Abstract
Can the theory of conceptual spaces developed by Peter Gärdenfors (2000, 2014) and others be applied to moral issues? Martin Peterson (2017) argues that several moral principles can be construed as regions in a shared similarity space, but Kristin Shrader-Frechette (2017) and Gert-Jan Lokhorst (2018) question Peterson’s claim. They argue that the moral similarity judgments used to construct the space are underspecified and subjective. In this paper, we present new data indicating that moral principles can indeed be construed as regions in a multidimensional conceptual space on the basis of moral similarity judgments. Four hundred and seventy-five students taking a course in engineering ethics completed a survey in which they were presented with ten cases (moral choice situations) featuring ethical issues related to technology and engineering. Participants were asked to judge the moral similarity of each pair of cases (45 comparisons) and to select which moral principle (from a list of five alternatives plus a sixth option: “none of the principle listed here”) they believed should be applied for resolving the case. We used interval multidimensional scaling (MDS) as well as individual differences scaling (INDSCAL) for analyzing the moral similarity judgments. Despite noteworthy individual variations in the judgments, the five moral principles included in the study were discernable in the aggregate multidimensional spaces, even for participants with no previous exposure to the principles. Participants tended to apply the same moral principles to cases rated as morally similar. Our overall conclusion is that moral similarity judgments, and their representation in multidimensional spaces, can help us identify moral principles that are relevant for assessing difficult moral choice situations.
Highlights
By ordering colors according to their perceived similarity, they can be represented in a cone-shaped conceptual space along three dimensions such that the distance between any two shades represents their degree of similarity
The reliability remained at a high value of .97 for both Survey A and B when the data were split in half so this does not appear to be an artefact of having a large number of participants provide the similarity judgments
Our findings indicate that five moral principles frequently applied for analyzing ethical issues related to technology and engineering can be represented as regions in a shared moral space
Summary
The theory of conceptual spaces introduced by Gärdenfors (2000, 2014) has been applied to topics in psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy (e.g., Chella et al 2001; Cubek et al 2015; Decock et al 2014; Douven 2016, 2019; Douven et al 2013; Gärdenfors and Zenker 2013; Valentine et al 2016; Verheyen and Égré 2018; Zenker and Gärdenfors, 2015). Beauchamp and Childress (1979, 2001) agree that ethical issues encountered by medical doctors and other healthcare professionals should sometimes be analyzed by comparing how similar or dissimilar they are to cases we are already familiar with Such comparisons help us to identify what principle(s) one ought to apply to each case. Peterson (2017) works in the same tradition as Beauchamp and Childress, but proposes a different set of principles for evaluating new and existing technologies: the cost-benefit principle (CBA), the precautionary principle (PP), the sustainability principle (ST), the autonomy principle (AUT), and the fairness principle (FP).3 Another important difference is that Peterson explicitly argues that his principles can be construed as regions in a conceptual space. If a case is more similar to a prototype for principle p than to the most similar prototype for any other principle, the case should be analyzed by applying p rather than any other principle
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