Perceived Justifiability Towards Morally Debatable Behaviors Across Europe

Abstract

Scientific interest in studying justifiability towards morally debatable behaviors across nations is considerable, but the statistical assessment of the issue has not been very rigorous so far. In fact, many authors measure the related constructs computing composite indicators of justifiability as unweighed averages of perceived justifiability towards morally debatable behaviors. Other than not allowing for different weights, another drawback is that even if the items have different variability, no transformation like the z score is typically applied before computing the average. Another major shortcoming of the available justifiability indexes is the lack of robustness analysis of the results, making their message weak. The aim of this paper is to design very general composite indicators of justifiability towards dishonest-illegal and personal-sexual behaviors without the shortcomings of the other indicators. The indexes are computed for a data set from the European Values Study covering 47 countries and regions. The results show that Sweden, Netherlands and Finland are the most permissive countries towards personal-sexual behaviors followed by other Western and Scandinavian countries, whereas the strictest countries are Kosovo and Turkey. The most permissive countries towards dishonest-illegal behaviors are all ex-communist countries with Belarus and Slovak Republic being the most permissive countries whereas the strictest ones are Northern Cyprus and Turkey.