Unsentimental ethics: Towards a content-specific account of the moral–conventional distinction

In this paper, we offer an overview and a critique of the existing theories of the moral–conventional distinction, with emphasis on Nichols’s [Nichols, S. (2002). Norms with feeling: Towards a psychological account of moral judgment. Cognition, 84, 221–236] neo-sentimentalist approach. After discussing some distinctive features of Nichols’s (2002) thesis and situating it within the context of his predecessors’ work [Blair, R. (1995). A cognitive developmental approach to morality: Investigating the psychopath. Cognition, 57, 1–29; Turiel, E. (1983). The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], we review a number of arguments and findings within the developmental literature that, collectively, pose a serious challenge to the proposition that emotion is indispensable for or plays a substantial contributory role in the construction of the moral domain. Furthermore, we report two studies whose results contravene those of Nichols’s (2002) Experiments 1 and 2 (the empirical basis for his “norms with feelings” hypothesis), while favoring a version of Turiel’s (1983) harm-based approach instead.     

Managed care at the bedside: how do we look in the moral mirror?

Managed care per se is a morally neutral concept; however, as practiced today, it raises serious ethical issues at the clinical, managerial, and social levels. This essay focuses on the ethical issues that arise at the bedside, looking first at the ethical conflicts faced by the physician who is charged with responsibility for care of the patient and then turning to the way in which managed care exacts costs that are measured not in dollars but in compromises in the caring dimensions of the patient-physician relationship.     

A new look at the vulnerability of puerperal mothers — A clinical study of two inpatient families at the Cassel Hospital

SUMMARY

The paper reviews some previous writings by Dr. Tom Main and Dr. Peter Lomas about the work of the Cassel Hospital with puerperal mothers. It goes on to describe the case histories and treatment of two patients recently treated with their families. The emphasis is on actual material produced in therapy but with reference to other aspects of the much wider treatment structures employed by the Cassel, for example the nursing and the community. Important aspects focussed upon include the essential experience of good mothering in becoming a mother, how closeness to the infantile impulses and urges of a real baby can lead to profound measures of identification and projection, and the effects of motherhood on femininity and sexuality.     

Evolutionary debunking: Can moral realists explain the reliability of our moral judgments?

Evolutionary debunking arguments, notably Sharon Street’s Darwinian Dilemma (2006), allege that moral realists need to explain the reliability of our moral judgments, given their evolutionary sources. David Copp (2008) and David Enoch (2010) take up the challenge. I argue on empirical grounds that realists have not met the challenge and moreover cannot do so. The outcome is that there are empirically-motivated reasons for thinking moral realists cannot explain moral reliability, given our current empirical understanding.     

Can we profile sex offenders? A review of sex offender typologies

Sex offenders constitute a heterogeneous population of individuals and can be classified into typologies based upon characteristics and motivations of offending. The most common classification systems are those differentiating between types of rapists, child molesters, female sex offenders, juvenile sex offenders and cyber sex offenders. Understanding the characteristics and motivations of sex offenders can lead to more effective treatment, supervision and management of offenders. This article outlines the development of sex offender typologies over the last quarter century.     

Can sex offenders who minimize on the MMPI conceal psychopathology on the Rorschach?

Rorschach sensitivity to minimization is important in forensic evaluations of sex offenders because these individuals frequently deny psychological problems. To study Rorschach minimization, we divided alleged sex offenders according to whether they minimized on the MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1943) or MMPI-2 (Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989) and compared their Rorschachs on indexes of distress, faulty judgment, interpersonal dysfunction, and cognitive distortions. We predicted there would be no differences between MMPI minimizers and nonminimizers on these indexes and that sex offenders of both groups would show greater psychopathology than normative adult samples. Results indicate that mini- mizers produce normal MMPI clinical profiles but still show evidence of psychopathology on the Rorschach. As predicted, sex offenders showed more Rorschach psychopathology than normative samples. Sex offenders' protocols that contained sexual content also showed perceptual distortions. These findings indicate that the Rorschach is resilient to attempts at faking good and may therefore provide valuable information in forensic settings where intentional distortion is common.     

Is the moral domain unique? A social influence perspective for the study of moral cognition

The nature of the cognitive processes that give rise to moral judgment and behavior has been a central question of psychology for decades. In this paper, we suggest that an often ignored yet fruitful stream of research for informing current debates on the nature of moral cognition is social influence. We introduce what we call the “social‐moderation‐of‐process” perspective, a methodological framework for leveraging insights from social influence research to inform debates in moral psychology over the mechanisms underlying moral cognition and the moral domains in which those mechanisms operate. We demonstrate the utility of the social‐moderation‐of‐process perspective by providing a detailed example of how research on social influence in behavioral ethics can be utilized to test a research question related to a debate between two prominent theories in moral psychology. We then detail how researchers across the field of moral psychology can utilize our social‐moderation‐of‐process perspective.     

Does the distinction between causal and moral responsibility really salvage the defensive attribution hypothesis?: A critique of Nogami and Streufert's thesis

Nogami and Streufert's (1983) thesis, that the distinction between causal and moral responsibility accounts for contradictory data in the defensive attribution literature, is criticized on empirical and conceptual grounds. It is argued that the results reported may be idiosyncratic to their study given the procedures they used. Moreover, close examination reveals several problems in using their results to account for previous contradictory research findings.     

Can cognitive psychological research on reasoning enhance the discussion around moral judgments?

In this article we will demonstrate how cognitive psychological research on reasoning and decision making could enhance discussions and theories of moral judgments. In the first part, we will present recent dual-process models of moral judgments and describe selected studies which support these approaches. However, we will also present data that contradict the model predictions, suggesting that approaches to moral judgment might be more complex. In the second part, we will show how cognitive psychological research on reasoning might be helpful in understanding moral judgments. Specifically, we will highlight approaches addressing the interaction between intuition and reflection. Our data suggest that a sequential model of engaging in deliberation might have to be revised. Therefore, we will present an approach based on Signal Detection Theory and on intuitive conflict detection. We predict that individuals arrive at the moral decisions by comparing potential action outcomes (e.g., harm caused and utilitarian gain) simultaneously. The response criterion can be influenced by intuitive processes, such as heuristic moral value processing, or considerations of harm caused.     

Sex-role messages vis-à-vis microcomputer use: A look at the pictures

This study explored the pictoral representation of men, women, boys, and girls in popular computer magazines through content analysis. Issues of three mass market computer magazines (total pages =2,637) were analyzed to determine numbers of men, women, boys, and girls illustrated; roles in which they were portrayed; and whether they were shown using the computer actively, standing by while others used the computer, or rejecting the computer. Many stereotypic portrayals were found: Men appeared in illustrations almost twice as often as women; women were overrepresented as clerical workers and sex objects, while men were overrepresented as managers, experts, and repair technicians. Women were shown significantly more often in a passive role vis-à-vis computers. In mixed-sex illustrations, men were most often shown in the position of authority. Only women were shown rejecting the computer or portrayed as sex objects. Also included are observations regarding the effects of stereotypic portrayals on women/girls and suggestions for further research.     

The effects of self-brand connections on responses to brand failure: A new look at the consumer–brand relationship

We argue that consumers with high self-brand connections (SBC) respond to negative brand information as they do to personal failure — they experience a threat to their positive self-view. After viewing negative brand information, high (vs. low) SBC consumers reported lower state self-esteem. Consumers with high SBC also maintained favorable brand evaluations despite negative brand information. However, when they completed an unrelated self-affirmation task, they lowered their brand evaluations the same as low SBC consumers. This finding suggests that high SBC consumers' reluctance to lower brand evaluation might be driven by a motivation to protect the self rather than the brand.     

Can Artificial Intelligence Have a Near-Death Experience? A Critical Look at the Ultimate Text

Since a computer model begins as an instance of writing, that is, a text, it is appropriate to examine this kind of discourse through the perspective of literary criticism. I examine Stephen Thaler's (1995) intelligent computer program and conclude that the gedanken creatures are constructed upon a structuralist theory of the text, which cannot support a complete simulation of human intelligence or experience.     

What does principled versus conventional moral reasoning convey to others about the politics and psychology of the reasoner?

The well‐documented relationship between political orientation and moral reasoning has most often been interpreted in terms of the influence of level of moral development (cf. Kohlberg, 1984) upon an individual's political inclinations: those who have reached the conventional level (or stage 4) in Kohlberg's terms will as a result tend to favour the political right, whereas those who progress to the principled level (stage 5) shift their political preferences to the left. An alternative, ‘social communication’ view is that these different forms of moral reasoning are expressions of contrasting political identities, and differ in ideological content rather than developmental level. We compared the inferences that American and British students (n=211) drew about the political, moral and cognitive attributes of a target who, in response to moral dilemmas, used either stage 4A, stage 4B or stage 5 moral arguments as defined by Kohlberg. Perception of the target's political attributes varied consistently and significantly as a function of the target's moral reasoning, but there were no corresponding effects on perception of moral or cognitive attributes. The results are interpreted as supporting a social communication view of moral reasoning and its relation to political orientation, and at the same time questioning the claim that conventional (stage 4) and principled (stage 5) moral reasoning are distinct levels of socio‐cognitive development. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A new look at “the hard problem” of bilingual lexical access: evidence for language-switch costs with univalent stimuli

Considerable work has used language-switching tasks to investigate how bilinguals manage competition between languages. Language-switching costs have been argued to reflect persisting inhibition or persisting activation of a non-target language. However, these costs might instead reflect the use of bivalent stimuli (i.e. pictures or digits that can be responded to in either language). That is, language-switching costs may simply reflect a cost of selecting the task-appropriate response for a given item and so may not be reflective of bilingual lexical access [Finkbeiner, M., Almeida, J., Janssen, N., & Carramaza, A. (2006). Lexical selection in bilingual speech production does not involve language suppression. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(5), 1075–1089]. The present study addresses this concern by having Chinese/English bilinguals switch between languages in response to inherently univalent stimuli (English words and Chinese Characters) as well as lexically univalent, but orthographically bivalent, stimuli (English words and Chinese Pinyin). Speakers showed switch costs when naming both univalent and orthographically bivalent stimuli, showing that switch costs can be found even with inherently univalent stimuli.