WARNING: Strong Stomach Required!
This is Lizzo. I have criticized her boorish, unladylike, impulsive, and self-depreciating antics in the public many times. Whenever I do, there are black men and women who jump to her defense, blind to the negative image she is projecting. Insomuch as black women, it's not a shock, since most of them think and believe that black women re incapable of doing anything wrong, and are thus, immune to constructive criticism and valid moral judgments. What's more, they have lost all notions, ideas, concepts, and appreciation for classy behavior...and want black men to accept them--as-is. I refuse.
**** their feelings.
Moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.
All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method . . .
George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss. Here, the realist novelist is protesting against over-simple moral judgments.
Thread: “Are there eulogizers of science out of blind-faith? ”
Forum:Debating Christianity and Religion Forum Index -> Science and Religion
Post 23: ———-wrote: [Replying to post 16 by paarsurrey1]
This is the science and religion sub forum. In the sticky posting the rules for debate one is required to substantiate claims. Perhaps, random ramblings, apologetics , or faith,doctine…
“It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.”
From “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” in Scenes of Clerical Life, by George Eliot (1858).
Eric Luis Uhlmann et. al., A Person-Centered Approach to Moral Judgment, 10 Persp Psychological Sci 72 (2015)
Abstract
Both normative theories of ethics in philosophy and contemporary models of moral judgment in psychology have focused almost exclusively on the permissibility of acts, in particular whether acts should be judged on the basis of their material outcomes (consequentialist ethics) or on the basis of rules, duties, and obligations (deontological ethics). However, a longstanding third perspective on morality, virtue ethics, may offer a richer descriptive account of a wide range of lay moral judgments. Building on this ethical tradition, we offer a person-centered account of moral judgment, which focuses on individuals as the unit of analysis for moral evaluations rather than on acts. Because social perceivers are fundamentally motivated to acquire information about the moral character of others, features of an act that seem most informative of character often hold more weight than either the consequences of the act or whether a moral rule has been broken. This approach, we argue, can account for numerous empirical findings that are either not predicted by current theories of moral psychology or are simply categorized as biases or irrational quirks in the way individuals make moral judgments.
There is a growing body of evidence that individuals are fundamentally motivated to evaluate others on a moral dimension—people quickly and easily attribute morally good or bad traits to others, and they often do so early in an interaction and with limited information (Goodwin, Piazza, & Rozin, 2014; Todorov, Said, Engell, & Oosterhof, 2008). However, most theoretical approaches in moral psychology have focused on the question of how individuals come to believe that certain acts are right or wrong (we refer to these as act-based theories). In contrast, in what follows, we outline a person-centered account of moral judgment (see also Pizarro & Tannenbaum, 2011), arguing that current act-based theories in moral psychology provide an incomplete account of moral judgment to the extent that they do not include the fundamental human motivation to determine the moral character of others. Simply stated, when making moral evaluations, it appears as if individuals are often not asking themselves the question “is this act right or wrong?” but rather are asking themselves “is this person good or bad?”
The person-centered approach we propose places renewed emphasis on the motivation to evaluate the character of others, arguing that it can account for a number of recent empirical findings that appear puzzling or irrational when viewed from the perspective of act-centered approaches. Specifically, we present evidence that judgments of a person’s underlying moral character can be empirically distinguished from judgments about the rightness or wrongness of an act (as demonstrated by evidence that judgments of acts can be dissociated from judgments of character) and that certain transgressions elicit especially negative reactions not because they are unusually wrong in-and-of-themselves, but because they are seen as highly diagnostic of an individual’s moral character. The process of arriving at a moral judgment, then, is often more influenced by what the action reflects about an agent’s moral character than by the degree of harm the act caused or whether the act violates a set of moral rules. In short, there is growing evidence that when it comes to moral judgment, human beings appear to be best characterized not as intuitive deontologists or consequentialists but as intuitive virtue theorists: individuals who view acts as a rich set of signals about the moral qualities of an agent and not as the endpoint of moral judgment.
In what follows, we defend a specific set of claims regarding the centrality of character evaluation in moral judgment. Namely, we argue that (a) individuals are motivated to assess the character of others and not just the rightness or wrongness of an act; (b) some acts are perceived as more informative of an individual’s moral character than others and are, therefore, weighed heavily in moral judgments; (c) moral evaluations of acts and character can diverge, resulting in act–person dissociations; (d) judgments of moral character can infuse a host of other judgments that are central to moral evaluations (e.g., judgments of intentionality, agency, and blame); and (e) a number of recent empirical findings demonstrating apparent inconsistencies in moral judgment may be better interpreted as reasonable for an individual motivated to assess the character of an agent rather than as simple “errors” of moral judgment.
The Person as a Naive Virtue Theorist
Although the goal of moral psychology is to shed light on the questions of how and why individuals make judgments about moral right and wrong, not on how individuals ought to make these judgments, psychological theories of morality have traditionally relied a great deal on normative ethical theories as a point of departure for understanding moral judgment. In particular, theories in moral psychology have been influenced by two of the most dominant theories of normative ethics within the last century—consequentialism and deontology. Both of these theories specify a procedure for determining the morality of an act. Consequentialist theories hold that an act is right or wrong solely on the basis of whether it maximizes good outcomes (typically along quantifiable metrics, such as happiness, resources spent, or lives saved; Smart & Williams, 1973), whereas deontological theories hold that an act is right or wrong on the basis of whether it adheres to a set of rules, duties, and obligations viewed as foundational to morality (and can be wrong despite bringing about the best consequences; e.g., Kant, 1796/2002). Both of these theories focus fundamentally on acts as the unit of analysis. That is, the rightness or wrongness of an action is taken as independent of contextual features, such as the history of the individual or the decision-making context. (Consequentialism, for instance, would hold that an act is wrong if it brings about negative consequences, regardless of who is taking the action.)
The most influential descriptive accounts of moral psychology have been fundamentally shaped by these normative ethical traditions. For instance, the theories of Piaget (1932)and Kohlberg (1969) were based largely on deontological normative ethical theories (e.g., Kant, 1796/2002; Rawls, 2005). For Kohlberg, for instance, individuals were characterized as moving from the belief that something was right or wrong on the basis of conventional standards to a more “mature” morality in which they understood morality as fundamentally about deontological moral principles (such as justice). In contrast to these developmental approaches, another set of researchers studying moral judgment built on the consequentialist normative tradition by focusing on the degree to which individuals make moral decisions on the basis of the consequences of an action and under what conditions they seem to hold beliefs that are insensitive to consequences (e.g., Alter, Kernochan, & Darley, 2007; Baron, 1994; Darley, Carlsmith, & Robinson, 2000; Darley, Solan, Kugler, & Sanders, 2010; Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001).
However, there is another ethical tradition in which persons (and not just actions) are placed as the crucial unit of analysis for determining right and wrong (e.g., Aristotle, 4th Century B.C.E./1998; Hume, 1739/1888). These person-based approaches to normative ethics emphasize the character of the agent. Hume, for instance, wrote the following:“[A]ctions are by their very nature temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some cause in the character and disposition of the person . . . [he] is not responsible for it: and as it proceeded from nothing in him, that is durable or constant, and leaves nothing of that nature behind it, ’tis impossible he can, upon its account, become the object of punishment or vengeance.” (Hume, 1739/1888, as cited in Sripada, 2010, pp. 162–163)
As Hobart (1934, p. 18) wrote regarding Hume’s perspective, “Morality has its eye upon acts, but an act is fleeting, it cannot be treasured and cherished. A quality can be, it lasts.”
These virtue-based normative ethical approaches may provide a better descriptive fit with the psychology of individuals than deontology and consequentialism in their central emphasis that morality is best understood at the level of persons rather than acts and that perceived morality is fundamentally about possessing the right sorts of traits. It appears as if the mind is well equipped to make inferences about traits—especially traits that fall along the moral dimension. There is a great deal of evidence that individuals can make these inferences spontaneously and automatically, that the ability to make such evaluations emerges early in development, and that (despite some variability) people across cultures engage in similar sorts of evaluations (Choi & Nisbett, 1998; Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007; Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007; Kuhlmeier, Wynn, & Bloom, 2003; Lieberman, Jarcho, & Obayashi, 2005; Todorov & Uleman, 2003; Willis & Todorov, 2006). Moreover, it appears that evaluating others on the dimensions of trustworthiness and warmth is something that individuals do almost immediately (Bar, Neta, & Linz, 2006; Fiske et al., 2007; Todorov et al., 2008). Individuals seek information about the moral traits of others through the exchange of social gossip (Foster, 2004) and by looking for emotional signals (Ames & Johar, 2009) and patterns of behavior that may indicate the presence of positive or negative underlying traits (Rand, Dreber, Ellingsen, Fudenberg, & Nowak, 2009; Schweitzer, Hershey, & Bradlow, 2006).
What sorts of traits fall along the dimension of moral character? Although lay conceptions of moral character are complex and multifaceted (Walker & Hennig, 2004), there is wide consensus that people view personal integrity and empathy as core components of moral character (Aquino & Reed, 2002; Lapsley & Lasky, 2001; Walker & Hennig, 2004; Walker & Pitts, 1998; Wojciszke, Dowhyluk, & Jaworski, 1998). Cues that a person possesses a stable set of traits regarding personal integrity (i.e., trustworthiness and fair treatment of others; Walker & Hennig, 2004) are of value because they suggest that a person can be relied on to act cooperatively in the future. A lack of trustworthiness suggests that a person will defect in joint endeavors when it suits his or her self-interest, and unfair treatment suggests that he or she will not divide resources equitably. Likewise, the sorts of emotional reactions that seem to indicate care and concern (such as empathic reactions) may be seen as valuable indicators that a person is genuinely motivated toward prosocial action (and would feel constraint against harming others).
There is support that these empathic traits may, in fact, serve as reliable indicators of future behavior—deficits in empathy are a hallmark of antisocial tendencies, and avoiding individuals with such tendencies is obviously beneficial (Becker, Stuewig, Herrera, & McCloskey, 2004; Haidt, 2001; Walton-Moss, Mangello, Frye, & Campbell, 2005). Even young children are sensitive to this fact when seeking moral counsel, preferring an intellectually deficient but emotionally healthy adult rather than vice versa (Danovitch & Keil, 2008). An action that signals an individual may have a deficit in empathy would serve as a very useful source of social information.
Perceived Informational Value, Moral Character, and Moral Blame
In setting the stage for a person-centered account of moral judgment, we have argued that individuals are motivated to assess the presence of a broad set of traits in others. However, what makes a particular behavior subjectively informative about underlying traits? The subjective informational value of any particular behavior (i.e., the probability increase that a behavioral cue provides toward making a strong inference; Nelson, 2005; Nelson, McKenzie, Cottrell, & Sejnowski, 2010) has been shown to depend on a number of characteristics. For example, negative acts (e.g., stealing) are perceived as more diagnostic of traits than positive acts (e.g., contributing to charity) because people often have ulterior motives for prosocial behaviors, such as a desire to create a positive impression on others (Reeder & Brewer, 1979). More generally, acts that can be attributed to multiple plausible motives or causes (i.e., are high in attributional ambiguity; Snyder, Kleck, Strenta, & Mentzer, 1979) tend to be seen as low in informational value. In contrast, behaviors that are statistically rare or otherwise extreme are perceived as highly informative about character traits (Ditto & Jemmott, 1989; Fiske, 1980; Kelley, 1967; McKenzie & Mikkelsen, 2007). In addition, decisions that are taken quickly and easily (Critcher, Inbar, & Pizarro, 2013; Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, & Lerner, 2000; Verplaetse, Vanneste, & Braeckman, 2007), that are accompanied by genuine emotions (Trivers, 1971), and that involve costs for the decision maker (Ohtsubo & Watanabe, 2008) are perceived as especially informative about character.
An example of a seemingly small misdeed that is nonetheless taken as highly informative about an individual’s moral character is that of a corporate executive who spends money on what are perceived to be frivolous perks, such as private planes, luxury cars, and country club memberships (Gasparino, 2009; Hills & Michaels, 2002;Johnson, 2003). Such perks are often met with a high degree of outrage and public condemnation despite the fact that they represent a small proportion of expenditures relative to high corporate salaries more generally. A recent study demonstrated that this response likely occurs because individuals who request perks are assumed to possess a broader number of negative moral traits. When given the hypothetical task of hiring a corporate executive, participants reported a preference for paying an additional $1 million in salary to a different job candidate just to avoid hiring a candidate whose salary request included a $40,000 marble table (Tannenbaum, Uhlmann, & Diermeier, 2011, Experiment 2). Mediation analyses indicated that the requested perk was weighed heavily in hiring decisions because it was perceived as higher in informational value about the job candidate’s moral integrity than requesting a higher salary. Participants also viewed a candidate who asked for such perks as more likely to act on his own selfish interests rather than the good of the company. Thus, it seems that participants viewed the goal of selecting a leader with good character as worth spending an extra million dollars on when tasked with a hiring decision.
There are cases when an act that causes comparatively less harm is viewed as more diagnostic about an agent’s underlying character because of the informational value that it provides. In the United States, there are strongly held norms holding that treating individuals poorly on the basis of their ethnicity is not justified (Crandall & Eshleman, 2003; Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986; Sears & Henry, 2005). Acts of racial bigotry speak strongly to an agent’s moral character and can influence judgments of blame out of proportion to the actual harm caused. In a relevant empirical investigation, participants read about either a bigoted manager who mistreated only Black employees or a misanthropic manager who mistreated all of his employees. Even though he harmed far fewer people, participants viewed the bigoted manager’s behavior as more informative about his character. Further, although perceived informational value negatively predicted moral evaluations of the bigot, it was unrelated to evaluations of the misanthrope (Zhu, Uhlmann, & Diermeier, 2014).
A central claim of the person-centered account is that acts are often taken as a source of information regarding an agent’s moral character. Even acts that may not be perceived as especially immoral in-and-of-themselves are nonetheless seen as shedding light on the goodness or badness of an individual. If so, it should be possible to demonstrate a dissociation between judgments of the wrongfulness of acts and judgments of the moral character of agents who carry them out. It is to evidence of these dissociations that we now turn.
Act–Person Dissociations
News journalist Roland Martin, when discussing perceptions of Michael Vick (the Nation Football League quarterback who was accused of organizing dog fights), argued that if Vick had beaten his girlfriend or murdered a human being, he might have been perceived more positively by the public (Martin, 2007). To investigate such phenomena,Tannenbaum et al. (2011, Experiments 1a and 1b) examined the possibility that although animal cruelty might be viewed as less immoral than violence toward humans, it would serve as a more informative signal that an individual possesses severe deficits in empathy and would, therefore, be especially indicative of an agent’s character. Consistent with this idea, participants who read a scenario in which a man acted violently toward his girlfriend judged the action as a more immoral act than when they read a similar scenario in which a man beat up his girlfriend’s cat. However, participants judged a person who acted violently toward a cat as more coldhearted and sadistic than a person who acted violently toward his girlfriend. Participants may have been accurately judging the cat-beater’s character—empirical investigations show animal cruelty is highly predictive of deficits in empathy and antisocial future behaviors (Becker et al., 2004; Haidt, 2001; Walton-Moss et al., 2005).
Drawing a distinction between moral judgments of acts and persons may help explain negative gut reactions to the harmless-but-offensive transgressions examined in social intuitionist studies (for empirical evidence, see Haidt, Bjorklund, & Murphy, 2011; Haidt & Hersh, 2001; Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993; for theoretical reviews, see Haidt, 2001,2007). Using moral interviews, researchers have found that people have negative gut reactions to harmless transgressions such as eating a dead dog that had been hit by a car and masturbating into a chicken carcass, but they find themselves at a loss to explain why (i.e., they are “morally dumbfounded”; Haidt et al., 2011, 1993). Negative intuitions in such contexts may be driven by a focus on the moral character of the agent rather than the tangible consequences of the act. Supporting this hypothesis, participants viewed harmless-but-offensive acts (e.g., sex with a chicken carcass) as less immoral than harmful acts (e.g., stealing a chicken carcass) but as speaking more strongly to global moral character (Uhlmann & Zhu, 2014, Experiments 1, 2, and 3).
Distinguishing person judgments from act judgments further sheds light on moral dumbfounding effects. As in prior work, participants were more likely to find themselves at a loss to justify their evaluations of harmless-but-offensive acts than harmful acts—most likely because the former are difficult to defend on the basis of “rational” metrics, such as the monetary damage or physical harm caused. In contrast, the acts’ statistical extremity (Ditto & Jemmott, 1989; Fiske, 1980), low attributional ambiguity (Snyder et al., 1979), and therefore high informational value (Nelson, 2005; Nelson et al., 2010) provide good reasons for drawing strong character inferences from behaviors such as eating a dead dog and having sex with a chicken carcass. Accordingly, participants were significantly less likely to be dumbfounded by their assessments of the moral character of agents who engaged in harmless-but-offensive transgressions relative to harmful transgressions (Uhlmann & Zhu, 2014, Experiment 3). Thus, with regard to assessments of personal character, the moral dumbfounding effects made famous by Haidt and colleagues can completely reverse in a manner explained by the informational value of the transgressions involved.
It is important to show that act–person dissociations emerge not just for bizarre and statistically rare acts (e.g., cat violence and unusual forms of masturbation) but also for incidents that people might encounter in their everyday lives. One such context in which act–person dissociations may readily emerge is that of encountering racial bias. Once again, experiments demonstrate a dissociation between judgments of acts and judgments of character. Participants judged referring to a coworker as a “nigger” as a less immoral act than physically assaulting the coworker. However, using the racial slur was seen as more indicative of poor global moral character (Uhlmann, Zhu, & Diermeier, 2014, Experiment 1). It is noteworthy that participants drew very negative character inferences about the bigoted agent even though his behavior had no direct victim, in that he muttered the racial slur under his breath and no one heard him (although see Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012). Further, even though they rated him as having committed the less immoral act, participants were less willing to be friends with the bigoted coworker than with the physically aggressive coworker (Uhlmann, 2013).
Another rich cue that serves as information that an individual possesses poor moral character is whether the person appears to actively take pleasure in the suffering of others. Signals regarding the hedonic experience of agents as they carry out moral transgressions are viewed as deeply informative about an individual’s moral character. For instance, “hedonic markers” that suggested the perpetrator took pleasure in a killing (e.g., cutting the body into pieces) led judgments of the person to become more negative but not judgments about the wrongness of the act itself (Gromet, Goodwin, & Darley, 2013). The presence of these hedonic cues also made participants more likely to recommend the death penalty as punishment. A similar pattern of results emerged when participants were directly told that the agent had experienced positive affect during the commission of the murder. With regard to receiving the ultimate punishment for moral transgressions, what your crime says about you as a person may matter as much as what you actually did.
Can similar dissociations extend to cases involving morally praiseworthy acts? In other words, can some acts considered necessary or even admirable nonetheless signal negative global moral character? Uhlmann, Zhu, and Tannenbaum (2013) hypothesized that this often occurs in the context of consequentialist acts. One reason is that consequentialist decisions can be attributionally ambiguous (Bartels & Pizarro, 2011). A decision maker may sacrifice the well-being of one person to maximize collective outcomes because he or she genuinely endorses consequentialist principles or out of a self-interested desire to share in those collective benefits. In a relevant study, participants felt that throwing an injured man off a sinking lifeboat to save the remaining passengers was the morally correct course of action. However, they further perceived lifeboat passengers who actually made such a decision as potentially driven by selfish motives (i.e., a desire to save themselves) and therefore deficient in moral character (Uhlmann et al., 2013, Experiment 1).
A second reason for act–person dissociations in this context is that actually carrying out consequentialist decisions can require suppressing one’s empathy for others. Participants viewed a hospital administrator who decided to buy necessary equipment (saving numerous future lives) rather than to fund a costly operation for one little boy as having acted on principle and having made a praiseworthy moral decision. However, at the same time, the administrator who let a little boy die for the greater good was perceived as deficient in moral character, an effect mediated by his apparent lack of empathy (Uhlmann et al., 2013, Experiments 2 and 3). Somewhat ironically given his perceived poor moral character, the consequentialist administrator was rated a better leader than an administrator who chose to forego buying the equipment to save one little boy. This suggests that leaders are judged by different criteria than everyday people, perhaps because it allows them to make the difficult trade-offs that their positions require.
Of course, moral evaluations of acts and persons do not always diverge. For example, judgments of the act of short selling stocks and of individuals who engaged in such behavior were largely identical (Inbar, Pizarro, & Cushman, 2012). However, this does not mean judgments of a person’s character are fully mediated by judgments of their acts. The reverse causal path can also hold, such that character inferences influence moral judgments of acts. Consistent with this idea, when participants were first led to think about the moral character of a person who engaged in a bigoted act (defacing a picture of Martin Luther King Jr.), moral judgments of the act itself become correspondingly more negative (Uhlmann et al., 2014, Experiment 2). Thus, in cases in which judgments of acts and persons correspond, person inferences may be driving evaluations of acts, rather than the reverse. As discussed in depth in the next section, person inferences can shape not only moral judgments of acts but also perceptions of the ostensive precursors of moral judgment such as the perceived intentionality and controllability of the act.
Explaining Moral Biases
Psychologists studying the attribution of blame (e.g., Malle, Guglielmo, & Monroe, 2014;Shaver, 1985; Weiner, 1995) have outlined sets of conditions that are generally viewed by lay judges as necessary for the ascription of blame. Building on normative theories of blame from philosophy and legal theory, these accounts portray the attribution of moral blame as a stage-like process, in which individuals first judge whether an agent (for instance) caused, desired, and intended an outcome before finally arriving at a judgment of moral blame. Although these theories are generally taken as descriptive, it is assumed that deviations from this process of blame attribution constitute biases in judgment.
Although lay perceivers do adhere to normative models some of the time, a number of recent findings have demonstrated systematic departures from the process of blame attribution predicted by these models (Knobe & Doris, 2010). Indeed, moral judgments are frequently influenced by factors that traditional normative models consider inappropriate or irrelevant, and many of these findings would be interpreted as evidence of the error-prone nature of moral judgments. The person-centered approach to moral judgment explains many supposed errors as the outputs of a moral system whose purpose is to determine the moral character of others (Pizarro & Tannenbaum, 2011). In what follows, we discuss two cases (the side-effect effect and asymmetries in judgments of blame and praise) for which there is empirical evidence that directly links the observed pattern of moral judgments to such person-centered concerns. We then discuss a number of other findings for which the person-centered account can offer a potential theoretical explanation, reinterpreting what might be deemed to be errors in moral judgment as reasonable responses given the underlying desire to evaluate the character of others.
The side-effect effect
One widely discussed anomaly of moral judgment is the tendency to judge the negative, but not positive, side effects of decisions as intentional (Knobe, 2006, 2010). For example, a profit-minded corporate executive who releases a product he knows will have the side effect of causing environmental damage is viewed as having intentionally harmed the environment. However, when the product has the side effect of helping the environment, this act is not perceived as intentional (Leslie, Knobe, & Cohen, 2006). This pattern of intentionality judgments is observed even though in all conditions the executive states that his only goal is to make a successful product, and he does not care one way or the other about the consequences for the environment. The side-effect effect may occur because participants draw strong person inferences about a profit-minded executive unconcerned with environmental consequences, and this perception in turn drives their assessments of intentionality. In other words, intentionality judgments—the ostensive precursors of moral condemnation—may be mediated by assessments of the target’s personal values rather than the reverse. Consistent with this idea, structural equation modeling shows that the corporate executive’s apparent values, principles, and characterological dispositions, rather than the goodness or badness of his actions, statistically explain whether the outcomes of his decisions are perceived as intentional (Sripada & Konrath, 2011; see also Sripada, 2012).
Asymmetries in judgments of blame and praise
Normative models of moral judgment stipulate that people should be held less accountable for acts that are difficult to consciously control. In line with such prescriptions, participants discount blame for immoral acts that are committed impulsively and automatically (e.g., physically attacking another person while overwhelmed by an uncontrollable rage). However, departing from normative models, participants do not discount praise for prosocial acts that are committed impulsively (e.g., helping someone while overwhelmed by uncontrollable feelings of compassion;Pizarro, Uhlmann, & Salovey, 2003). This effect occurs because of the inferences that lay perceivers have about an agent’s metadesires (Frankfurt, 1971; Wolf, 1987), or desires about desires. Participants assume that most people do not wish to have negative emotional impulses, and they do wish to have positive emotional impulses. This sense that the agent does not “really want” his or her antisocial impulses is what leads to the discounting of blame for impulsive negative acts (Pizarro et al., 2003).
Thus, as with the side-effect effect, asymmetries in the discounting of blame and praise are driven by the inferences that lay perceivers make about the deeper desires and character-based dispositions of the agents involved (see also Sripada, 2010). Such person-centered inferences are not only logically defensible but are likely effective when it comes to determining who might be (or at least might become) a valuable ingroup member. Individuals whose impulsive desires and metadesires are consistent are likely to continue to engage in acts consistent with their emotional impulses in the future. In contrast, individuals who experience internal conflict about their impulses may eventually overcome them and may exhibit quite different (and even redeeming) patterns of behavior.
Culpable causation
Assessments of causal control over negative events may be influenced by the perceived values of the agent. Research on culpable causation have found that, in a between-subjects design, a driver is more likely to be perceived as the cause of a complicated car accident if he was speeding home to hide a vial of crack cocaine as opposed to speeding home to hide a present for a loved one (Alicke, 1992). The desire to heap blame on an unlikable person involved in an accident appears to influence his or her perceived control over the event (Alicke, 1992, 2000). Thus, culpable causation effects and person-centered morality are very much in harmony with one another: Person-centered information about the underlying goodness or badness of the agent’s moral character appears to shape assessments of his or her causal role in good and bad events. If moral judgments were solely based on evaluations of acts and not character, effects such as those reported by Alicke (1992) would not be obtained.
The culpable causation model provides greater generality in understanding moral staining, for instance, demonstrating spillover not only between underlying motives and causal attributions but also between the outcomes of an event and assessments of causal control over the event (Alicke, 2000, 2008; Mazzocco, Alicke, & Davis, 2004). Notably, our person-centered approach likewise predicts effects outside the scope of the culpable causation model, such as theoretically meaningful dissociations between moral judgments of action and persons (Tannenbaum et al., 2011; Uhlmann & Zhu, 2014; Uhlmann et al., 2014, 2013). Thus, the two models can complement each other to account for certain phenomena (such as spillover between a person’s motives and perceptions of his or her causal control over events) and, at the same time, each explain further effects that do not fall under the purview of the other model.
There is a significant difference between the culpable causation model (Alicke, 1992,2000) and our person-centered account as to whether phenomena such as bad motives influencing perceived causality constitute an irrational bias. In our view, character-based inferences spilling over to other judgments reflect a moral system bent on the adaptive goal of identifying good and bad people and using such information to navigate one’s social world. Character-based inferences should not be taken as irrational biases unless there is evidence that the character information being used as an input to understanding an event is irrelevant on some other grounds. There are times in which, especially in the absence of perfect information about what happened, or when there is a dispositional cue present that is known to be a reliable predictor of immoral behavior, it may be perfectly rational for character inferences to spill over to other judgments (for a related point, see Malle et al., 2014).
Identification with externally controlled acts
Inferences about character may influence not only attributions of causality but also assessments of responsibility for transgressions that are clearly externally caused. Indeed, individuals are judged responsible for acts that were severely constrained by external circumstances, so long as their acts are consistent with their intentions. In one study, when an airline passenger was forced by hijackers to kill another hostage, he was judged as more responsible if he wanted to kill the other man anyway (i.e., if he “identified” with the act; Woolfolk, Doris, & Darley, 2006). Internally embracing a violent act in this way—even one compelled by external circumstances—is highly informative of poor moral character and may therefore influence judgments of responsibility.
Distorted recollections of intentional transgressions
Even knowledge of the basic facts about a moral transgression—the very earliest precursors of moral judgment according to normative models—can be distorted by the perpetrator’s perceived motives. When a restaurant customer intentionally left without paying his bill, participants recalled the cost of the meal as significantly greater than when he had merely forgotten to pay (Pizarro, Laney, Morris, & Loftus, 2006). Thus, recollections of the severity of an act can be influenced by the internal motivations of the person who carried it out.
Omission bias
Person-centered inferences may further underlie the tendency to assign greater blame for crimes of commission than omission. For example, a tennis player who orders a rival a meal containing an allergen is judged more harshly than if he simply fails to warn the rival about an allergen in his meal (Spranca, Minsk, & Baron, 1991). Lay perceivers may reason that it “takes a worse person” to actively harm others than to passively allow harm to take place, and this assumption may shape their assessments of blame and responsibility.
Summary
Act-based theories struggle to account for the tendency to judge unintended negative side effects as intentional, assign greater causal control over negative events to a dislikeable person, hold people responsible for externally compelled acts that they internally identify with, misremember the severity of intentional harms, and assign greater blame for commissions than omissions. These findings are not predicted by most normative models of blame and, therefore, tend to be interpreted as instances of bias. However, they are understandable as a reasonable set of evaluations from a moral system bent on assessing moral character.
Conclusion
According to the person-centered account of moral judgment, human beings are intuitive virtue theorists who view acts as signals of underlying moral traits, such as integrity and empathy for others. Relatively harmless actions high in informational value regarding character are therefore weighed heavily in moral judgments. Indeed, striking dissociations emerge between moral evaluations of acts and the persons who carry them out, such that some acts speak strongly to moral character despite not being condemned as especially harmful or immoral in-and-of-themselves. Many putative biases and errors of moral judgment may be the products of a moral system designed to determine the character of others. It is time for psychological theories of moral judgment to rediscover Hume’s insight that although acts are fleeting, the lasting qualities of moral character are to be treasured and cherished. Bringing this insight to contemporary theories of moral judgment will lead to a more comprehensive and complete psychology of human morality.
References
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On the Normative Significance of Experimental Moral Psychology
Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell
Philosophical Psychology
Vol. 25, Iss. 3, 2012, 311-330.
Experimental research in moral psychology can be used to generate debunking arguments in ethics. Specifically, research can indicate that we draw a moral distinction on the basis of a morally irrelevant difference. We develop this naturalistic approach by examining a recent debate between Joshua Greene and Selim Berker. We argue that Greene’s research, if accurate, undermines attempts to reconcile opposing judgments about trolley cases, but that his attempt to debunk deontology fails. We then draw some general lessons about the possibility of empirical debunking arguments in ethics.
The entire article is here.
http://ift.tt/1KfmSRT
"If you haven't found the problem to which a concept corresponds, everything stays abstract. If you've found the problem, everything becomes concrete." - Gilles Deleuze, in his Abecedaire, episode H is for History, a bit past the 16min mark here.
Preamble
Last semester my colleague Joel Dittmer from the Philosophy Department gave a talk to a room full of undergraduates presenting some ethical approaches to the Henrietta Lacks case. It was a good talk, reviewing a number of ways to analyze our moral outrage over what happened to her, but the best part was the discussion we had afterwards. That discussion will make up the bulk of this essay.
But first, for those who haven't read Rebecca Skloot's celebrated book on the topic, in 1951 Henrietta Lacks was treated at Johns Hopkins for cervical cancer, at which time two samples of her cervix - a healthy one and a cancerous one - were removed from her body without her consent, making their way to the lab of Dr. George Gey. He frequently took the cells of patients for use in medical research, but Henrietta's cells turned out to be remarkable: instead of dying after a few days, these HeLa cells (as they came to be called) were immortal and could be grown and reproduced in great quantities. Lacks died in October 1951 of course not knowing any of this, but in the years following her death, also without her family's knowledge or permission, the HeLa line revolutionized bioscience and led to great profits for many.
Introduction
1a. Most of Joel's talk discussed whether it was moral or right for Dr. Gey to take the cells and for so many to profit so much while Lacks and her family got nothing. The students generally agreed that this was wrong, but many of them were unable to assign blame. Many of them reasoned that Gey was wrong to take her cells without permission, but that he did no great evil toward her because he couldn't have known that her cells were remarkable. Besides, the taking of the cells caused Lacks no significant personal injury. Moreover, it was a routine procedure. And here many of them stopped thinking, adding that if Gey had received simple consent from her, there would be no need to talk about the case at all.
1b. This saddened me a great deal, because I could still see on their faces that they found something wrong about the situation, but lacking the ability to make the models they had lead them back to their moral position, they abandoned it entirely. This is one sign of a great tragedy befalling many of the conservative youth entering American colleges nowadays: their natural empathy and Christian upbringing has made them want to correct social ills, but the ahistorical quasi-libertarian principles they hear in equal measure cause them to write social ills off as unavoidable or causeless. These kids -- I see them constantly in my classroom -- think of moral judgments as some sort of logical parlor game. If they feel in their heart that a situation was immoral but a logical operation can tell them that it wasn't, they conclude that their heart was wrong, not that the logic was flawed or inadequate. In the Lacks case, they take precious few steps: "Gey didn't really wrong Lacks by taking her cells, so I guess I have to conclude that no harm was done." And so they stop asking questions, not just because their privilege allows them to, but also because no one has ever told them they needed to keep going. By keeping moral judgments in the realm of abstract analytic operations, they get to ignore history and social realities -- the very things which generate and necessitate moral judgments in the first place! Their mode of analysis doesn't just lead them to the wrong conclusion; it keeps them from really seeing the problem by telling them to stop asking questions.
So in this essay I'm going to ask some questions. To review: It seems morally wrong that Lacks's cells were taken without informed consent or compensation and made into the enormously productive and profitable HeLa line while she and her family remained poor and obscure. But what about that scenario do we ACTUALLY have an issue with? Let's perturb it a few different ways to find out.
Thought Experiments
2. What if Gey had known at the time he took Henrietta's cells how useful the HeLa line would become? Then taking the cells without informed consent or compensation seems much worse, right? It would have been a clear-cut case of exploitation, right? But since Gey didn't know, a lot of people excuse him. But somehow the outcome of this case, decades later, seems wrong to us, even if Gey isn't the one at fault. Why is that? We might remark, at the very least, that it's possible for a person to be wronged by a system rather than only by another individual. This point may become important in a moment.
3. Now consider: What if Lacks had given informed consent but didn't receive compensation? While that certainly feels more legal, something about it still doesn't sit right with us, right? We still feel that if someone has profited off her cells, it's wrong for her and/or her family to receive nothing, right? We should remark on this point that the situation, at the very least, seems inequitable.
4. All right, then what if she'd been compensated for the cells once they realized how exceptional they were? This seems better to us. But how much compensation is enough? $10? $10,000? A percentage of all profits in perpetuity? How much does it take to buy off our moral misgivings? Where's the line where the situation becomes just? Surely it's not a sharp line or a concrete dollar amount, but we can at least assert that we'd feel better if her family weren't still in poverty. If they were provided-for, that would quell our moral outrage, right?
It seems, then, that our moral outrage centers around the issue of poverty rather than medical ethics.
5. Let's test this hypothesis with another scenario. Say that Lacks and her family weren't poor. In fact, let's say they were well-off. Let's say that the cells were taken, that for years it was unknown how incredible they were, and then their worth suddenly came to light. If her wealthy family (remember, they're wealthy in this scenario) decided to sue for a percentage, how bad would we feel for them if they didn't get it? Again, we might see a commonsense basis on which they might seem to deserve a cut, but if they didn't get it, we probably wouldn't mourn for them too badly. I mean, they're rich, right? So I can conclude from this that taking the Lacks family's poverty out of the equation silences the MORAL problems and turns compensation into a much more prosaic (and, if we're honest, trivial) legal question.
Thus, the real thing we must therefore be mad about in the Lacks case is that her family is unjustly poor. All the talk of medical ethics and even informed consent is wallpaper at best and a red herring at worse.
6. Consider: if we say instead that Henrietta Lacks had been an amateur painter who never sold any work, but once freely gave away one of her paintings to a friend. If that friend was able, by some outrageous fluke of the art market, to turn around and resell Henrietta's work years later for something like $10 million, again, we wouldn't be able to say that such an action was illegal, but something about it wouldn't sit well with us, right? By accident something that appeared of little worth became essentially priceless, and the person it came from never saw any of the money. This scenario is basically equivalent with the real story; that is to say, at its heart the Lacks case isn't really a question of medical ethics. It's a question of the injustice of poverty.
7. But how are we computing this notion of injustice? We can push this further. Consider this: What if Henrietta's cells had been useful for medical research, but minimally? Let's say all the profits ever generated amounted to $100. Let's even say that the Lacks family received a sizeable percentage of this $100. They would remain poor, of course, but would it still seem so terrible a crime to us that her family is poor? Why or why not? As you mull the answer to this question, consider that in both the real HeLa case and the present alternate scenario, it was not known if or to what extent the cells would ever be useful in research. Additionally, the fact that the HeLa cells became profitable was a chance occurrence. Henrietta Lacks had no control over it. The exceptionality of her biology wasn't something she ever worked on, cultivated, or sunk any money into. It was a complete accident. Winning a lottery without even buying a ticket.
8. So, what bizarre conclusion has this led us to? That if Henrietta's cells had been normal, we wouldn't have a problem with her poverty, but that since they were exceptional, suddenly her poverty is a problem? Why's that? Aren't we just saying that Henrietta Lacks and her family DIDN'T deserve to be poor because of a bizarre stroke of luck - and, conversely, that she DID deserve to be poor otherwise (just as many of the other donors whose cells weren't exceptional)? If we look at the real Lacks case and say, "Her family didn't deserve to be poor because the cells were so valuable," isn't that the same as saying to every other person whose unremarkable cells were also taken: "You DO deserve to be poor because your cells aren't valuable"? We need to resolve this contradiction.
9. Why do we think that some people deserve poverty and others don't, especially if, as in the Lacks case, the factor that makes them seem to NOT deserve poverty was a complete fluke? When we realize that there's no real difference between Lacks and the others' whose cells were taken, we must conclude that if Henrietta's poverty is unjust, then theirs must be unjust too. The only difference is that their poverty is banal, and therefore easy to overlook, while Lacks's poverty has a bizarre story attached to it. We need to see past the story and realize that poverty, whether banal or bizarre, is immoral in itself when the society has the means to abolish it. And, of course, we do have such means. Thus, everything in the Lacks case is a red herring besides her poverty. That's what we're outraged about, but we're not outraged enough.
Conclusion
10. Somewhere deep inside everyone who's ever turned a blind eye to poverty is a kernel of moral outrage against poverty, but for the most part it's been locked or logicked away. Properly rigorous analysis of the Lacks case, or indeed any social system, will brush aside the red herrings which conspire to quell our outrage against inequality. And once we find it again, we need to listen.
Sleep deprivation also appears to impair moral judgments, by slowing down responses and increasing the chance that people will make choices that would violate their own moral position under normal conditions. All in all, this pattern suggests that the brain’s system for punishment and reward is temporarily out of balance when people are sleep deprived.
