Damned If You Do; Damned If You Don’t!

This paper discusses the Principle of Normative Invariance: ‘An action’s moral status does not depend on whether or not it is performed.’ I show the importance of this principle for arguments regarding actualism and other variations on the person-affecting restriction, discuss and rebut arguments in favor of the principle, and then discuss five counterexamples to it. I conclude that the principle as it stands is false; and that if it is modified to avoid the counterexamples, it is gutted of any interest or power.

Anti-Autonomism Defended: A Reply to Hill

In the current issue of this journal, Scott Hill critiques some of my work on the “is”-“ought” controversy, the Hume-inspired debate over whether an ethical conclusion can be soundly, or even validly, derived from only non-ethical premises. I’ve argued that it can be; Hill is unconvinced. I reply to Hill’s critique, focusing on four key questions to which he and I give different answers.

Adolescents' emotion attributions and expectations of behavior in situations involving moral conflict

This study examined the idea that expectations of behavior in hypothetical situations involving potential moral transgressions are related to emotion attributions relating to both moral and cost-benefit considerations. We asked younger (14 years 5 months) and older (16 years 1 month) female and male adolescents (a) to make predictions about the probability that an adolescent placed in a hypothetical situation where a payoff could be obtained by acting in a nonmoral way would choose to do so and (b) to evaluate adolescents' attributions of moral (guilt) and cost-benefit-related emotions (satisfaction and fear) to the nonmoral action. Two different situations were examined; one looked at the possibility of stealing money from a lost wallet, and the other examined a situation where a contract with another peer could be broken for personal reasons. Results showed that expectations that the nonmoral action would be taken were positively related to the degree of satisfaction and negatively related to the degree of guilt and fear. However, the pattern of relations between emotion attributions and behavioral expectations differed between the two situations. Female and male adolescents had different levels of emotion attributions and behavioral expectations, but the relation between the two was similar for both. Finally, developmental comparisons indicated that older adolescents put more weight on guilt and were more internally consistent in the way that emotions were integrated into behavioral expectations.     

Gross gods and icky atheism: Disgust responses to rejected religious beliefs

Disgust is an emotional response that helps to maintain and protect physical and spiritual purity by signaling contamination and motivating the restoration of personal cleanliness. In the present research we predicted that disgust may be elicited by contact with outgroup religious beliefs, as these beliefs pose a threat to spiritual purity. Two experiments tested this prediction using a repeated taste-test paradigm in which participants tasted and rated a drink before and after copying a passage from an outgroup religion. In Experiment 1, Christian participants showed increased disgust after writing a passage from the Qur'an or Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, but not a control text. Experiment 2 replicated this effect, and also showed that contact with an ingroup religious belief (Christians copying from the Bible) did not elicit disgust. Moreover, Experiment 2 showed that disgust to rejected beliefs was eliminated when participants were allowed to wash their hands after copying the passage, symbolically restoring spiritual cleanliness. Together, these results provide evidence that contact with rejected religious beliefs elicits disgust by symbolically violating spiritual purity. Implications for intergroup relations between religious groups is discussed, and the role of disgust in the protection of beliefs that hold moral value.     

Time and moral judgment

Do moral judgments hinge on the time available to render them? According to a recent dual-process model of moral judgment, moral dilemmas that engage emotional processes are likely to result in fast deontological gut reactions. In contrast, consequentialist responses that tot up lives saved and lost in response to such dilemmas would require cognitive control to override the initial response. Cognitive control, however, takes time. In two experiments, we manipulated the time available to arrive at moral judgments in two ways: by allotting a fixed short or large amount of time, and by nudging people to answer swiftly or to deliberate thoroughly. We found that faster responses indeed lead to more deontological responses among those moral dilemmas in which the killing of one to save many necessitates manhandling an innocent person and in which this action is depicted as a means to an end. Thus, our results are the first demonstration that inhibiting cognitive control through manipulations of time alters moral judgments.     

Hot as hell! The self-conscious nature of action regrets

Gilovich, Medvec, and Kahneman (1998) have shown that real-life regrets for actions and inactions correspond to different emotional states. When people regret something they have done they experience painful “hot” emotions such as disgust or guilt, whereas when the regret is about a failure to act they rather experience wistful emotions. In four questionnaire studies, we have tested the hypothesis that regrettable actions elicit a particular subcategory of these hot emotions: the self-conscious emotions (i.e., guilt, shame, embarrassment, remorse, and anger toward oneself). These studies used different methodologies and all converged to show that self-conscious emotions were the only hot emotions to be systematically greater for action regrets than for inaction regrets. A similar pattern was observed for judgments of responsibility and morality. We emphasize the theoretical and methodological implications of these results in the discussion.     

Dual-process morality and the personal/impersonal distinction: A reply to McGuire, Langdon, Coltheart, and Mackenzie

A substantial body of research supports a dual-process theory of moral judgment, according to which characteristically deontological judgments are driven by automatic emotional responses, while characteristically utilitarian judgments are driven by controlled cognitive processes. This theory was initially supported by neuroimaging and reaction time (RT) data. McGuire et al. have reanalyzed these initial RT data and claim that, in light of their findings, the dual-process theory of moral judgment and the personal/impersonal distinction now lack support. While McGuire and colleagues have convincingly overturned Greene et al.’s interpretation of their original RT data, their claim that the dual-process theory now lacks support overstates the implications of their findings. McGuire and colleagues ignore the results of several more recent behavioral studies, including the study that bears most directly on their critique. They dismiss without adequate justification the results of a more recent neuroimaging study, three more recent patient studies, and an emotion-induction study. Their broader critique is based largely on their conflation of the dual-process theory with the personal/impersonal distinction, which are independent.     

Methodological concerns in moral judgement research: Severity of harm shapes moral decisions

Research on moral judgement traditionally deals with scenarios involving trade-offs between saving lives and causing harm or death. In the field of moral psychology and philosophy, these specific scenarios are regularly used jointly, regardless of the severity of harm. We predicted that the confounding between distinct phrasings involving different degrees of harm will have an impact on the frequency of utilitarian judgements regardless of the mere moral value of the action (as usually investigated in the moral judgement field). In line with this prediction, a first experiment showed that utilitarian responses were less frequent for conflicting moral scenarios that involved death, as compared to scenarios that involved non-lethal harm. A second experiment showed that participants' utilitarian responses decreased as the severity of harm increased. Experimental studies on moral reasoning should take greater care to avoid potential confounds associated with this content factor.     

Disparities in the moral intuitions of criminal offenders: The role of psychopathy

The present study examined whether and in what ways psychopathy is associated with abnormal moral intuitions among criminal offenders. Using Haidt et al.’s Moral Foundations Questionnaire, 222 adult male offenders assessed for clinical psychopathy reported their degree of support for five moral domains: Harm Prevention, Fairness, Respect for Authority, Ingroup Loyalty, and Purity/Sanctity. As predicted, psychopathy total score explained a substantial proportion of the variance in reduced support for Harm Prevention and Fairness, but not the other domains. These results confirm that psychopathy entails a discrete set of moral abnormalities and suggest that these abnormalities could potentially help to explain the characteristic antisocial behavior of individuals with psychopathy.     

Personhood: An activist project of historical becoming through collaborative pursuits of social transformation

The goal of this paper is to contribute to recent scholarship that pursues radical revision of prevalent models of personhood mired in outdated notions of human development and its foundational principles. To achieve this goal, I revisit and expand Vygotsky's project of cultural historical psychology to offer a dialectical framework that encompasses but is not limited to relational ontology. Premised on the notion of collaborative transformative practice as the grounding for human Being and Becoming,¹ my proposal is that at the core of human nature and development lies an ineluctably activist stance vis-à-vis the world; it is the realization of this stance through answerable deeds composing one unified life project that forms the path to personhood. The ethical dimension appears as foundational to Being and Becoming because it is integral to actions through which we become who we are while changing the world in collaborative pursuits of social transformation. From an activist transformative stance persons are agents not only for whom “things matter” but who themselves matter in history, culture, and society and, moreover, who come into Being as unique individuals through and to the extent that they matter in these processes and make a contribution to them.