Abstract
Many studies have demonstrated that moral philosophies, such as idealism and relativism, could be used as robust predictors of judgements and behaviours related to common moral issues, such as business ethics, unethical beliefs, workplace deviance, marketing practices, gambling, etc. However, little consideration has been given to using moral philosophies to predict environmentally (un)friendly attitudes and behaviours, which could also be classified as moral. In this study, we have assessed the impact of idealism and relativism using the Ethics Position Theory. We have tested its capacity to predict moral identity, moral judgement of social vs. environmental issues, and self-reported pro-environmental behaviours. The results from an online MTurk study of 432 US participants revealed that idealism had a significant impact on all the tested variables, but the case was different with relativism. Consistently with the findings of previous studies, we found relativism to be a strong predictor of moral identity and moral judgement of social issues. In contrast, relativism only weakly interacted with making moral judgements of environmental issues, and had no effects in predicting pro-environmental behaviours. These findings suggest that Ethics Position Theory could have a strong potential for defining moral differences between environmental attitudes and behaviours, capturing the moral drivers of an attitude-behaviour gap, which continuously stands as a barrier in motivating people to become more pro-environmental.
Highlights
Today’s pressing climate change issues call for the search for effective means to inspire people to support environmental movements [1, 2]
We have adopted similar data analysis procedures to those employed in previous studies [94,95,96, 100] that had assessed the relationships between morality and social or organisational issues using the Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ) [36, 37] scale
The results indicate that there was a significant relationship between relativism and environmental judgement when idealism was lower (b = -0.168, t = -2.700, P = 0.007) but not higher (b = 0.076, t = 1.523, P = 1.029), suggesting that those lower in idealism were associated with higher levels of relativism, and this relation was significant (Fig 1)
Summary
Today’s pressing climate change issues call for the search for effective means to inspire people to support environmental movements [1, 2]. Academics, including psychologists, sociologists, economists, policy makers and scholars of neighbouring disciplines have employed emotions [3, 4], nudges [5, 6], theories of Planned Behaviour (TPB) [7, 8], Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) [9, 10] and other techniques to understand and foster positive environmental behaviour change. Moral judgement of social vs environmental issues
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