Moral Preferences Research Articles

When and for Whom Moral Proximity Matters: Measuring the Economic and Moral Distances between Citizens and Candidates, and Their Effects on Voting

Substantively, this paper seeks to refine what we know about the weights placed by voters on House candidates' moral and economic preferences. Which voters value the moral and social positions of candidates more than or as much as candidate economic preferences? Results suggest that the traditional dominance ascribed to voters' economic concerns is misplaced. So that the economic and moral ideologies of candidates and voters can be directly compared, their preferences must be assessed on the same scale. Herein lies this paper's methodological contribution. 20 question across the 2004 ANES and NPAT adequately paralleled one another so as to make candidate and citizen responses directly comparable after some coding adjustments. Factor analysis of the merged dataset allows positioning of candidate and citizen ideal points along the same dimensions, making it possible to measure a representative's ideological proximity to her constituents as opposed to their ideological correlation. Such capabilities (i) permit investigating the representativeness of legislative outcomes, and (ii) provide some means of validating the assumptions of otherwise theoretic majority rule solution concepts such as the uncovered set and strong point.

At the Heart of Morality Lies Neuro-Visceral Integration: Lower Cardiac Vagal Tone Predicts Utilitarian Moral Judgment

Extensive research has examined the role of countervailing emotional and cognitive systems in moral judgment. We speculated that typical human moral judgments may rely on the integration of neural and visceral processes. Specifically, the present research examined whether moral judgment was associated with cardiac vagal tone, a physiological proxy for neuro-visceral integration. The traditional bipolar deontology-utilitarianism index was correlated with resting heart rate variability — an index of cardiac vagal tone — such that more utilitarian judgments were associated with lower heart rate variability. 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 heart rate variability. There results suggest that moral preferences may be sensitive to the functional integration of neural and visceral systems.

Disclosure Two Ways.

This article is an initial attempt to compare the pre-abortion disclosure mandates that have proliferated in the two decades since the Court decided Planned Parenthood v. Casey with laws that, in the context of assisted reproduction and reproductive health, require specific disclosures beyond a state's baseline informed consent requirements. While some scholars have characterized pre-abortion disclosure laws as sui generis, they share some important common features with disclosure mandates in the context of oocyte donation and other reproductive health procedures. This article suggests that in critiquing pre-abortion disclosure mandates, scholars and advocates should be careful to differentiate the use of disclosure laws in general from uses where the government interest conveys a moral preference against a particular procedure.

Testing models of information avoidance with binary choice dictator games

Standard social choice experiments generally force subjects to make decisions about giving money to another person, but the ability to avoid information outside of the lab could lead to less altruistic or fair behavior than such experiments tend to suggest. I expand on the design of Dana, Weber, and Kuang (2007) to better study information avoidance in an experimental setting. Subjects are given the chance to avoid information about a recipient’s payoffs in a dictator game. I vary the probability that a dictator’s payoffs will be aligned with the recipient’s in order to assess the role of beliefs on avoidance and test contradictory models. The within-subjects approach shows that even people who are generous in a stark choice will make self-serving decisions when they can avoid knowing the recipient’s outcome. People avoid information more often when the self-serving choice is unlikely to hurt the recipient, which supports Rabin’s model (1995) of moral rules and moral preferences.

Исследование нравственных предпочтений студентов инженерных специальностей

Исследование нравственных предпочтений студентов инженерных специальностей

Sealing animal welfare into the GATT exceptions: the international dimension of animal welfare in WTO disputes

AbstractEC–Seal Products has been characterized as a contest between local moral preferences about animal welfare, on the one hand, and global commitments to trade disciplines on the other. But that description fails to take into account the development of international legal norms concerning animal welfare and their relevance to this case, as well as to other potential disputes involving animal welfare measures that affect trade. The international dimension of animal welfare implicates two ongoing debates in international trade law: what the relationship should be between WTO law and general international law, and the extent to which ‘public morals’ under Article XX(a) of GATT can be locally defined or need to be internationally shared. This Article examines the argument that there is a general principle of international law concerning animal welfare, and analyzes the role that international norms regarding animal welfare should play in EC–Seal Products.

Religion and Redistributive Voting in Western Europe

Why some individuals, who would clearly benefit from redistribution, do not vote for parties offering redistributive policies is an old puzzle of redistributive politics. Recent work in political economy offers an explanation based on the interplay between religious identity and party policies. Strategic parties bundle conservative moral policies with anti-redistribution positions inducing individuals with a strong religious identity to vote based on moral rather than economic preferences. I test this theory using microlevel data on individuals’ vote choices in 24 recent multiparty elections in 15 Western European countries. I use an integrated model of religion, economic and moral preferences, and vote choice to show that religious individuals possess less liberal economic preferences, which shapes their vote choice against redistributive parties. This holds even for individuals who would clearly benefit from redistribution. Moreover, the redistributive vote of religious individuals is primarily based on...

Rethinking Finance: Responsible Investment in the European Asset Management Industry (A Dissertation)

This dissertation explores the notion of Rethinking Finance, in the form of questioning previously established beliefs and models. In particular, it examines the current evolution of the European Asset Management industry as increasing institutional pressures push organizations to change their business models and integrate sustainability into their traditional investment practices. This is manifested in the phenomenon of Responsible Investment (RI) – any type of consideration of Environmental, Social, Governance and Controversial Business Involvement issues within the investment process. The objective of this dissertation is two-fold: first, to examine the mechanisms underlying institutional change within the context of field-level institutional complexity and within a situation of transition, wherein organizations are embedded in a dominant logic while subject to pressures from a new, conflicting logic that does not bring with it theorized definitions or models of success and second, to provide an illustration of whether and how this rethinking is manifested within financial markets. This dissertation is composed of three standalone papers that address the aforementioned research objectives. Chapter 2. Institutional Complexity in a Transition Field: Responsible Investment in the European Asset Management Industry asks the question, how do organizations experience and respond to institutional complexity in a transition field? Through a qualitative, abductive, exploratory study, we find that in a situation of transition, organizations make sense of institutional complexity through logic assimilation, which has two core mechanisms, logic theorization and logic-archetype elaboration. This chapter also highlights the existence of an enabling organization, which facilitates logic assimilation. In Chapter 3. Responsible Investments: the Assimilation of Sustainability-related Sources of Risk, I investigate a dataset of European Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) mutual funds, providing evidence that (1) sustainability information and (2) moral preferences of clients have a significant relationship with financial risk and fund flow volatility, respectively, in substantive forms of RI. In Chapter 4. Rethinking Finance: Sustainability Governance in Responsible Investment, we investigate a similar dataset, focusing on sustainability governance practices (sustainability disclosure, sustainability activism, and sustainability research). We show in a first attempt that governance practices related to sustainability issues – often overlooked in the literatures – are value-relevant. These latter two chapters illustrate primary workings of how logic assimilation is manifested within financial markets. This dissertation incorporates the notions of conflicting logics, institutional embeddedness, and logic assimilation within previous work in the Social Studies of Finance, harmonizing complementary views from Institutional theory. It further goes beyond previous ethnographic and descriptive work and illustrates how such a reconceptualization of previously well-established beliefs perform markets and become manifested in financial models, thus providing an important empirical linkage between the experience of institutional complexity and actual practice change in financial markets.

The politics are personal: The Australian vs the Australian curriculum in history

This article reviews the relationship between the conservative newspaper The Australian and the development of a national history curriculum in Australia. The lead author surveyed the major Australian press in the five‐year period between 2007 and 2012 and found clear patterns of difference between The Australian and other press outlets in relation to education in general and history curriculum in particular. Using Jonathan Haidt%s five‐point model of moral values, the article analyses the behaviour of the press in Australia in relation to history education as a feature of moral preferences. Extending from this analysis, it then highlights a number of cases of press campaigns in The Australian targeted against individuals including one academic involved in the development of a national curriculum. The article demonstrates that a culture of aggressive conservatism exercised in this Murdoch press outlet reaches beyond the field of conventional political debate to constitute a serious and concerning influence in the dynamics of curriculum policy development.

ADAM SMITH AND THE MODERN SCIENCE OF ETHICS

Third-party decision-makers, orspectators, have emerged as a useful empirical tool in modern social science research on moral motivation. Spectators of a sort also serve a central role in Adam Smith's moral theory. This paper compares these two types of spectatorship with respect to their goals, methodologies, visions of human nature and emphasis on moral rules. I find important similarities and differences and conclude that this comparison suggests significant opportunities for philosophical ethics to inform empirical and theoretical research on moral preferences and vice versa.

Moral Foundations and Heterogeneity in Ideological Preferences

Scholars have documented numerous examples of how liberals and conservatives differ in considering public policy. Recent work in political psychology has sought to understand these differences by detailing the ways in which liberals and conservatives approach political and social issues. In their moral foundations theory, Haidt and Joseph contend the divisions between liberals and conservatives are rooted in different views of morality. They demonstrate that humans consistently rely on five moral foundations. Two of these foundations—harm and fairness—are often labeled the individualizing foundations, as they deal with the role of individuals within social groups; the remaining three foundations—authority, ingroup loyalty, and purity—are the binding foundations as they pertain to the formation and maintenance of group bonds. Graham, Haidt, and Nosek demonstrate that liberals tend to disproportionately value the individualizing foundations, whereas conservatives value all five foundations equally. We extend this line of inquiry by examining whether different types of liberals and conservatives value the moral foundations to varying degrees. Using survey data (n = 745), we rely on a mixed‐mode latent class analysis and identify six ideological classes that favor unique social and fiscal policy positions. While most of the respondents belonging to these classes self‐identify as conservative, they endorse the moral foundations in varying degrees. Since our findings demonstrate considerable heterogeneity with respect to ideology and moral preferences, we conclude by encouraging scholars to consider this heterogeneity in detailing the motivational and psychological foundations of ideological belief.

Individual Differences in Moral Behaviour: A Role for Response to Risk and Uncertainty?

Investigation of neural and cognitive processes underlying individual variation in moral preferences is underway, with notable similarities emerging between moral- and risk-based decision-making. Here we specifically assessed moral distributive justice preferences and non-moral financial gambling preferences in the same individuals, and report an association between these seemingly disparate forms of decision-making. Moreover, we find this association between distributive justice and risky decision-making exists primarily when the latter is assessed with the Iowa Gambling Task. These findings are consistent with neuroimaging studies of brain function during moral and risky decision-making. This research also constitutes the first replication of a novel experimental measure of distributive justice decision-making, for which individual variation in performance was found. Further examination of decision-making processes across different contexts may lead to an improved understanding of the factors affecting moral behaviour.

Judgement and Behaviour in the Prisoner's Dilemma: The Impact of Moral and Strategic Considerations

How do people perceive a social dilemma such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma if the problem is framed focusing entirely on monetary incentives – as commonly done in laboratory experiments? Focusing on the involved conflict between strategic and moral incentives, we designed a two-stage experiment to analyse both the subjects’ judgement (Part 1) and their behaviour (Part 2) in such a setting. In Part 1, we elicited the subjects’ preferences over the different outcomes in the Prisoner’s Dilemma from three different perspectives (moral, strategic, overall). In Part 2, conducted some months later, we let them decide on actions in the respective context. The data show that: (a) subjects can differentiate between moral and strategic incentives; (b) overall preferences are often a combination of moral and strategic preferences; (c) the subjects’ expressed preferences over outcomes are closely aligned with specific personal values; (d) actual behaviour in the lab is primarily determined by the subjects’ (pessimistic) first order beliefs. Moreover, the analysis suggests that while subjects have a more complex and, indeed, socially minded view on the incentive structure of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the common focus on monetary incentives and anonymity in economic lab experiments directs judgements and behaviour into a special and not necessarily realistic direction.

Comment on: Ethical dilemmas in antibiotic treatment

Sir, Leibovici et al. are addressing very important issues regarding the ethical dilemma in antimicrobial stewardship, such as the central question: whether we could and should value benefits in the distant future for unidentified patients as more important than benefits in the near future for an identified patient. However, some aspects in the argumentation by Leibovici et al. are problematic: (i) overlapping use of two ethical frameworks, i.e. utilitarianism and principlism; (ii) justifying the use of cost-effectiveness studies by only one ethical framework; and (iii) other ethical solutions to deal with this dilemma exist. (i) Generally, the use of different theoretical frameworks in approaching an ethical dilemma is to be encouraged because different frameworks may result in different solutions. But, importantly, one has to resolve inconsistencies that arise from using different frameworks. The two ethical approaches used by Leibovici et al. are principlism and utilitarianism. Principlism is based on the four moral principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. In contrast, the single goal of utilitarianism is to maximize ‘total utility’. The weakness in this article lies in emphasizing cost-effectiveness studies as a tool justified solely by utilitarianism while simultaneously relying on a principlistic framework. However, these two frameworks are mutually exclusive, because utilitarianism only allows one moral principle: maximizing total utility. On the other hand, principlism does not allow one of its four principles to become absolute. Thus, if cost-effectiveness studies are used as a normative instrument justified by utilitarianism, this conflicts with this tenet of principlism. When using cost-effectiveness as an operationalization of utilitarianism, respect for patient autonomy and justice is no longer a concern, as long as violations of patient autonomy and justice do not lead to a heavy loss of overall utility. The reason for this is that, in contrast to principlism, respect for autonomy and justice have no intrinsic value in utilitarianism. There are multiple theories of utilitarianism, however, and some modern versions of preference utilitarianism, e.g. the theory of Gesang, take secondary preferences, such as moral preferences, into account. If, for example, many persons wish to live in a healthcare system that always respects patient autonomy and demands informed consent, the current practice of antimicrobial stewardship would lead to a severe loss of utility, rendering the practice immoral from a utilitarian point of view. Thus, the concept of utility in utilitarianism is broader than just medical benefit. (ii) Leibovici et al. note that ‘The inclusion of costeffectiveness together with the most quoted principles of bioethics looks strange.’ While it is easier to argue for costeffectiveness within a utilitarian framework, cost-effectiveness as a means to solve an ethical dilemma can be supported by principlism as well. In fact, Beauchamp and Childress discuss cost-effectiveness as part of the principle of beneficence. What they point out, though, is that such quantitative methods may only function as auxiliary means in ethical decision-making and must not become a surrogate for decision-making. The important difference is that all four principles have to be specified and balanced. Moreover, if using principlism, the exception to the rule that Leibovici et al. introduced in the case of lifethreatening scenarios would not have to be an exception. It would be just a specification of the principle of non-maleficence, which very likely would have gained enough weight in principlistic balancing to be morally preferred to all other courses of action. So, the same result might have been possible in the argumentation without mixing conflicting ethical approaches. (iii) One could further ask if there is no possibility of reconciling the duties of non-maleficence or beneficence for unidentified patients with the duty of respect for autonomy for the actual patient. We suggest three considerations. First, analogously to tacit consent when being treated in a teaching hospital (possibly by junior doctors and residents) someone treated with antibiotics tacitly consents to non-maximum empirical treatment, as long as there is no life-threatening situation. Secondly, informed patients might accept non-maximal empirical coverage because of ethical reasoning. Thirdly, one could consider that nowadays, respect for patient autonomy already does not include the duty to do everything that a patient wishes. Specific broad-spectrum antibiotics might, as Leibovici et al. suggest, be regarded as a ‘scarce’ resource when being used for empirical treatment, and thus, these antibiotics would represent a treatment restricted to those needing it most, e.g. in transplantation. In summary, restricting universal coverage in empirical treatment can be justified within various ethical frameworks. Cost-effectiveness analysis as a measure to solve the ethical dilemma can be used in a utilitarianistic or principlistic ethical framework. In order to assess the dilemma in the patient– doctor relationship, empirical studies should be conducted addressing what patients would accept in terms of non-maximal Letters to the Editor

Moral Judgment Test (MJT) in Urdu: Translation and Validation

The present study was conducted as part of a larger study that aimed to compare moral judgment competence and moral preferences among Pakistani students of public and private sector educational institutes and religious institutes and also to measure the pattern of development of moral judgment competence of students within these institutes. The validation study completed in two phases, during the 1st phase data were collected from the students of grade 8 to 16 from public sector schools and colleges of Rawalpindi city. Very low mean c-score was observed (M = 13.60, SD = 9.05), the test came out to be valid on preference hierarchy criterion but its validity on the cognitive-affective parallelism and Quasi- simplex structure criteria could not be established due to low c-scores of the sample. In the second phase an additional sample from one private sector and two public sector universities was collected. The analysis of the combined sample (N = 246) showed no significant improvement of c-scores (M = 13.94, SD = 9.53). The test meets well the preference hierarchy criterion but on the other two criteria results remain inconclusive due to low variance in the sample. The low c-scores are explained on the basis of three assumptions; (1) poor quality of education, (2) dogmatic religiosity, and (3) weak and instable political structure of Pakistani society.

Morally Motivated Self-Regulation

Self-regulation is the private provision of public goods and private redistribution. This paper examines the scope of self-regulation motivated by altruistic moral preferences that are reciprocal and stronger the closer are citizens in a socioeconomic distance. The focus is on the role of organizations in increasing self-regulation by mitigating free-rider problems. Social label and certification organizations can expand the scope of self-regulation but not beyond that with unconditional altruism. Enforcement organizations expand the scope of self-regulation farther, and for-profit enforcement is more aggressive than non-profit enforcement. Enforcement through social pressure imposed by NGOs also expands the scope of self-regulation. (JEL D64, H41, L51)

Ethics Committee Membership Selection: A Moral Preference Tool

How the diversity of membership of research ethics committees is arrived at has, to date, largely been fairly arbitrary. However, a tool to help determine one's moral preference is now available and it is introduced here as, arguably, having the potential to assist with ensuring a more meaningful diversity amongst an ethics committee's membership. The tool is seen to be easily applied – but, it is argued, may be conceived on at least two false premises. Firstly, despite different theories of ethics, none can be proved to give the ‘right’ answer other than in its own terms. Secondly, if there is an ethical hierarchy, as the model suggests, then ethical diversity must become redundant for the possibility of achieving ethical excellence.

Freiheit in Deutschland: Wettbewerb der Staaten, Einfluss der Kirche, amerikanisches Erbe – Versuch einer historischen Erklärung – / Freedom in Germany: Interjurisdictional Competition, the Influence of the Church, and the American Heritage – Sketch of a Historical Explanation

Zusammenfassung Der Aufsatz versucht das schwierige Verhältnis der Deutschen zur Freiheit mit ihren historischen Erfahrungen und den geographischen Gegebenheiten zu erklären. Wenn die Freiheit, der wissenschaftlich-technische Fortschritt und die industrielle Revolution in Europa - kurz: “das europäische Wunder” - auf die politische Fragmentierung und den Wettbewerb zwischen den Herrschern zurückzuführen war, würde man erwarten, dass dieses “Wunder” vor allem von Deutschland - dem am stärksten fragmentierten Sprachraum - ausgegangen wäre. Führend waren jedoch zumeist andere Länder. Der Aufsatz zeigt, dass der Wettbewerb der Fürsten auch in Deutschland der Freiheit und der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung förderlich war; gleichzeitig gab es jedoch Sonderfaktoren, die retardierend wirkten. Dazu gehörte die prekäre Lage in der Mitte des Kontinents und der Mangel an natürlichen Grenzen, welche viele verlustreiche Kriege zur Folge hatten. Je zersplitterter die weltliche Macht, desto einflussreicher ist überdies die Kirche. Das Verhältnis der Kirche zur wirtschaftlichen Freiheit ist ambivalent. Was die Deutschen von ihren Nachbarn unterscheidet, ist daher der tiefe Zwiespalt zwischen den freiheitlichen Anforderungen der äußeren Verhältnisse und ihren historisch geprägten Wertvorstellungen. Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg übernahm (West -) Deutschland von den Amerikanern zahlreiche Elemente einer freiheitlichen Wirtschaftspolitik. Die Analyse zeigt, dass das amerikanische Erbe nur in zwei dieser sieben Politikbereiche bewahrt wurde.

Parental Refusal to Terminate Pregnancy in face of a Strongly Negative Prognosis of Neonatal Viability

During the last few years, several maternity departments in Paris hospitals have registered an increasing number of parental refusals to terminate pregnancies on the basis of foetal abnormality. These refusals have provoked disagreement and tension between parents and medical staff within the departments in question. The present contribution will endeavour to advance a number of ethical arguments and an analysis of these moral dilemmas with a view to justifying the need to fully account for the moral preferences of the parents who refuse to have their pregnancy interrupted.

Seeing the Other Side of the Coin: (Re)Constructing the Normative Flipside to Marx’s Sociology.

This paper argues that, Marx’s insistences notwithstanding, there is an ethical core to Marx’s critique of capitalism. I attempt to establish this claim through presenting salient points of Marx’s critique. From this basis, I move on to discuss Marx’s conception of human nature and the way in which it is typically frustrated under pre-communist societies. This frustration is the basis for a moral preference for communism. After pausing briefly to consider the possible criticism that this moral preference is mere ideology, I conclude with the normative heart of the matter. This is addressed by underscoring principal similarities between Marx’s work and Aristotle’s ethical project, insofar as each comprehends an intuitive description of the good life and an analysis of the prerequisites for obtaining it. A grasp of this similarity opens the door to understanding the normative flip side of Marx’s intellectual project.