Moral Intuitions Research Articles

Shadow as Trigger Factor of Morality Change in Utopian Society in From the New World Novel

This research aims to analyze the role of shadow towards the morality change in a utopian society in the novel From the New World by Yusuke Kishi. The focus is to identify the factors of shadow within the novel and to find how shadow triggers morality change in utopian society within the novel. The theory used in this research is psychoanalysis by Carl Jung, specifically shadow and morality. Shadow was used to examine the atrocities conducted within the novel and Carl Jung’s approach of morality was used to examine the morality change phenomenon in utopian society within the novel. The method used in this research is qualitative in a descriptive way. The researcher found the factors of shadow as ego, personal unconscious, and dark aspects of personality. Each of these factors is integral in how shadow triggers morality change in utopian society and the resulting changes found are within social, sexual, and intuitive morality. The research shows that shadow is the primary cause of morality changes happening within the novel and this research aims to prove whether shadow could be repressed in order to achieve perfect morality.

Should age matter in COVID-19 triage? A deliberative study

The COVID-19 pandemic put a large burden on many healthcare systems, causing fears about resource scarcity and triage. Several COVID-19 guidelines included age as an explicit factor and practices of...

Exploring the moral foundations of crisis management

Crises are complex, multi-faceted, and ill-defined systems of highly interconnected problems. Profound ethical issues are among their prime components. Therefore, any attempt to manage them is unprofessional at best if it does not include ethical and moral standards. The link between ethics and crisis management, however, is seriously underdeveloped. We explore a pluralistic framework, Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), to take a step toward developing this important link.According to MFT, nature imbues us with “moral intuitions” which are continually shaped by our lifelong experiences. In particular, MFT has two sets of Foundations. We argue that MFT's Individualizing Moral Foundations emphasize the necessity of treating stakeholders fairly and protecting them from potential and actual harm; whereas its Binding Foundations emphasize the necessity of expanding the organization's moral compass to include a broad set of stakeholders, establishing trust and coalitions with them, and creating a culture within which expertise and diverse opinions are respected, and open-mindedness and critical thinking are highly valued. We discuss how organizations can manage moral intuitions to create an environment in which fast, automatic, habitual yet moral and rational judgments consistent with the moral standards of an organization and society at large, can flourish.

And (Always?) Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide

Medical schools that value the moral integrity of their students and that wish to graduate ethical professionals ought to provide a clear process for conscientious objection during clinical rotations. During clerkship year, medical students are confronted with ethical dilemmas that are complicated by the most profound questions of human existence, including the definition of personhood, the terms that govern creation of a new life, the meaning of suffering, and the finality of death. In these situations, students may draw upon personal experience, prior analysis, cultural beliefs, or religious frameworks in order to decide the most ethical action. These various influences may cause the student to reach a moral conclusion that is at odds with the wish of the patient or the consensus of the medical team. As a current clerkship student, I have personally found myself in several such situations. Conscientious objection in medicine is the concept that allows providers to refrain from participating in practices that, despite careful study and thoughtful reflection, cannot be reconciled with their moral judgement. This protection also applies – in theory – to medical students, who often find themselves in these same clinical situations. However, students are not well positioned to practice conscientious objection because: medical schools do not always make students aware of this option, students may be afraid to challenge more senior members of the team, and clerkship success and residency applications rely heavily on subjective evaluations. Without institutional support, students may repress strong moral intuitions for these and other reasons. In these instances, medical schools not only miss an opportunity to encourage students to stand up for what they believe to be right, but in fact teach students to ignore the guidance of their conscience in ethically fraught situations. Schools that wish to encourage the development of ethical professionals should provide a clear and transparent protocol for conscientious objection that empowers students to act in a way consistent with their beliefs, encourages them to think critically about ethical dilemmas, and shows them how to navigate ethical disagreements with compassion and professionalism Figure 1.

The Future of Moral Responsibility and Desert

Most contemporary accounts of moral responsibility take desert to play a central role in the nature of moral responsibility. It is also assumed that desert is a backward-looking concept that is not directly derivable from any forward-looking or consequentialist considerations, such as whether blaming an agent would deter the agent from performing similar bad actions in the future. When determining which account of moral responsibility is correct, proponents of desert-based accounts often take intuitions about cases to provide evidence either in favor of or against a proposed theory. In this paper, I discuss two experiments that test whether folk intuitions accord with what desert-based accounts would predict. Results suggest that moral responsibility intuitions are sensitive to forward-looking considerations, thus posing a problem for desert-based accounts of moral responsibility. If appealing to intuitions about cases is a valid method of discovering the nature of moral responsibility and desert, it seems either desert is not entirely backward-looking or moral responsibility is not exclusively desert-based. These experimental results also suggest that consequentialist accounts of moral responsibility, which have largely been abandoned due to their counterintuitive nature, are perhaps not so counterintuitive after all.

Attending to the Multidimensional Nature of Spirituality and Faith: Integrating Spiritual Development and Moral Foundations Theory

The psychological study of spiritual development continues to grow in popularity, but definitions, theories, and frameworks related to this field often focus on a narrow range of qualities associated with spirituality. In the present article, the importance of integrating intuitive cognition—particularly moral intuitions—into models of spiritual development is considered, the implications of such cognition for spiritual development and Christian education are examined, and various limitations are noted.

The Influence of Prevailing Regional Political Narratives on Intuitions Featured in Religious Messages

Recent research suggests that political beliefs in different geographic locations shape religious groups’ sensitivity toward and representation of moral intuitions. Guided by moral foundations theory, we test this possibility with content analysis. We compared moral intuitions represented in church sermons of one religious denomination located in counties with liberal versus conservative voting records. Fifty-eight sermons based on identical biblical texts were selected from churches located in 28 liberal and 30 conservative counties throughout the United States. Chi-square analyses revealed: (1) sermons from conservative counties featured more moral intuitions overall than sermons from liberal counties, and (2) ingroup loyalty was overrepresented in sermons from conservative counties.

Luck Egalitarianism: Two Lines of Critique

This article is devoted to the stream in political philosophy which came to be known as “luck egalitarianism”. Luck egalitarians are concerned with the questions of distributive justice; their main idea is that no person should be worse-off due to factors which they are unable to influence. Luck egalitarians express this idea via the dichotomy of brute and option luck. The goal of the article is to describe two main lines of critique which luck egalitarianism encounters, and to assess which one is the most dangerous for this movement. Some authors criticize luck egalitarianism from a moral standpoint. They believe that it is overly cruel towards those who suffer due to unfortunate but free choices, humiliating towards those whom it deems to be worthy of help, and that it contradicts our moral intuitions concerning the question of what do people who engage in socially necessary, yet risky professions, deserve. Another important problem for this trend of political thought has to do with metaphysical criticism. Luck egalitarians claim that a person is not responsible not only for the status of her family, her gender, ethnicity, etc., but also for her talents and abilities. The question arises; is there anything for what a person can be genuinely responsible for? Thus, luck egalitarianism encounters the problem of determinism and free will. This problem threatens the identity of luck egalitarianism: if free will does not exist or if it cannot be identified, then the key dichotomy of brute and option luck is meaningless. The article demonstrates that it is the criticism of the second kind which currently poses the greatest problem for luck egalitarianism.

The Vital Importance of Conscientious Discernment

Conscientious discernment—which involves the ability to see right and wrong clearly—is an important task that all people must undertake on a daily basis. It is difficult to properly form one’s conscience, which is not a feeling or a mere moral intuition. To the contrary, it is rooted in object truth and reason; and through conscience, a person recognizes the morality, or immorality, of an act. As a result, moral education—teaching the difference between virtue and sin—is a crucial responsibility of parents. But young people are highly sensitive to hypocrisy, so we must live as examples, resisting complacency and continuing to form our consciences throughout our lives.

Trolleyology as First Philosophy

Though sometimes maligned, “trolleyology” offers an effective means of opening and framing, not only classes in ethics, but indeed any introductory philosophy course taking a broadly “puzzle-based” approach. When properly sequenced, a subset of the thought experiments that are trolleyology’s stock-in-trade can generate a series of puzzles illustrating the shortcomings of our untutored moral intuitions, and which thus motivate the very enterprise of moral theorizing. Students can be engaged in the attempt to resolve said puzzles, inasmuch as they’re accessible and compelling, and their resolutions generally easy to achieve. Once thus engaged, students can be directed to the fact that (perhaps unbeknownst to them) they had already rolled up their sleeves and begun “doing philosophy.” In this way, engagement with trolleyological puzzles can serve as a “microcosm” for philosophy more broadly, illustrating the processes of critical thinking that are likewise the stock-in-trade of philosophers across many different domains of inquiry.

The Strict Definition of Intended Effects and Two Questions for Critics

I present the strict definition of intended effects and pose two questions for its critics: (1) Apart from rationalizing moral intuitions about the craniotomy and other controversial cases, why classify an effect as intended if it does not explain the action? (2) What definition of intended effects can people use to guide their actions? These questions show that broad definitions of intended effects have no basis in action theory and are too vague to guide people’s actions. I suggest that broad definitions seem plausible because people confuse what someone intends and what someone is responsible for causing.

Проблема практического дискурса: обоснование моральных норм

The paper provides analysis of the main problem of practical discourse — the issue of substantiation of moral standards — and addresses logical foundations of the so-called principle or law of D. Hume, according to which a logical transition from “is” to “should” is impossible, that is, from descriptive judgments to normative ones. The study shows that this law does not exclude all ethical theories, but only those that justify the norms of morality, deducing them from any realities of the external world: laws of nature, direction of evolution, objective course of history, etc. Hume only limits the methods of substantiating normative propositions, but does not exclude the very possibility of justifying them. The authors discuss various types and attempts to substantiate value judgments and propose to use a new concept of normative correctness. They also perform analysis of cognitive and non-cognitive concepts (I. Kant, C. Bayer, M. Singer, D. Rawls, P. Lorenzen, E. Tugendhad, Karl-Otto Apel, J. Habermas). The paper gives preference to the cognitive approach, and within its framework — the ethics of discourse developed by J. Habermas. The central point in the ethics of discourse is the principle of universalization, which is discussed in detail. The study shows that the principle of universalization and other provisions of the ethics of discourse seem to be well-founded, and the approach itself is the most promising of all other modern ethical undertakings. It also attests to the fact that the ethics of discourse is best suited to the spirit of genuine democracy. As the authors conclude, one way to persuade people to exercise free will and to apply the principle of universalization is through enlightenment, appealing to the mind, and demonstrating that a program to substantiate the ethics of discourse is the best in clarifying our everyday moral intuitions and defending democracy.

The effect of Moral intuition and emotions on Ethical Consumption: The Mediatory Role of Moral Reasoning

The effect of Moral intuition and emotions on Ethical Consumption: The Mediatory Role of Moral Reasoning

The Postsecular and Rethinking the Political

The notion of postsecularity has come to the fore in recognizing the neglected significance of religion and belief in terms of their normative, social and political contributions to the individual and collective lives of contemporary times. The literature of postsecularism, essentially, takes issue with the normative-political problematique of coexistence of diverse beliefs in the political community. In this respect, Jürgen Habermas joins the term of postsecular consciousness to be able to deal with the persistence of religiousity and faith in modernized societies and seeks ways to include religious reasoning and moral intuitions into the public sphere and will-formation of the political community. However, he ends up restricting religious moral and political contribution strictly to the general public sphere and ultimately civil society. This article argues that the inadequacy of his postsecular orientation has to do with his idea of the political, which ignores contestation and pluralization in relation to the very foundations of the political. The article also claims that the postsecular turn in political theory fulfills its promises, if it opens the relationship between the secular/immanence and the religious/ transcendence to diverse/plural interpretations, and simultaneously contest the political as ontology among subjects of diverse beliefs in the political community.

The Good and Evil of Health Policy: Medicaid Expansion, Republican Governors, and Moral Intuitions

Using moral foundations theory (MFT), this study analyzes how Republican governors employed moral concepts to either build support or opposition to Medicaid expansion. The study examined statements about Medicaid expansion made by all Republican governors as reported in two large newspapers in each governor’s state from 28 June 2012 to 31 December 2018. A slight majority of the statements (183 or 58.5%) used moral arguments in support of Medicaid expansion. Governors from both policy camps most frequently used the moral foundations shared by liberals and conservatives: care/harm and fairness/cheating. Those supporting expansion also used loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Those opposing expansion used liberty/oppression. Policymakers recognize that activating the public’s moral intuitions can be an effective way to advance a policy of interest. Those interested in advancing health policies would do well to better understand the kind of moral arguments that are used with potential supporters and arguments that may be used by opponents.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Abstract. Applying logic from both the model of intuitive morality and exemplars and construal level theory, we examined the impact of baseline moral intuition salience and social distance on the moral judgment of a narrative character confronted with a moral dilemma. After completing a measure of baseline intuition salience, participants in an experiment first read an article about a fighter pilot who shot down a plane and then judged the pilot’s actions as morally right or wrong. The article indicated that the plane had been hijacked by a terrorist who wanted to let it crash into a nearby stadium, and that the pilot shot down the plane to save the spectators in the stadium. Participants were randomly assigned to read the article either as if they were the pilot (social distance low) or as objectively as possible (social distance high). Results showed that baseline intuition salience and social distance interacted in determining moral judgment. Finally, moral judgment predicted whether participants would find the pilot guilty or not. In a second study using the same design as in the first study, we ensured that readers focused on different aspects of the dilemma depending on social distance.

Moral Intuitions and Moral Nativism

Moral nativism is a theory of moral cognition which holds that significant elements of human moral psychology are innate. In this invited chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology, I first summarize the intuitive turn in recent moral psychology and explain its significance for moral nativism. Drawing on an analogy to language, I then outline two principal arguments for moral nativism: the argument for moral grammar and the argument from the poverty of the moral stimulus. After making some terminological clarifications and correcting some popular misconceptions, I then review some of the most significant research supporting moral nativism, including empirical studies of compassion, empathy, and altruistic motivation in humans and other primates; the intuitive jurisprudence of young children; the emergence of moral cognition in human infants and toddlers; the neurocognitive foundations of moral judgment; and human moral universals. The chapter concludes by locating moral nativism within a broader historical and scientific context, including ancient philosophy (e.g., Plato’s Meno), Enlightenment rationalism (e.g., Descartes’ Treatise on Man), evolutionary theory (e.g., Darwin’s Descent of Man), and the modern cognitive science of innate knowledge.

“You can’t say that”

Abstract Why does our moral intuition tend to differ when a person uses deprecating speech towards her own affiliation group as opposed to an outer affiliation group? This paper offers a descriptive mapping of moral intuitions behind group self-deprecation (GSD) as stemming from two theoretical fields: pragmatics and standing. The first possible explanation to our moral intuition focuses on the moral flaw in the utterance of condemned (i.e., the person using GSD). Here, I argue our moral intuition suggests the group affiliation of the condemned affects the utterance’s pragmatic interpretation, thus affecting its offensiveness. An alternative explanation focuses on the critic. Here, I argue practices of standing lay behind the offhand rejection of critiques from outer-group members, regardless of their validity.

Moral intuitions predict pro-social behaviour in a climate commons game

The climate crisis and appeals to tackle it are often framed in moral terms, but few studies tested whether individual variation in moral intuitions correlate with pro-environmental behaviours that may affect the climate commons. In the present study we ask whether moral intuitions regarding harm (care and compassion), fairness, in-group loyalty, stance towards authority, and purity, as quantified by the Moral Foundations Theory, correlate with pro-environmental behaviours. Participants played 10 rounds of a public goods game framed as extraction of a mineral that affects climate commons negatively. We found that participants' extraction in the first round of the game was positively related to loyalty and authority moral foundations. Average extraction over all ten rounds of the game was negatively related to harm and positively related to loyalty moral foundations with small to moderate effect sizes. The fairness dimension was only weakly related to extraction in the first round and not related to average extraction over the entire game. Purity dimension did not relate to extraction neither in the first round nor on average. These results suggest that intrinsic factors such as moral intuitions are likely to play an important role in fostering pro-environmental behaviours to address the climate crisis.

Are Moral Intuitions Heritable?

Two prominent theoretical frameworks in moral psychology, Moral Foundations and Dual Process Theory, share a broad foundational assumption that individual differences in human morality are dispositional and in part due to genetic variation. The only published direct test of heritability, however, found little evidence of genetic influences on moral judgments using instrumentation approaches associated with Moral Foundations Theory. This raised questions about one of the core assumptions underpinning intuitionist theories of moral psychology. Here we examine the heritability of moral psychology using the moral dilemmas approach commonly used in Dual Process Theory research. Using such measures, we find consistent and significant evidence of heritability. These findings have important implications not only for understanding which measures do, or do not, tap into the genetically influenced aspects of moral decision-making, but in better establishing the utility and validity of different intuitionist theoretical frameworks and the source of why people differ in those frameworks.