The role of subjective concerns and characteristics of the moral issue in moral considerations

Abstract

This paper addresses three issues of moral decision making within the framework of Jones' (1991) moral intensity model: (1) the effect of scope of justice for the moral agent and the target person of a moral issue on moral judgments; (2) the relative importance placed upon different characteristics of a moral issue in moral decisions; and (3) the empirical link between judgments of ethicality and fairness. Scope of justice was operationalized in terms of friendship, attitude similarity and justice concerns. A scenario approach was employed whereby each respondent read cases of ethical decisions involving two people known to them. The two people were either the respondent's ‘friend’ or ‘non‐friend’ (high vs. low level of scope of justice), and they were cast in the scenarios as the decision maker and the target person. Respondents then made evaluations of the intensity, fairness and ethicality of the issue. Results show that scope of justice regarding either the moral agent or the target person affected moral judgments. However, these scope of justice effects were context dependent. Results also show that the issue dimension of social consensus was consistently accorded a greater weight in the overall ethicality judgment. A significant empirical link between judgments of ethicality and fairness was also evident. Implications for theories of morality are noted.