Moral responsibility and free will: A meta-analysis

Fundamental beliefs about free will and moral responsibility are often thought to shape our ability to have healthy relationships with others and ourselves. Emotional reactions have also been shown to have an important and pervasive impact on judgments and behaviors. Recent research suggests that emotional reactions play a prominent role in judgments about free will, influencing judgments about determinism’s relation to free will and moral responsibility. However, the extent to which affect influences these judgments is unclear. We conducted a meta-analysis to estimate the impact of affect. Our meta-analysis indicates that beliefs in free will are largely robust to emotional reactions.     

Presentism,Redemption, and Moral Development

This paper explores what could justify some intuitive temporal asymmetries regarding redemption and the distribution of ills and goods throughout an agent's lifespan. After exposing the inadequacies of causal explanations – based on our differential ability to affect the future, but not the past – a metaphysical explanation is outlined in relation to three competing temporal‐ontological profiles of agents, and their varying accounts of a being's development. Only one of those conceptions of agents – supported by Presentism, the thesis that everything is present – offers an account justifying the intuitive temporal asymmetries. Finally, consequences are then drawn for the possibility of true redemption.     

现实受欺负与青少年网络欺负行为：愤怒反刍的中介作用及道德推脱的调节作用

摘 要 本研究采用整体抽样法对2407名青少年进行问卷调查,探讨了现实受欺负对网络欺负行为的影响,以及愤怒反刍的中介作用和道德推脱的调节作用。结果表明：（1）现实受欺负可以显著地正向预测网络欺负行为。（2）愤怒反刍在现实受欺负与网络欺负行为之间起部分中介作用。（3）现实受欺负通过愤怒反刍对网络欺负行为产生影响的间接效应受到道德推脱的调节。具体来说,对于道德推脱水平高的青少年而言,愤怒反刍会对网络欺负行为产生显著的正向预测作用;而对于道德推脱水平低的青少年而言,愤怒反刍对网络欺负行为的预测效应变得不再显著。     

Cognition in moral space: A minimal model

We describe moral cognition as a process occurring in a distinctive cognitive space, wherein moral relationships are defined along several morally relevant dimensions. After identifying candidate dimensions, we show how moral judgments can emerge in this space directly from object perception, without any appeal to moral rules or abstract values. Our reductive “minimal model” (Batterman & Rice, 2014) elaborates Beal’s (2020) claim that moral cognition is determined, at the most basic level, by “ontological frames” defining subjects, objects, and the proper relation between them. We expand this claim into a set of formal hypotheses that predict moral judgments based on how objects are “framed” in the relevant dimensions of “moral space.”     

Narcissistic self-esteem or optimal self-esteem? A Latent Profile Analysis of self-esteem and psychological entitlement

Research into the relationship between self-esteem and narcissism has produced conflicting results, potentially caused by hidden subpopulations that exhibit distinct positive or negative associations. This research uses Latent Profile Analysis to identify profiles within a national panel study (N = 6471) with differing relationships between psychological entitlement and self-esteem. We identified a narcissistic self-esteem profile (9%) characterised by high entitlement and high self-esteem, an optimal self-esteem (38.4%) profile characterised by high self-esteem but low entitlement, and three profiles that reported low entitlement but different levels of self-esteem. We additionally predicted profile membership using Big-Five traits. Results indicate that self-esteem is a necessary but not sufficient condition for high entitlement, and entitlement is not highly prevalent in New Zealand.     

Always looking for a moral identity: The moral licensing effect in men convicted of domestic violence

People who act in accord with moral standards enjoy a strong moral self-concept, but people with a strong moral concept do not always behave morally: sometimes they exhibit consistent behaviors and sometimes compensatory behaviors. Through two studies, this paper shows that people who do wrong enjoy a stronger moral self-concept and regulate their moral behavior accordingly. Specifically, men in court-mandated psychological treatment for having employed violence against their partners manage to preserve a very positive moral self-concept. They also exhibit moral self-regulation: when prompted to consider their high moral self-concepts, they recalled performing significantly more prosocial behaviors in the previous year (consistency effect), and immediately following this, they relaxed their future intentions to act in prosocial manners over the next year (licensing effect). This novel connection between intimate partner violence and moral regulation allows us to observe the dark side of feeling too moral in a sensitive sample.     

Do framing effects make moral intuitions unreliable?

I address Sinnott-Armstrong's argument that evidence of framing effects in moral psychology shows that moral intuitions are unreliable and therefore not noninferentially justified. I begin by discussing what it is to be epistemically unreliable and clarify how framing effects render moral intuitions unreliable. This analysis calls for a modification of Sinnott-Armstrong's argument if it is to remain valid. In particular, he must claim that framing is sufficiently likely to determine the content of moral intuitions. I then re-examine the evidence which is supposed to support this claim. In doing so, I provide a novel suggestion for how to analyze the reliability of intuitions in empirical studies. Analysis of the evidence suggests that moral intuitions subject to framing effects are in fact much more reliable than perhaps was thought, and that Sinnott-Armstrong has not succeeded in showing that noninferential justification has been defeated.     

和平与发展问题的伦理思考

和平原则的道德价值,主要表现在对生存原则的肯定、尊重和对不同社会形态、意识形态、文化背景、价值观念的包容。道德融入发展的意义,主要体现在人类最大限度地共享发展带来的丰硕成果的同时,能不断提高自身的文明程度和道德水准,以及促使世界各国谋求发展的目的和手段道德化。和平与共同发展原则不仅是国际关系的基本原则,同时也应成为国际关系伦理的基本原则。     

Natural Compatibilism,Indeterminism, and Intrusive Metaphysics

The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this is largely explained by the fact that people import an indeterministic metaphysics into deterministic scenarios when making judgments about freedom and responsibility. We conclude that judgments based on these scenarios are not reliable evidence for natural compatibilism.