Intuitive Moral Judgments Research Articles

Influence of stress on athletes' intuitive moral judgments in sports: The moderating role of self-control

We conducted two experiments to explore whether moral judgments occur intuitively in sports scenarios, and whether such judgments are influenced by stress and self-control. In Experiment 1 we verified the existence of intuitive moral judgment in sports scenarios, then in Experiment 2 we identified the moderating effect of self-control. Results of a survey with Chinese collegiate athletes showed that under the condition of low stress, there was no significant difference between individuals with strong and weak self-control regarding the accuracy rate of intuitive moral judgment in sports scenarios. Under the condition of high stress, however, individuals with strong self-control were more inclined than were those with weak self-control to intuitively make a judgment that was moral in sports scenarios. Therefore, in sports scenarios stress exerts an influence on intuitive moral judgment, and the degree to which this influence applies is moderated by individual self-control. This finding has positive implications for reducing unethical behavior among athletes in sporting contexts.

Moral Relevance Approach for AI Ethics

Artificial intelligence (AI) ethics is proposed as an emerging and interdisciplinary field concerned with addressing the ethical issues of AI, such as the issue of moral decision-making. The conflict between our intuitive moral judgments constitutes an inevitable obstacle to decision-making in AI ethics. This article outlines the Moral Relevance Approach, which could provide a considerable moral foundation for AI ethics. Taking moral relevance as the precondition of the consequentialist principles, the Moral Relevance Approach aims to plausibly consider individual moral claims. It is not only the common ethical target shaping our moral consensus but also the inherent moral ability connecting others with us.

The legitimate targets of political disobedience

In public discourse, activists are often criticized for directing their acts of political resistance against this or that specific target. Underlying these criticisms appears to be a strongly held, though underarticulated, intuitive moral judgment that some targets are legitimate whereas others are not. Little philosophical attention has been paid to this issue. My primary aim is to address this neglect. I specify a central part of this intuitive judgment – centering on persons and activities – and argue that there is a principled way to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate targets. This specification relies on a novel conception of political resistance, which focuses on its defensive rather than communicative aspect. I then extend the idea of forfeiture to argue that acts of political resistance are correctly directed when they are aimed at those activities of liable persons that cause injustice. My discussion contributes to vindicating our intuitive judgments about several controversial cases of political resistance. 

Roles of Moral Foundations and Empathic Concern on Rights of Public Decision‐Making for Geological Disposal Facilities: Why is it Self‐evident that “the Concerned Party should be the Decision‐Maker” in the Context of NIMBY Facilities?1

AbstractWhen the location of NIMBY (not in my backyard) facilities is focused, legitimate decision‐making rights tend to be preferentially given to local residents, an attitude defined as a superior legitimization of the concerned parties. Moral foundations and empathic concern are hypothesized to predict the process of superior legitimization of the concerned parties. We conducted an experiment wherein participants evaluated the legitimacy of residents and government agencies in view of the site selection of a geological disposal facility focused on ingroups or outgroups. In both groups, the legitimacy of the residents was notably higher, and the roles of moral foundations and empathic concern on the judgment of legitimacy were indicated. One reason why residents are self‐evidently legitimatized superiorly in the context of NIMBY facilities, therefore, should be that such judgments are based on intuitive moral judgment and empathic concern.

The Curious Case of the Irrational Disputant: Insights and Strategies from the Science of Moral Reasoning

In mediation and negotiation, we sometimes encounter people who make decisions that seem to be inconsistent with what they say they care about and want, and with their alternatives to settlement. Some seemingly irrational decisions may be a result of automatic, intuitive moral judgments, which are best approached at a corresponding intuitive level. Social scientists have identified two “systems” of thinking: an automatic, quick process made outside of awareness (System 1), and an effortful, deliberate, logical, conscious one (System 2). In their social intuitionist model and moral foundations theory, Jonathan Haidt and colleagues propose that individuals make automatic, quick, intuitive moral judgments along five universal moral domains: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. These moral judgments are difficult to engage with reasoned arguments. A seemingly irrational party may be in the midst of an intuitive moral judgment that is not logic‐based. The literature on these and related lines of research explains when and why a mediator should seek to explore whether a party’s assessments may be a result of intuitive moral judgments, and if so, ways a mediator could communicate with the party on that level. This may be done most effectively by shifting the focus within or to another relevant moral domain, using moral reframing, and making liberal use of stories in communicating alternative intuitive moral perspectives. These methods engage on an intuitive level.

Disagreement, Anti-Realism about Reasons, and Inference to the Best Explanation

I defend an inference to the best explanation (IBE) argument for anti-realism about reasons for acting based on the history of intractable disagreement in moral philosophy. The four key premises of the argument are: 1. If there were objective reasons for action, epistemically-well-situated observers would eventually converge upon them after two thousand years; 2. Contemporary philosophers, as the beneficiaries of two thousand years of philosophy, are epistemically well-situated observers; 3. Contemporary philosophers have not converged upon reasons for action; 4. Conclusion: there are no objective reasons for action (IBE from the first three premises). The key premises of the IBE are (1) sentimentalism; (2) non-cognitivism about basic affects; and (3) philosophical arguments for what our reasons for action are always involve arguments that depend on a basic intuitive moral judgment (that can be explained in terms of a basic non-cognitive affect). All these premises are explored in detail, and various objections addressed.

The Consumers’ Emotional Dog Learns to Persuade Its Rational Tail: Toward a Social Intuitionist Framework of Ethical Consumption

Literature on consumers’ ethical decision making is rooted in a rationalist perspective that emphasizes the role of moral reasoning. However, the view of ethical consumption as a thorough rational and conscious process fails to capture important elements of human cognition, such as emotions and intuitions. Based on moral psychology and microsociology, this paper proposes a holistic and integrated framework showing how emotive and intuitive information processing may foster ethical consumption at individual and social levels. The model builds on social intuitionism to show how consumers’ a priori affect-laden intuitive moral judgments impact their post hoc reflective moral reasoning. Symbolic interactionism is used to interpret consumers as interdependent and socially embedded agents that self-construct their social identity through interactions with other consumers. The proposed social intuitionist framework of consumers’ ethical decision making shows that other-oriented moral emotions—such as elevation, gratitude, and empathy—interact with persuasion and social influence in ethical consumption. Consequently, moral emotions and intuition drive interpersonal persuasion among ethical consumers. Theoretical propositions and implications for consumer ethics theory and practice are discussed.

Moral understanding and moral illusions

The central claim of this paper is that people who ignore recherche cases might actually understand ethics better than those who focus on them. In order to establish this claim, I employ a relatively new account of understanding, to the effect that one understands to the extent that one has a representation/process pair that allows one to efficiently compress and decode useful information. I argue that people who ignore odd cases have compressed better, understand better, and so can be just as ethical (if not more so) as those who focus on such cases. The general idea is that our intuitive moral judgments only imprecisely track the moral truth—the function that maps possible decisions onto moral valuations—and when we try to specify the function precisely we end up overfitting what is basically a straightforward function to accommodate irrelevant data points.

The role of testimony in children’s moral decision making: Evidence from China and United States.

What does it take know a moral truth or principle? Although testimony is an undisputed source of empirical knowledge of contingent facts, it is less clear whether it is possible to acquire "second-hand moral knowledge" (Jones, 1999; Wolff, 1998). In the present studies, 3- to 5-year-old Chinese (N = 124) and U.S. American (N = 90) children were asked to judge whether novel, distress-inducing actions were morally permissible, both independently and after either 1 or 3 adult informants had made counterintuitive judgments. Although participants made appropriate moral judgments independently, children from both countries were affected by the counterintuitive testimony provided by the adult informant(s). Moreover, Chinese children were especially receptive to such counterintuitive claims. These findings demonstrate that intuitive moral judgments based on perceived harm are common across 2 cultural groups, but adult testimony can potentially shift those judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Disagreement, Anti-Realism About Reasons, and Inference to the Best Explanation

I revisit, refine and defend an inference to the best explanation (IBE) argument for anti-realism about reasons for acting based on the history of intractable disagreement in moral philosophy. The four key premises of the argument are: 1. If there were objective reasons for action, epistemically-well-situated observers would eventually converge upon them after two thousand years; 2. Contemporary philosophers, as the beneficiaries of two thousand years of philosophy, are epistemically well-situated observers; 3. Contemporary philosophers have not converged upon reasons for action; 4. Conclusion: there are no objective reasons for action (IBE from the first three premises). The key premises of the IBE are (1) sentimentalism; (2) non-cognitivism about basic affects; and (3) philosophical arguments for what our reasons for action are always involve arguments that depend on a basic intuitive moral judgment (that can be explained in terms of a basic non-cognitive affect). All these premises are explored in detail, and various objections addressed.

Unfounded dumbfounding: How harm and purity undermine evidence for moral dumbfounding

Two paradigm-shifting ideas have gained widespread influence in current accounts of moral cognition: (a) that moral judgments are pluralistic, extending beyond domains of harm and fairness, and (b) that people’s judgments are driven primarily by intuition, such that people are “morally dumbfounded” about the reasons behind their own judgments. An ongoing debate has emerged regarding the former claim of moral pluralism, with opposing sides in disagreement about whether moral judgments are best understood as reflecting multiple moral domains vs. a single moral domain. The current analysis demonstrates that however this debate concerning pluralism is resolved, evidence of moral dumbfounding is undermined. This evidentiary basis for intuitive moral judgment is therefore not well supported, and additional evidence indicates that moral judgments are more reasoned and malleable than the dumbfounding account would allow.

Intuition and Moral Decision-Making - The Effect of Time Pressure and Cognitive Load on Moral Judgment and Altruistic Behavior.

Do individuals intuitively favor certain moral actions over others? This study explores the role of intuitive thinking—induced by time pressure and cognitive load—in moral judgment and behavior. We conduct experiments in three different countries (Sweden, Austria, and the United States) involving over 1,400 subjects. All subjects responded to four trolley type dilemmas and four dictator games involving different charitable causes. Decisions were made under time pressure/time delay or while experiencing cognitive load or control. Overall we find converging evidence that intuitive states do not influence moral decisions. Neither time-pressure nor cognitive load had any effect on moral judgments or altruistic behavior. Thus we find no supporting evidence for the claim that intuitive moral judgments and dictator game giving differ from more reflectively taken decisions. Across all samples and decision tasks men were more likely to make utilitarian moral judgments and act selfishly compared to women, providing further evidence that there are robust gender differences in moral decision-making. However, there were no significant interactions between gender and the treatment manipulations of intuitive versus reflective decision-making.

Moral Learning: Conceptual foundations and normative relevance

What is distinctive about a bringing a learning perspective to moral psychology? Part of the answer lies in the remarkable transformations that have taken place in learning theory over the past two decades, which have revealed how powerful experience-based learning can be in the acquisition of abstract causal and evaluative representations, including generative models capable of attuning perception, cognition, affect, and action to the physical and social environment. When conjoined with developments in neuroscience, these advances in learning theory permit a rethinking of fundamental questions about the acquisition of moral understanding and its role in the guidance of behavior. For example, recent research indicates that spatial learning and navigation involve the formation of non-perspectival as well as ego-centric models of the physical environment, and that spatial representations are combined with learned information about risk and reward to guide choice and potentiate further learning. Research on infants provides evidence that they form non-perspectival expected-value representations of agents and actions as well, which help them to navigate the human environment. Such representations can be formed by highly-general mental processes such as causal and empathic simulation, and thus afford a foundation for spontaneous moral learning and action that requires no innate moral faculty and can exhibit substantial autonomy with respect to community norms. If moral learning is indeed integral with the acquisition and updating of casual and evaluative models, this affords a new way of understanding well-known but seemingly puzzling patterns in intuitive moral judgment—including the notorious “trolley problems.”

What Sparks Ethical Decision Making? The Interplay Between Moral Intuition and Moral Reasoning: Lessons from the Scholastic Doctrine

Recent theories on cognitive science have stressed the significance of moral intuition as a counter to and complementary part of moral reasoning in decision making. Thus, the aim of this paper is to create an integrated framework that can account for both intuitive and reflective cognitive processes, in order to explore the antecedents of ethical decision making. To do that, we build on Scholasticism, an important medieval school of thought from which descends the main pillars of the modern Catholic social doctrine. Particularly, the focus will be on the scholastic concept of synderesis, which is an innate human faculty that constantly inclines decision makers toward universal moral principles. Managerial implications are discussed, stressing how a rediscovery of decision makers’ intuitive moral judgments could be relevant in the reflective thinking practice of managers’ ethical reasoning, thus saving them from rational insensitivity to ethical dilemmas.

Animal suffering and human bias

Ng proposes concrete ways to decrease animal suffering on the basis of commonsense economic logic and research in welfare biology. But to reduce animal suffering effectively in livestock farming, animal experimentation or the natural environment we have to become more aware of our pervasive and spontaneous but unreliable intuitive moral judgments. These can generate biases that prevent us from decreasing animal suffering effectively.

Inference of trustworthiness from intuitive moral judgments.

Moral judgments play a critical role in motivating and enforcing human cooperation, and research on the proximate mechanisms of moral judgments highlights the importance of intuitive, automatic processes in forming such judgments. Intuitive moral judgments often share characteristics with deontological theories in normative ethics, which argue that certain acts (such as killing) are absolutely wrong, regardless of their consequences. Why do moral intuitions typically follow deontological prescriptions, as opposed to those of other ethical theories? Here, we test a functional explanation for this phenomenon by investigating whether agents who express deontological moral judgments are more valued as social partners. Across 5 studies, we show that people who make characteristically deontological judgments are preferred as social partners, perceived as more moral and trustworthy, and are trusted more in economic games. These findings provide empirical support for a partner choice account of moral intuitions whereby typically deontological judgments confer an adaptive function by increasing a person's likelihood of being chosen as a cooperation partner. Therefore, deontological moral intuitions may represent an evolutionarily prescribed prior that was selected for through partner choice mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record

Supplemental Material for Inference of Trustworthiness From Intuitive Moral Judgments

Supplemental Material for Inference of Trustworthiness From Intuitive Moral Judgments

Wrong or merely prohibited: Special treatment of strict liability in intuitive moral judgment.

Most crimes in America require that the defendant have mens rea, Latin for "guilty mind." However, mens rea is not legally required for strict liability crimes, such as speeding, for which someone is guilty even if ignorant or deceived about her speed. In 3 experiments involving participants responding to descriptive vignettes, we investigated whether the division of strict liability crimes in the law reflects an aspect of laypeople's intuitive moral cognition. Experiment 1 (N = 396; 236 male, 159 female, 1 other; Mage = 30) found evidence that it does: ignorance and deception were less mitigating for strict liability crimes than for "mens rea" crimes. Experiments 2 (N = 413; 257 male, 154 female, 2 other; Mage = 31) and 3 (N = 404; 183 male, 221 female, Mage = 35) revealed that strict liability crimes are not treated as pure moral violations, but additionally as violations of convention. We found that for strict liability crimes, ratings of moral wrongness and punishment were influenced to a greater extent by the fact that a rule had been violated, even when harm was kept constant, mirroring the legal distinction of malum prohibitum (wrong as prohibited) versus malum in se (wrong in itself). Further, we found that rules prohibiting strict liability crimes were judged more arbitrary than corresponding rules for "mens rea" crimes, and that this judgment was related to the role of mental states. Jointly, the findings suggest a surprising correspondence between the law and laypeople's intuitive judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record

Inference of Trustworthiness from Intuitive Moral Judgments

Inference of Trustworthiness from Intuitive Moral Judgments

Supplemental Material for Wrong or Merely Prohibited: Special Treatment of Strict Liability in Intuitive Moral Judgment

Supplemental Material for Wrong or Merely Prohibited: Special Treatment of Strict Liability in Intuitive Moral Judgment