Human Moral Judgment Research Articles

Morality in Our Mind and Across Cultures and Politics.

Moral judgments differ across cultures and politics, but they share a common theme in our minds: perceptions of harm. Both cultural ethnographies on moral values and psychological research on moral cognition highlight this shared focus on harm. Perceptions of harm are constructed from universal cognitive elements-including intention, causation, and suffering-but depend on the cultural context, allowing many values to arise from a common moral mind. This review traces the concept of harm across philosophy, cultural anthropology, and psychology, then discusses how different values (e.g., purity) across various taxonomies are grounded in perceived harm. We then explore two theories connecting culture to cognition-modularity and constructionism-before outlining how pluralism across human moral judgment is explained by the constructed nature of perceived harm. We conclude by showing how different perceptions of harm help drive political disagreements and reveal how sharing stories of harm can help bridge moral divides.

Moral educational implications of neuroscientific research on moral decisionmaking

In this study, the two types of moral judgment, rational reasoning and emotional intuition, were analyzed with a focus on neuroscientific interpretation of human responses in the trolley dilemma and footbridge dilemma. Based on such analysis, the cognitive approach required to make correct moral judgments was sought with a focus on establishing the relationship between reason and emotion. And the implications of this neuroscientific approach for moral education were derived. According to the results of neuroscientific research on people's moral judgments in the trolley dilemma and footbridge dilemma, there are many neuroscientific research results supporting that emotional intuition leads to deontological judgments and rational reasoning leads to consequential judgments. In this way, emotional intuition and rational reasoning appear widely in human moral judgment. There is a need to find a method of moral education that can harmoniously utilize emotional intuition, which is fast and efficient but has the potential for bias, and rational reasoning, which is slow but accurate and fair.

Moral judgment in realistic traffic scenarios: moving beyond the trolley paradigm for ethics of autonomous vehicles

AbstractThe imminent deployment of autonomous vehicles requires algorithms capable of making moral decisions in relevant traffic situations. Some scholars in the ethics of autonomous vehicles hope to align such intelligent systems with human moral judgment. For this purpose, studies like the Moral Machine Experiment have collected data about human decision-making in trolley-like traffic dilemmas. This paper first argues that the trolley dilemma is an inadequate experimental paradigm for investigating traffic moral judgments because it does not include agents’ character-based considerations and is incapable of facilitating the investigation of low-stakes mundane traffic scenarios. In light of the limitations of the trolley paradigm, this paper presents an alternative experimental framework that addresses these issues. The proposed solution combines the creation of mundane traffic moral scenarios using virtual reality and the Agent-Deed-Consequences (ADC) model of moral judgment as a moral-psychological framework. This paradigm shift potentially increases the ecological validity of future studies by providing more realism and incorporating character considerations into traffic actions.

Language Nativeness Modulates Physiological Responses to Moral vs. Immoral Concepts in Chinese-English Bilinguals: Evidence from Event-Related Potential and Psychophysiological Measures.

Morality has been an integral part of social cognition and our daily life, and different languages may exert distinct impacts on human moral judgment. However, it remains unclear how moral concept is encoded in the bilingual brain. This study, therefore, aimed to explore the emotional and cognitive involvement of bilingual morality judgement by using combined event-related potential (ERP) and psychophysiological (including skin, heart, and pulse) measures. In the experiment, thirty-one Chinese-English bilingual participants were asked to make moral judgments in Chinese and English, respectively. Our results revealed increased early frontal N400 and decreased LPC in L1 moral concept encoding as compared to L2, suggesting that L1 was more reliant on automatic processes and emotions yet less on elaboration. In contrast, L2 moral and immoral concepts elicited enhanced LPC, decreased N400, and greater automatic psychophysiological electrocardiograph responses, which might reflect more elaborate processing despite blunted emotional responses and increased anxiety. Additionally, both behavioral and P200 data revealed a reliable immorality bias across languages. Our results were discussed in light of the dual-process framework of moral judgments and the (dis)embodiment of bilingual processing, which may advance our understanding of the interplay between language and morality as well as between emotion and cognition.

Unique Moral Judgements of Psychopathic Individuals

Emotions are important in human moral judgment and behavioral decision making. In the case of psychopaths, emotional deficits due to low fear response and dysregulated control prevent them from feeling the consequences of wrong behaviors, and therefore they cannot fully understand social moral behaviors or internalize the public's social moral system. Thus psychopathic individuals have their own unique moral judgment system based on their emotional deficits.

AI Moral Enhancement: Upgrading the Socio-Technical System of Moral Engagement

Several proposals for moral enhancement would use AI to augment (auxiliary enhancement) or even supplant (exhaustive enhancement) human moral reasoning or judgment. Exhaustive enhancement proposals conceive AI as some self-contained oracle whose superiority to our own moral abilities is manifest in its ability to reliably deliver the ‘right’ answers to all our moral problems. We think this is a mistaken way to frame the project, as it presumes that we already know many things that we are still in the process of working out, and reflecting on this fact reveals challenges even for auxiliary proposals that eschew the oracular approach. We argue there is nonetheless a substantial role that ‘AI mentors’ could play in our moral education and training. Expanding on the idea of an AI Socratic Interlocutor, we propose a modular system of multiple AI interlocutors with their own distinct points of view reflecting their training in a diversity of concrete wisdom traditions. This approach minimizes any risk of moral disengagement, while the existence of multiple modules from a diversity of traditions ensures pluralism is preserved. We conclude with reflections on how all this relates to the broader notion of moral transcendence implicated in the project of AI moral enhancement, contending it is precisely the whole concrete socio-technical system of moral engagement that we need to model if we are to pursue moral enhancement.

The many faces of moralized self-control: Puritanical morality is not reducible to cooperation concerns.

Fitouchi et al.'s moral disciplining approach highlights the significant role social evaluations of self-control appear to play in human moral judgment. At the same time, attributing the wide range of puritanical concerns to a singular focus on self-control seems unwarranted. A more pluralistic approach would enrich understanding of moral judgment in all its cultural and historical diversity.

Choices behind the veil of ignorance in Formosan macaques.

An ongoing debate regarding the evolution of morality is whether other species show precursory moral behavior. The veil of ignorance (VOI) paradigm is often used to elicit human moral judgment but has never been tested in other primates. We study the division of resources behind the VOI in Formosan macaques. Monkeys choose the equal division more often when a conspecific is present than when it is absent, suggesting a degree of impartiality. To better understand this impartiality, we measure a monkey's reactions to two directions of inequity: one regarding inequity to its advantage and the other to its disadvantage. We find that disadvantageous inequity aversion correlates with the degree of impartiality behind the VOI. Therefore, seemingly impartial behavior could result from a primitive negative reaction to being disadvantaged. This suggests a mechanism to explain a tendency toward impartiality.

Influence of reputational concern and social distance on moral decision-making under the harmful dilemma: Evidence from behavioral and ERPs study

<p id="p00005">Reputational concern has been suggested as an important determinant of human cooperative behavior and moral judgment in social interactions. Previous studies have demonstrated that reputational concern influences behavioral and neural responses during prosocial behaviors and decision-making, such as moral decision-making. Moral decision- making is a typical social decision-making process involving trade-offs between the self and others. It refers to the process in which individuals make optimal choices under the guidance of social systems and norms according to their own value orientations when faced with a variety of possible dilemmas and conflicts in behavioral choices. Emerging studies have shown that social distance modulates behavioral and neural responses during moral decision-making. However, little is known about how reputational concern and social distance interact to affect moral decision-making, particularly regarding the underlying cognitive neural mechanism of moral decision-making associated with proscriptive morality (i.e., harmful behavior). <break/>In the present study, we adopted the “shock-benefit dilemma” task and event-related potential (ERP) technology to examine temporal processing of the interactive influence of reputational concern and social distance on moral decision-making when faced with harmful dilemmas. Participants were instructed to complete a series of alternative dilemmas in an anonymous or public context. After being instructed whether their decisions were going to be made public to the target person, participants decided whether to deliver a certain intensity of painful electric shocks toward the targets (i.e., friends, acquaintances, or strangers) to receive money. A choice not to shock the targets meant that they would forego the benefit. Behavioral and neural responses were recorded while the participants made their decisions. The experiment consisted of 360 trials, including two blocks of anonymous and public situations and 120 trials with friends, acquaintances, and strangers. <break/>The results showed that participants administered fewer electric shocks to friends than to acquaintances and strangers, which suggested an obvious “egoistic altruism” decision tendency in anonymous situations. Participants spent more time and experienced greater disgust in dilemmas involving acquaintances relative to those involving friends and strangers, which showed an obvious “acquaintance effect”. However, these differences were weakened in public situations. As for the ERP results, the dilemmas involving acquaintances elicited a larger P260 component, which is associated with emotional responses, and late positive potential (LPP, 300~450 ms), which is associated with cognitive reasoning. However, these differences in ERP indices disappeared in public situations. <break/>The aim of this study was to explore the interaction between reputational concern and social distance in behavioral and neural responses during moral decision-making involving harmful dilemmas. The results supported the hypothesis that individuals follow the egoistic altruism moral principle to conduct moral decision-making involving reputational concern and social distance. These findings suggest that the uncertainty of acquaintance relations induces stronger negative emotions and cognitive load during moral decision-making, and reputational concern effectively weakens the aversion and dilemma conflict brought about by self-interest tendencies and interpersonal uncertainties.

Computational ethics.

Technological advances are enabling roles for machines that present novel ethical challenges. The study of 'AI ethics' has emerged to confront these challenges, and connects perspectives from philosophy, computer science, law, and economics. Less represented in these interdisciplinary efforts is the perspective of cognitive science. We propose a framework - computational ethics - that specifies how the ethical challenges of AI can be partially addressed by incorporating the study of human moral decision-making. The driver of this framework is a computational version of reflective equilibrium (RE), an approach that seeks coherence between considered judgments and governing principles. The framework has two goals: (i) to inform the engineering of ethical AI systems, and (ii) to characterize human moral judgment and decision-making in computational terms. Working jointly towards these two goals will create the opportunity to integrate diverse research questions, bring together multiple academic communities, uncover new interdisciplinary research topics, and shed light on centuries-old philosophical questions.

Between the ethics of forgiveness and the unforgivable: Reflections on Arendt’s idea of reconciliation in politics

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The aim of the article is to examine the role that memory and oblivion, forgiveness and unforgiveness play in Hannah Arendt’s thought in relation to acts of violence in the political sphere. Political communities do not always decide to remember the crimes they have committed or the wrongs they have suffered, but neither can they always forget their mutual harms, even when there is already peace between them. Without striving to exhaust the entire subject matter of Arendt’s work, I would like to illustrate the difficulty of understanding the role forgiveness plays in her thought as well as to indicate possible solutions when forgiveness becomes unachievable within the framework of her considerations. Her reflection can be divided into two stages. The first is a focus on the idea of radical evil and the need to forgive perpetrators for their crimes. Second, under the influence of the Adolf Eichmann trial, she developed the idea of the banality of evil. This idea points to situations so terrible that they transcend all human moral judgment, making forgiveness impossible. However, even when the moral possibility of individual forgiveness has been rejected, when the legal possibility of seeking justice has been exhausted and when victims and perpetrators in the community are still unable to live together peacefully, Arendt’s thought leads us to the possibility of political reconciliation.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

The Phenomenon of Conscience in Social Work

The Phenomenon of Conscience in Social Work

The logic of universalization guides moral judgment

To explain why an action is wrong, we sometimes say, "What if everybody did that?" In other words, even if a single person's behavior is harmless, that behavior may be wrong if it would be harmful once universalized. We formalize the process of universalization in a computational model, test its quantitative predictions in studies of human moral judgment, and distinguish it from alternative models. We show that adults spontaneously make moral judgments consistent with the logic of universalization, and report comparable patterns of judgment in children. We conclude that, alongside other well-characterized mechanisms of moral judgment, such as outcome-based and rule-based thinking, the logic of universalizing holds an important place in our moral minds.

Toward Implementing the ADC Model of Moral Judgment in Autonomous Vehicles.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs)-and accidents they are involved in-attest to the urgent need to consider the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). The question dominating the discussion so far has been whether we want AVs to behave in a 'selfish' or utilitarian manner. Rather than considering modeling self-driving cars on a single moral system like utilitarianism, one possible way to approach programming for AI would be to reflect recent work in neuroethics. The agent-deed-consequence (ADC) model (Dubljević and Racine in AJOB Neurosci 5(4):3-20, 2014a, Behav Brain Sci 37(5):487-488, 2014b) provides a promising descriptive and normative account while also lending itself well to implementation in AI. The ADC model explains moral judgments by breaking them down into positive or negative intuitive evaluations of the agent, deed, and consequence in any given situation. These intuitive evaluations combine to produce a positive or negative judgment of moral acceptability. For example, the overall judgment of moral acceptability in a situation in which someone committed a deed that is judged as negative (e.g., breaking a law) would be mitigated if the agent had good intentions and the action had a good consequence. This explains the considerable flexibility and stability of human moral judgment that has yet to be replicated in AI. Thispaper examines the advantages and disadvantages of implementing the ADC model and how the model could inform future work on ethics of AI in general.

Scaling up psychology via Scientific Regret Minimization

Do large datasets provide value to psychologists? Without a systematic methodology for working with such datasets, there is a valid concern that analyses will produce noise artifacts rather than true effects. In this paper, we offer a way to enable researchers to systematically build models and identify novel phenomena in large datasets. One traditional approach is to analyze the residuals of models-the biggest errors they make in predicting the data-to discover what might be missing from those models. However, once a dataset is sufficiently large, machine learning algorithms approximate the true underlying function better than the data, suggesting, instead, that the predictions of these data-driven models should be used to guide model building. We call this approach "Scientific Regret Minimization" (SRM), as it focuses on minimizing errors for cases that we know should have been predictable. We apply this exploratory method on a subset of the Moral Machine dataset, a public collection of roughly 40 million moral decisions. Using SRM, we find that incorporating a set of deontological principles that capture dimensions along which groups of agents can vary (e.g., sex and age) improves a computational model of human moral judgment. Furthermore, we are able to identify and independently validate three interesting moral phenomena: criminal dehumanization, age of responsibility, and asymmetric notions of responsibility.

Mencius’s Four Sprouts and Moral Modularity Hypothesis

이 글은 맹자가 제시한 사단/사덕의 조합을 도덕 모듈성(MMM)의 하나로 간주하고 이를 사회적 직관주의자 모듈성(SIM)과 비교하는 것을 목표로 한다. 이러한 비교를 정당화하기 위해 몇 가지 주장에 대한 검토가 선행되어야 한다. (1) 도덕철학은 신경과학과 진화심리학을 기반으로 수행되는 도덕심리학적 연구성과를 적극적으로 반영하여야 한다. (2) 도덕심리학 연구의 중요한 쟁점 가운데 하나인 도덕의 모듈성에 대한 논의는 도덕철학적으로 의의가 있다. (3) 도덕의 모듈성을 논하기 위해 모듈성 자체에 대한 검토가 필요하다. 지금까지의 연구에 따르면 모듈성에 대한 일치된 합의는 없지만, 모듈성을 인정하는 측의 주장이 점차 더 많은 증거를 제시하는 추세이다. 검토 결과 가장 강력한 모듈성을 주장하는 SIM과 MMM을 비교함으로써 몇 가지 사실들이 드러났다. (1) 인/측은지심 모듈은 피해/배려 모듈에 대응된다. (2) 의/수오지심 모듈은 공정/상호성 및 순수/고귀 모듈에 대응된다. (3) 예/사양지심 모듈은 권위/존경 모듈에 대응된다. (4) SIM의 내집단/충성 모듈은 MMM 가운데 대응되는 모듈이 없다. 동중서가 맹자의 사덕 목록에 추가한 신(信)이 여기에 대응해 보인다. (5) 지/시비지심 모듈은 SIM 가운데 대응되는 모듈이 없다. SIM은 도덕적 판단과 행위 과정에서 직관이 주도적 역할을 하고 추론은 부수적 역할만 할 따름이라고 주장한다. 이에 따라 SIM은 도덕적 추론을 모듈의 목록에서 제외한다. MMM은 이와 달리 도덕적 추론을 의미하는 지/시비지심을 목록에 포함한다. 이로 인해 MMM은 세 개의 도덕 정서 모듈과 하나의 도덕이성 모듈로 구성된다. 정서와 이성을 하나의 모듈성에 포함시킴으로써 MMM의 모듈성으로서의 타당성은 의심받는다. 그러나 인간의 도덕적 행위와 판단이 정서만으로 형성되지 않고, 정서만으로 형성되어서도 안 된다는 측면에서 보면 이러한 결함은 오히려 MMM의 실질적 가치를 드러내는 것일 수 있다.This article aims to consider the combination of four sprouts/four virtues presented by Mencius as one of the moral modularity (Mencian Moral Modularity: MMM) and compare it with Social Intuitionist Modularity (SIM). In order to justify this comparison, several arguments need to be reviewed first: (1) Moral philosophy should actively reflect the results of moral psychological research based on neuroscience and evolutionary psychology; (2) the discussion of moral modularity, one of the major issues of moral psychology research, is of moral philosophical significance; and (3) to discuss the modularity of morality, it is necessary to examine the modularity itself. Research indicates that there is no consensus on modularity but claims of modularity tend to provide more and more evidence. The review arrives at the following findings by comparing MMM with the strongest modularity, SIM: (1) The benevolence/heart of compassion module corresponds to the harm/care module; (2) the righteousness/heart of the shame/disgust module corresponds to the fairness/reciprocity module and the purity/sanctity module; (3) the proprietary/heart of deference module corresponds to the authority/respect module; (4) the ingroup/loyalty module of SIM doesn t have a corresponding module in MMM; and (5) the wisdom/heart of approval and disapproval module doesn t have a corresponding module in SIM. SIM argues that intuition plays a leading role in moral judgment and action, while reason plays only a minor role. Accordingly, SIM excludes moral reason from the list of modules. MMM, on the other hand, contains the wisdom/heart of approval and disapproval module, which implies moral reasoning. As a result, MMM consists of three moral emotion modules and one moral reason module. By including emotion and reason in one modularity, the validity of MMM as a modularity is questioned. However, considering human moral behavior and judgment are not formed only by emotions and they should not be formed by emotions alone, this deficiency may reveal the real value of MMM.

Ethics beyond Computation: Why We Can't (and Shouldn't) Replace Human Moral Judgment with Algorithms

Ethics beyond Computation:Why We Can't (and Shouldn't) Replace Human Moral Judgment with Algorithms William Hasselberger (bio) in 1976, the computer scientist and artificial intelligence pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum, inventor of the famous ELIZA program that simulated conversation with a psychotherapist, published an impassioned book titled Computer Power and Human Reason. He observed: "Western man's entire milieu is now pervaded by complex technological extensions of his every functional capacity" (1976, 9). Whether or not that statement was true in 1976, when a song called "Disco Lady" was at the top of the charts, it is certainly true now, in 2019, when computer algorithms are becoming interwoven with every manner of human activity and practice. Algorithms—logically structured formal instructions for mechanically translating specific "inputs" into desired "outputs"—are now used to assist or replace human judgment and expertise in countless areas, including transportation (in planes, trains, and automobiles), medical diagnosis and treatment decisions, human resource management, military strategy and intelligence assessment, stock trading, insurance risk assessment, aesthetic evaluation, matchmaking, assessing job applications and loan requests, and criminal sentencing [End Page 977] and parole eligibility determinations. The trend of altering or substituting individual human judgment and expertise with increasingly sophisticated and powerful computer algorithms seems nearly irresistible. This trend also raises serious ethical questions: about the privacy of those individuals involved, about automated patterns of bias towards particular groups of people, and about moral responsibility for harms resulting from "judgments" made by computers in, say, autonomous transportation or military hardware. But there is a deeper philosophical issue at play here that Weizenbaum put his finger on four decades ago when he noted that "the computer … has brought the view of man as a machine to a new level of plausibility," that people are increasingly prone to "anthropomorphize" computers, and that computers, while promising us ever increasing mastery and freedom, could actually play a decisive role in the "general technological usurpation of man's capacity to act as an autonomous agent in giving meaning to his world" (1976, 8, 10). Against the backdrop of an increasingly computerized and automated social world and an increasingly mechanistic view of ourselves ("as nothing but a clockwork"), Weizenbaum thought we faced two paramount questions. First, "no matter how it may be disguised by technological jargon, the question is whether or not every aspect of human thought is reducible to a logical formalism, or, to put it into the modern idiom, whether or not human thought is entirely computable" (12, emphasis added). And, second, "whether there are limits to what computers ought to be put to do"—i.e., "however intelligent machines may be made to be," are there "some acts of thought that ought to be attempted only by humans" (11, 13, original emphasis)? The first question is both a philosophical and an empirical question, and the second question is a related normative and ethical one. Jump ahead 40 years. The idea of self-driving cars has been introduced to the public alongside the appealing prospect of a drastic reduction in overall traffic deaths. But such cars must be programmed with an algorithm—what some call a "morality algorithm" and others call the "death algorithm"—to determine how the car should respond [End Page 978] to the event of an impending accident when human beings are likely to be killed. In a crash, should the car prioritize the lives of its occupants over a larger number of lives of pedestrians? What if among those pedestrians are mothers with infants in baby strollers? What is the morally correct program for such cases? Anyone who has taken a university course in moral philosophy in recent decades will recognize that the quandary of the "death algorithm" of a self-driving car is a variant of the infamous trolley problem that some philosophers use to argue for and against different moral theories. However, with the "death algorithm," we are not just having dubious fun testing our moral intuitions with macabre hypotheticals; programmers are thinking about the design architecture of the increasingly automated, computerized environment that human beings will actually inhabit, in which we will live and die (Simanowski 2018).1 The "death algorithm" can be seen as part...

Infants reason about deserving agents: A test with distributive actions

The ability to attend to agents' deservingness and merit is a fundamental aspect of human moral judgment. To investigate the origins of this ability, we recorded 15- and 20-month-old infants’ reactions to deservingness congruent and incongruent distributions performed towards pairs of helping and hindering agents. Twenty-month-old infants looked longer at equal distributions performed towards not equally deserving recipients than at equal distributions performed towards equally deserving agents and they looked equally long at equal and unequal deservingness congruent distributions. These results suggest that infants' are able, at least in some simple contexts, to take into account the valence of previous actions and expect agents to treat others in accord with their deservingness.

Trust, authentic pride, and moral reasoning: a unified framework of relational governance and emotional self‐regulation

This conceptual article introduces behavioral perspectives into the governance arena and undertakes a psychological assessment of managerial decision making in organizations by elaborating on the treatment of trust and (authentic and hubristic) pride in the extant literature. While trust is conceived by governance scholars as a device for monitoring relationships with others, we argue that authentic pride, contrary to hubris, could operate as an attribute of emotional self‐regulation allowing corporate leaders to govern the social behavior of their own self. Contrasting the features of trust and authentic pride, we advance several propositions to capture their relevance and simultaneous importance as viable governance mechanisms in light of a manager's level of cognitive moral reasoning. Our study builds a unified theoretical framework of governance which integrates human agency, psychological states, and moral judgment to foster a deeper understanding of complex self‐regulatory processes that are activated by decision makers in the execution of their roles.

Teaching applied ethics to the righteous mind

What does current empirically informed moral psychology imply about the goals that can be realistically achieved in college-level applied ethics courses? This paper takes up this question from the vantage point of Jonathan Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model of human moral judgment. I summarize Haidt’s model, and then consider a variety of pedagogical goals. I begin with two of the loftiest goals of ethics education, and argue that neither is within realistic reach if Haidt’s model is correct. I then look at three goals that can be achieved if his model is correct; but each of these goals, I argue, lacks significant value. I end by identifying three goals that are of significant value and also realistically attainable on Haidt’s model. These should be the focus of applied ethics pedagogy if Haidt’s model is correct.