The difference between punishments and rewards in fostering moral concerns in social decision making

In social decision making, punishing non-cooperation and rewarding cooperation may not only affect cooperation because of instrumental reasons. They may also evoke moral concerns regarding cooperation as they signal that cooperation is socially approved of and non-cooperation socially disapproved of. I argue that punishments do this to a greater extent than rewards as punishments communicate an obligatory rule and rewards communicate a voluntary rule. Indeed, the first experiment shows that, in a social dilemma, the concept of punishment increased cooperation and the concept of a reward did not. The second experiment showed that participants showed more disapproval towards an offender when there was a punishment for non-compliance than when there was a reward for compliance. These findings suggest that punishing non-cooperation more strongly foster moral concerns regarding cooperation than rewarding cooperation. Possible implications for internalizations are discussed.     

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.     

Control,responsibility, and moral assessment

Recently, a number of philosophers have begun to question the commonly held view that choice or voluntary control is a precondition of moral responsibility. According to these philosophers, what really matters in determining a person’s responsibility for some thing is whether that thing can be seen as indicative or expressive of her judgments, values, or normative commitments. Such accounts might therefore be understood as updated versions of what Susan Wolf has called “real self views,” insofar as they attempt to ground an agent’s responsibility for her actions and attitudes in the fact (when it is a fact) that they express who she is as a moral agent. As such, they seem to be open to some of the same objections Wolf originally raised to such accounts, and in particular to the objection that they cannot license the sorts of robust moral assessments involved in our current practices of moral responsibility. My aim in this paper is to try to respond to this challenge, by clarifying the kind of robust moral assessments I take to be licensed by (at least some) non-volitional accounts of responsibility and by explaining why these assessments do not in general require the agent to have voluntary control over everything for which she is held responsible. I also argue that the limited applicability of the distinction between “bad agents” and “blameworthy agents” on these accounts is in fact a mark in their favor.

The virtue of cold-heartedness

I defend a strong version of the Kantian claim that actions done solely from duty have moral worth by (1) considering pure cases of acting from duty, (2) showing that love and sympathy, unlike a sense of duty, can often lead us to do the wrong thing, (3) carefully distinguishing moral from non-moral virtues, and (4) by distinguishing pathological sympathy from practical sympathy. Not only is acting purely from a sense of duty superior to acting from love and sympathetic feelings, but the cold-heartedness found in Kant’s examples should be thought of as a virtue rather than a vice.     

Betting Against Hard Determinism

The perennial fear associated with the free will problem is the prospect of hard determinism being true. Unlike prevalent attempts to reject hard determinism by defending compatibilist analyses of freedom and responsibility, this article outlines a pragmatic argument to the effect that we are justified in betting that determinism is false even though we may retain the idea that free will and determinism are incompatible. The basic argument is that as long as we accept that libertarian free will is worth wanting, there is a defensible rationale, given the uncertainty which remains as to whether determinism is true or false, to refrain from acting on hard determinism, and thus to bet that libertarian free will exists. The article closes by discussing two potentially decisive objections to this pragmatic argument.     

Human moral responsibility is moral responsibility enough: A reply to F. Allan Hanson

Hanson claims that moral responsibility should be distributed among both the humans and artifacts comprising complex wholes that produce morally relevant outcomes in the world. I argue that this claim is not sufficiently supported. In particular, adopting a consequentialist understanding of morality does not by itself support the view that the existence of a causally necessary object in such a complex whole is sufficient for assigning moral responsibility to that object. Moreover, there are good reasons, both evolutionary and contemporary, for not adopting this stance.     

Moral masquerades: Experimental exploration of the nature of moral motivation

Why do people act morally – when they do? Moral philosophers and psychologists often assume that acting morally in the absence of incentives or sanctions is a product of a desire to uphold one or another moral principle (e.g., fairness). This form of motivation might be called moral integrity because the goal is to actually be moral. In a series of experiments designed to explore the nature of moral motivation, colleagues and I have found little evidence of moral integrity. We have found considerable evidence of a different form of moral motivation, moral hypocrisy. The goal of moral hypocrisy is to appear moral yet, if possible, avoid the cost of being moral. To fully reach the goal of moral hypocrisy requires self-deception, and we have found evidence of that as well. Strengthening moral integrity is difficult. Even effects of moral perspective taking – imagining yourself in the place of the other (as recommended by the Golden Rule) – appear limited, further contributing to the moral masquerade.     

Variability and moral phenomenology

Many moral philosophers in the Western tradition have used phenomenological claims as starting points for philosophical inquiry; aspects of moral phenomenology have often been taken to be anchors to which any adequate account of morality must remain attached. This paper raises doubts about whether moral phenomena are universal and robust enough to serve the purposes to which moral philosophers have traditionally tried to put them. Persons’ experiences of morality may vary in a way that greatly limits the extent to which moral phenomenology can constitute a reason to favor one moral theory over another. Phenomenology may not be able to serve as a pre-theoretic starting point or anchor in the consideration of rival moral theories because moral phenomenology may itself be theory-laden. These doubts are illustrated through an examination of how moral phenomenology is used in the thought of Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, Joseph Butler, Francis Hutcheson, and Søren Kierkegaard.     

明代道德生活与核心价值观

明代独特的道德生活是有其偏执的政治导向、失序的商品经济发展以及无根社会文化综合作用的结果.究其实质乃是在商品经济发展的过程中,传统儒家的价值观念无力为新的社会经济生产方式提供价值支撑,道德生活中的种种失范现象最终都导源于核心价值观的缺失.     

青少年道德自我认同问卷的修订

本研究以青少年群体为样本,在Aquino和Reed的道德自我认同问卷（Moral Identity Measure,MIM）基础上,进行问卷的修订。方法：对935名青少年进行原始问卷的测量,采用探索性因素分析。结果：与MIM原问卷相比,修订后的问卷包含了16个项目。因素分析表明,二个维度能够解释总方差41．68％的变异,各个项目的载荷在0．57～0．71之间,分半信度为0．69,同质信度达到了0．85。结论：经修订后,青少年道德同一性问卷具有较为满意的心理学测量指标,可以在青少年中推广使用。