Moral Preferences Research Articles

Why dishonest job seekers are attracted by Corporate Social Performance.

Although past research investigates how job seekers react to information about a firm’s Corporate Social Performance (CSP), an unexplored question is whether CSP is more (or less) likely to attract employees that behave according to higher ethical standards. Focusing on individual propensity towards dishonesty we offer the first systematic evaluation of how CSP contributes to the moral preferences of the workforce that an organization attracts. Contributing to research on the micro-level processes that explain job seekers attraction to CSP, the study shows that, contrary to current accounts, organizations promoting social and environmental programs are equally attractive to both honest and dishonest job seekers. Furthermore, the mediating mechanisms linking CSP to organizational attractiveness are systematically different for individuals with different propensity towards honest behavior and the impact of CSP signaling on attractiveness is moderated by extrinsic attributions only for individuals with high propensity for honest behavior. Finally, we hypothesize and show that dishonest job seekers are attracted to CSP because of a social signaling mechanism that is especially valuable for them; the association with a firm promoting CSP is a way to disguise individual predatory tendencies and ensure that dishonest prospects are trusted by others in social interactions.

Individual differences in the early recognition of moral information in lexical processing: An event-related potential study

Previous studies have shown that intuitive moral cognition occurs at an early stage. However, inconsistent findings indicate that moral information is recognized at a relatively late stage. This study uses the recognition potential (RP) as a neural index and simultaneously measures individuals’ moral preferences using the Moral Foundation Questionnaire. We aim to investigate how individual differences in moral preferences modulate the processing of morality in the pre-semantic stage and provide some insights to explain the variation in rapid information processing linked to morality. The participants performed an implicit task in which recognizable words depicting geographical names or behaviors related to moral, disgusting or neutral content alternated with background stimuli at high rates of presentation. The results showed that the early recognition of moral information manifested in the RP depended on an individual’s moral concerns. Participants with a higher level of endorsement of the harm/care foundation exhibited a greater net moral effect, namely, greater mean amplitudes of the moral-neutral RP difference waves. Meanwhile, only the group that was more sensitive to the harm/care foundation showed a distinctively larger RP for the moral words than for the neutral words. Overall, these findings suggest that the early processing of moral cognition may hinge on individual differences in moral concerns about other people’s suffering.

Moral transgressions corrupt neural representations of value.

Moral systems universally prohibit harming others for personal gain. However, we know little about how such principles guide moral behavior. Using a task that assesses the financial cost participants ascribe to harming others versus themselves, we probed the relationship between moral behavior and neural representations of profit and pain. Most participants displayed moral preferences, placing a higher cost on harming others than themselves. Moral preferences correlated with neural responses to profit, where participants with stronger moral preferences had lower dorsal striatal (DS) responses to profit gained from harming others. Lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) encoded profits gained from harming others, but not self, and tracked the blameworthiness of harmful choices. Moral decisions also modulated functional connectivity between LPFC and the profit-sensitive region of DS. The findings suggest moral behavior in our task is linked to a neural devaluation of reward realized by a prefrontal modulation of striatal value representations.

Axiologies: Past and Present Concepts of Literary Value

AbstractVerdicts concerning a work’s worth, “good,” “bad,” or “great,” vary wildly at any point and change radically over time. Much depends on what didactic or aesthetic rules are imposed and what modes of reading hold sway. Many critics see the purpose of literature as didactic; others subscribe to the principle of art for art’s sake. We need to know whether we are debating a text or disputing the evaluative criteria applicable to it. We need to ask how certain we are of what the author meant to accomplish. Henry Fielding and David Hume remind us that a range of judgments is unavoidable: people differ, and so do aesthetic and moral preferences. So if subjectivity is inescapable, we should accept chaotic diversity in a spirit of courteous toleration.

A closer look at intergroup threat within the dual process model framework: The mediating role of moral foundations

In our study we investigated how right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) are related to perceived intergroup threat, and also tested the potential mediating role of individualizing and binding moral foundations within this relationship pattern. According to our results, both RWA and SDO enhanced the perceived threat related to immigration. Furthermore, the effect of SDO was partly mediated by individualizing moral foundations, while the effect of RWA was partly mediated by both kinds of moral foundations. It seems that perceived intergroup threat, at least to some extent, is influenced by personal moral preferences that can be derived from individual dispositions and motivations.

Satisfaction Guaranteed: When Moral Hazard Meets Moral Preferences

The fear of moral hazard—especially in the age of internet commerce—can depress or prevent profitable trades. Experiments show, however, that many people prefer honesty to deceit and would not succumb to moral hazard. This paper asks whether we can find a simple, voluntary institution that can empower moral traders, drive out amoral ones, reduce moral hazard, and restore profitable trade to markets. I find that selling goods with a “satisfaction guarantee,” accompanied by potentially minor legal or reputational enforcement, allows moral preferences to defeat moral hazard. (JEL C91, D63, D82, Z13)

Individual Differences in Moral Disgust Do Not Predict Utilitarian Judgments, Sexual and Pathogen Disgust Do

The role of emotional disgust and disgust sensitivity in moral judgment and decision-making has been debated intensively for over 20 years. Until very recently, there were two main evolutionary narratives for this rather puzzling association. One of the models suggest that it was developed through some form of group selection mechanism, where the internal norms of the groups were acting as pathogen safety mechanisms. Another model suggested that these mechanisms were developed through hygiene norms, which were piggybacking on pathogen disgust mechanisms. In this study we present another alternative, namely that this mechanism might have evolved through sexual disgust sensitivity. We note that though the role of disgust in moral judgment has been questioned recently, few studies have taken disgust sensitivity to account. We present data from a large sample (N = 1300) where we analyzed the associations between The Three Domain Disgust Scale and the most commonly used 12 moral dilemmas measuring utilitarian/deontological preferences with Structural Equation Modeling. Our results indicate that of the three domains of disgust, only sexual disgust is associated with more deontological moral preferences. We also found that pathogen disgust was associated with more utilitarian preferences. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Individual’s Characteristics and Ethical Financial Reporting Choice

<p>The aim of this study is to examine the influence of individuals’ characteristics such as cognitive moral development, idealism, machiavellianism, deontology, and risk preference on the ethical financial reporting choice. The accountant profession cannot be separated from many ethical considerations that have been set with the professional ethics, and the professional ethics will be closely related with the individuals to consider how far they have applied those professional ethics, thus this research aims to identify whether the individuals’ characteristics influence the ethical financial reporting choice. This research is expected to be an important reference in the development of accounting knowledge particularly that which is related with the ethical-based financial reporting. Total sample of 56 respondent were used for this study. Primary data gained through questionnaires were analyzed using logistic regression model. The findings of this study showed that risk preference had negatively significant influence on ethical financial reporting choice, while cognitive moral development, idealism, machiavellianism, and deontology had no significant effect on ethical financial reporting choice.</p>

Sally Yates, Ronald Dworkin, and the Best View of the Law

What interests me, as a scholar of legal ethics and jurisprudence, is whether Yates got it right when she said the responsibility of a lawyer for the government is to seek justice and stand for what is right, and that the position of the Department of Justice should be informed by the lawyer’s best view of the law. Yates’s claim that legal advice should be informed by the best view of the law sounds very much like the position of Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin argued that a judge should determine the legal rights and duties of the litigants by constructing the best possible interpretation of the principles of justice, fairness, and procedural due process, all considered from the standpoint of the community’s political morality. The judge’s interpretation must fit with past legal decisions, but its aim is also to show the community’s legal practices in their best moral light. I do not know whether Yates was thinking about Dworkin when she wrote her letter, but I wish to use this Essay to seek to persuade legal advisors—whether for the government or a private client— that their role is not to construct an interpretation of the law that represents the best constructive interpretation of political morality but rather to serve as agents of their client. There are several reasons that lawyers should not be Dworkinian interpreters, but this Essay will concentrate on two. First, Dworkin’s jurisprudential vision has always sat uncomfortably with moral pluralism. Dworkin denies that his imaginary Judge Hercules merely imposes his own moral preferences under the guise of offering a legal interpretation. He insists that Hercules instead provides the best account of the community’s political morality. But he has very little to say about the possibility that a faithful reconstruction of the community’s moral principles will potentially establish multiple moral narratives bearing on the same question of legal interpretation. The American experience with immigration shows that, as a political com-munity, we have a remarkable capacity for tolerating both expansive executive power and discrimination on the basis of nationality (and, as demonstrated by the George W. Bush Administration, possibly discrimination on the basis of religion). As a community we also have become increasingly tolerant of strong executive power, but in the immigration context the president’s plenary power goes back more than a century, to the Chinese Exclusion Case. Litigation after the September 11 attacks set some limits on the president’s power, but left in place the deference given to the executive branch by the other branches on matters pertaining to national security. A program called the National Security Entry Exit Registration System (NSEERS), established by the Bush Administration, required the registration, fingerprinting, and questioning of aliens present in the United States from Muslim-majority countries, who were males over the age of sixteen. Courts sustained the registry features of the NSEERS program against due process and equal protection challenges, claims that the program amounted to racial profiling, and arguments regarding lack of statutory authorization for the program. That is not the only story, but it is certainly an aspect of our political morality that sits alongside the antidiscrimination norms articulated in the Constitution and numerous judicial opinions. What is a lawyer modeling herself on Judge Hercules to do when seeking the best view of the law?

Utilitarian preferences or action preferences? De-confounding action and moral code in sacrificial dilemmas

A large literature in moral psychology investigates utilitarian versus deontological moral preferences using sacrificial dilemmas (e.g., the Trolley Problem) in which one can endorse harming one person for the greater good. The validity of sacrificial dilemma responses as indicators of one's preferred moral code is a neglected topic of study. One underexplored cause for concern is that standard sacrificial dilemmas confound the endorsement of specific moral codes with the endorsement of action such that endorsing utilitarianism always requires endorsing action. Two studies show that, after de-confounding these factors, the tendency to endorse action appears about as predictive of sacrificial dilemma responses as one's preference for a particular moral code, suggesting that, as commonly used, sacrificial dilemma responses are poor indicators of moral preferences. Interestingly however, de-confounding action and moral code may provide a more valid means of inferring one's preferred moral code.

Two Hearts Believing in Just One Mind? The Humanistic Management Network and the Global Ethic Project

It is drearily fashionable to criticise the business community for its chronic refusal to take values - beyond the bottom line - seriously. A more honest investigation of the phenomenon of moral bankruptcy in global business and finance, however, reveals that a prior crisis among humanists - widespread denial of the very existence and even desirablility of universal values - predates the financial crises and big business scandals of recent decades, and deserves a healthy portion of the blame for them. Opposition to this quest for common values takes many forms, principled as well as practical. Values, it is commonly argued, belong in the realm of individual freedom; organisations, including corporations, have no business trying to impose moral preferences on their employees. The only solution fit for the 21st Century, with its highly differentiated and increasingly global labour markets, is, on the standard neoliberal account, to leave individuals alone to pursue their own conceptions of the good life on the condition that they display a minimum of respect for the rule of law within the organisations in which they operate. Such ethical minimalism, however, leaves a society more or less defenceless against the excesses of its most powerful actors, which today most certainly include multinational corporations. Without demanding higher, global standards of ethical responsibility beyond mimimum legal compliance, a ‘race to the bottom’ among business actors desperate for survival is, and has been, the inevitable result of this total abandonment of higher humanistic principles. The reintroduction of Basic Trust, necessary for all ethical behaviour, into the system in which global managers operate - an impossible task without turning to an updated global patrimony of humanistic learning - is the common goal of the Humanistic Management Network and the Global Ethic Project. This brief paper critically explores the paths to reform proposed by the two movements, and shows how each can play an important supporting role in helping the other to achieve its main goals.

Personhood Amendments after Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt

Over the past six years, pro-life advocates have used Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws and state-level constitutional personhood amendments to end abortion. The Supreme Court’s recent opinion in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt suggests that the TRAP strategy will give way to a greater push for personhood amendments. This is so for three reasons. First, Whole Woman’s Health undermined the woman’s-health basis for TRAP laws, and may encourage advocates to refocus their efforts on fetal rights. Second, Whole Woman’s Health limited the types of statute that can survive judicial scrutiny, but left constitutional amendments untouched. Third, with TRAP laws under attack, the pro-life movement’s only other sustained, institutional strategy is to push personhood amendments.Whole Woman’s Health also reinforced the Planned Parenthood v. Casey undue burden test. The law around abortion rights, therefore, has become less favorable to pro-life advocates. The fight over reproductive rights will thus become more overtly political. Because personhood amendments are broad and vague enough not to be facially unconstitutional, and because they engage voters’ social and moral preferences, they represent the political future of the pro-life movement. Advocates would, therefore, do well to concentrate on the political aspects of personhood amendments. This article illuminates those political aspects by analyzing the 2014 campaign against North Dakota’s personhood amendment, which is broadly representative of past and probably future campaigns, from three vantage points. Historically, it places North Dakota’s campaign in the context of the post-Roe v. Wade fight over abortion rights and the probable effect of Whole Woman’s Health. Legally, it analyzes the salient legal issues arising from the amendment and its possible impacts, most importantly on reproductive rights, end-of-life care, and in vitro fertilization. Politically, the article reports the results of a survey the author performed, which details why the North Dakota amendment failed so decisively at the ballot box. Whole Woman’s Health may signal a new era for reproductive rights; it will certainly mean that personhood amendments become more attractive to pro-life advocates. This article provides the insight necessary to understand that shift.

At the heart of morality lies neuro-visceral integration: lower cardiac vagal tone predicts utilitarian moral judgment.

To not harm others is widely considered the most basic element of human morality. The aversion to harm others can be either rooted in the outcomes of an action (utilitarianism) or reactions to the action itself (deontology). We speculated that the human moral judgments rely on the integration of neural computations of harm and visceral reactions. The present research examined whether utilitarian or deontological aspects of moral judgment are associated with cardiac vagal tone, a physiological proxy for neuro-visceral integration. We investigated the relationship between cardiac vagal tone and moral judgment by using a mix of moral dilemmas, mathematical modeling and psychophysiological measures. An index of bipolar deontology-utilitarianism was correlated with resting heart rate variability (HRV)-an index of cardiac vagal tone-such that more utilitarian judgments were associated with lower HRV. Follow-up analyses using process dissociation, which independently quantifies utilitarian and deontological moral inclinations, provided further evidence that utilitarian (but not deontological) judgments were associated with lower HRV. Our results suggest that the functional integration of neural and visceral systems during moral judgments can restrict outcome-based, utilitarian moral preferences. Implications for theories of moral judgment are discussed.

AGGREGATING MORAL PREFERENCES

Abstract:Preference-aggregation problems arise in various contexts. One such context, little explored by social choice theorists, is metaethical. ‘Ideal-advisor’ accounts, which have played a major role in metaethics, propose that moral facts are constituted by the idealized preferences of a community of advisors. Such accounts give rise to a preference-aggregation problem: namely, aggregating the advisors’ moral preferences. Do we have reason to believe that the advisors, albeit idealized, can still diverge in their rankings of a given set of alternatives? If so, what are the moral facts (in particular, the comparative moral goodness of the alternatives) when the advisors do diverge? These questions are investigated here using the tools of Arrovian social choice theory.

Three paradigms for the analysis of corruption

In the last decades a growing awareness emerged of the relevance of corruption as an hidden factor which may negatively affect political and economic decision-making processes. In spite of a lively scientific debate there is no general consensus on a commonly accepted definition of what corruption is. The A. distinguishes three main paradigms, focusing on different (though not irreconcilable) variables. The first is the economic paradigm, which usually takes the principal-agent model of corruption as its founding pillar. In this paradigm corruption is considered the outcome of rational individual choices, and its spread within a certain organization is influenced by the factors defining the structure of expected costs and rewards. A second approach – the cultural paradigm – looks at the differences in cultural traditions, social norms and interiorized values which shape individuals’ moral preferences and consideration of his social and institutional role. These are a leading forces that can push a corrupt public or private agent (not) to violate legal norms. A third neo-institutional approach considers also mechanisms which allow the internal regulation of social interactions within corrupt networks, and their effects on individuals’ beliefs and preferences. Though the corrupt agreements cannot be enforced with legal sanctions, several informal, non-written rules, contractual provisos and conventions may regulate the corrupt exchange between agent and corruptor. The A. underlines that corruption is the outcome of a multitude of individual and collective choices which change public opinion towards corruption and its diffusion throughout the state, markets and civil society. There is no univocal recipe to deal with anti-bribery measures, since corruption is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. Reforms aimed at dismantling systemic corruption have to be finely tuned against its hidden governance structures, i.e. its internal regulation of exchanges and relationships. Otherwise, a vicious circle may emerge: the more an anti-corruption policy is needed, because corruption is systemic and enforced by effective third-parties, the less probable its formulation and implementation. Only when official rules are complemented by coherent informal institutions, bottom-up initiatives, they tend to produce the expected outcomes and make anticorruption regulation more effective.

Politics and Morality in State Abortion Policy

AbstractThe number and variety of state policies regulating abortion each year is increasing. Opponents of abortion adopted a strategy of “legal but inaccessible” that has resulted in the passage of more than 700 state laws since the early 1990s. Despite being a very active area of policy making, we lack a coherent explanation for the proliferation of abortion policy. Scholars studying different policies at discrete moments in time have come to conflicting conclusions about how well theories of morality policy and representation explain abortion policy. Using an original dataset comprised of a near-universe of pro- and anti-abortion rights policy from 1973 to 2013, I establish the ways in which partisan control of the government and the moral preferences of constituents shape state policy. I find that anti-abortion rights policies are well explained by both theories but that pro-abortion rights policies are not well explained as a morality policy or with descriptive representation. In addition, I show the heterogeneous effect of representation across anti-abortion rights policies; Democratic women and governors decrease the probability of only certain anti-abortion rights policies.

Do ethical investors want purity or effectiveness? An exploratory study on the ethical preferences of mutual fund investors

This article relates the result of an exploratory survey aimed at better understanding the ethical preferences of individuals invested in so-called ethical or socially responsible investment (SRI) profiled mutual funds. In order to get an insight into the moral preferences of investors, a range of questions and dilemmas were formulated to determine respondents’ agreement with one of two more stringent philosophical perspectives: the moral purity and moral effectiveness perspectives. Our results indicate that investors support both perspectives but have difficulties in choosing between them in ethical dilemmas. For financial services providers, this confusion among investors represents a major challenge in setting up and managing an ethical or socially responsible investment service. In essence, providers are faced with the task of deciding which strategies and methods that should be used in the ethical investment service, even though many customers may not know which ones they prefer.

중학생들의 도덕적 감수성과 과학 선호도 및 과학학습에 대한 신념과의 상관관계

중학생들의 도덕적 감수성과 과학 선호도 및 과학학습에 대한 신념과의 상관관계

Why Procreative Preferences May be Moral - And Why it May not Matter if They Aren't.

There has been much argument over whether procreative selection is obligatory or wrong. Rebecca Bennett has recently challenged the assumption that procreative choices are properly moral choices, arguing that these views express mere preferences. This article challenges Bennett's view on two fronts. First, I argue that the Non-Identity Problem does not show that there cannot be harmless wrongs - though this would require us to abandon the intuitively attractive 'person-affecting principle', that may be a lesser cost than abandoning some more firmly-held intuition. But, even if we accept Bennett's claim that these choices are not moral, that does not show them to be mere personal preferences. I argue that there is a class of non-moral 'categorical preferences' that have much the same implications as moral preferences. If a moral preference for able-bodied children is problematic (as Bennett claims), then so is a non-moral categorical preference. Thus, showing that these preferences are not moral does not show that they are not problematic, since they may still be categorical.

Moral motivation in defending classmates victimized by bullying

The study addresses factors that relate to defending of classmates victimized by bullying in early adolescence. Specifically, it examines whether moral motivation—measured as a combination of emotion attributions and their justifications in response to a hypothetical transgression—predicts defending in context of gender, social preference, perceived popularity and teacher support. We gathered single-time-point data on a sample of 512 sixth-graders (aged 11–13 years). A three-step hierarchical regression analysis showed that defending was positively predicted by: (1) moral motivation, when gender, social preference, perceived popularity and teacher support were accounted for; (2) interaction between moral motivation and social preference, when all other independent variables were accounted for. Simple slopes indicated that increased social preference strengthened the link between moral motivation and defending. The full model explained 40.5% of the variance in defending. The findings underscore the relevance of morality and its interplay with social preference in understanding defending.