etc.

Morality and True Self - Evidence

Is the true self morally good, morally bad, or morally in-between? - Al used to be a deadbeat dad -> Now he is a good dad - Al used to be a good dad -> Now he is a deadbeat dad Participants more likely to report that: - true self had caused change when the change was good rather than bad - the new behavior was consistent with the true self when it was good rather than bad Consistency across multiple factors: - If one characteristic changed about a person, how much has this person changed overall after this change? - varied targets (1st vs 3rd person) - Reported more change when the trait changed was a widely shared moral belief for both pov's - Different cultures also see the true self as morally good

True Self

People perceive true self as: - Moral - Good - Consistent across a number of variables Evidence: - Participants are asked to imagine that someone took a pill that changed only one thing about them - Indicate what percent of the person has changed - Lowest: 0% (they're the same as before) - Highest: 100% (they're completely different) - percent change to self was highest when a moral characteristic is changed

Moral dumbfounding

Phenomenon where people cannot explain their moral judgments despite feeling that something is right or wrong

Haidt - Intuitionist Model

Primary links - Intuitive judgment: Moral judgments appear in our minds automatically, often without conscious reasoning - Post hoc reasoning: We search for justifications that support our moral judgments - Reasoned persuasion: We try to convince others by verbalizing justifications - Social persuasion: We influence and are influenced by others in our social sphere, even without reasoned persuasion Secondary links - Reasoned judgment: Sometimes, we override our initial intuitions by using reasoning - Private reflection: New intuitions can arise (when we try to adopt someone else's perspective) We can make a final judgment by going with strongest intuition or by using reasoning to decide among intuitions

Essentialism

The idea that certain characteristics constitute an innate, internal, immutable 'essence'

Moral Monism

morality is made up of one component and that component is harm (if it harmful it is not moral)