Children's and adolescents' intuitive judgements about distributive justice: Integrating need,effort, and luck

This study investigated the principles that children and adolescents rely on when allocating a resource fairly. In a series of three experiments, 51 Swiss children (aged 7 and 9 years) and 309 German children (aged 6, 9, and 15 years) participated. A different situational context was presented in each experiment, where luck, need and effort of two protagonists were systematically varied. Primary-school children relied mainly on need when making distributive justice judgements. Effort became more prominent as the allocation principle in adolescence. Equality occurred rarely in all age groups. Integrational capacity and the ability to differentiate between the three situational contexts increased from childhood to adolescence. The data suggest the conclusion that the development of distributive justice decisions has both generalized and context-specific components.     

Moral dilemmas and moral rules

Recent work shows an important asymmetry in lay intuitions about moral dilemmas. Most people think it is permissible to divert a train so that it will kill one innocent person instead of five, but most people think that it is not permissible to push a stranger in front of a train to save five innocents. We argue that recent emotion-based explanations of this asymmetry have neglected the contribution that rules make to reasoning about moral dilemmas. In two experiments, we find that participants show a parallel asymmetry about versions of the dilemmas that have minimized emotional force. In a third experiment, we find that people distinguish between whether an action violates a moral rule and whether it is, all things considered, wrong. We propose that judgments of whether an action is wrong, all things considered, implicate a complex set of psychological processes, including representations of rules, emotional responses, and assessments of costs and benefits.     

Identity, Reasoning, and Emotion: An Empirical Comparison of Three Sources of Moral Motivation

Prior research on moral motivation has primarily emphasized moral reasoning and moral emotion; however, identity may also play an important role. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to examine the relative importance of prosocial identity, prosocial moral reasoning, and empathy in predicting prosocial behavior. The sample included 91 university students, ages 19–35 years (M=21.89; SD=3.01; 80% European American; 65% female). Prosocial identity and empathy, but not prosocial moral reasoning, were positively associated with overall prosocial behavior. Exploratory analyses examined how these three sources of prosocial motivation differentially related to six forms of prosocial behavior. Results suggest the importance of considering the roles of all three sources of moral motivation.     

论《周易》的道德谱系

《周易》是一部人学著作,也是一部道德著作。《周易》构建了一种特殊的道德谱系,这种道德谱系由本能无意识、文化无意识、社会意识、自我意识道德化四个层面构成。《周易》的道德谱系把“人”与“道”联系起来,从而有了“人道”,也把“道”与“德”联系起来,从而有了“道德”。《周易》在性命之理的基础上探讨了人的形成、演化及人性的内容;又在“人”与“道”的基础上构建了“成人”与“做人”的道德谱系。《周易》的道德谱系把“人”与“道”联接起来是人学,把“道”与“德”联接起来是伦理学。天道、人道等统一于性命之理的命题之中,成为了道德谱系的奇特内容,从而人也就成为了道德谱系的本体。     

Crime and punishment: distinguishing the roles of causal and intentional analyses in moral judgment

Recent research in moral psychology has attempted to characterize patterns of moral judgments of actions in terms of the causal and intentional properties of those actions. The present study directly compares the roles of consequence, causation, belief and desire in determining moral judgments. Judgments of the wrongness or permissibility of action were found to rely principally on the mental states of an agent, while judgments of blame and punishment are found to rely jointly on mental states and the causal connection of an agent to a harmful consequence. Also, selectively for judgments of punishment and blame, people who attempt but fail to cause harm more are judged more leniently if the harm occurs by independent means than if the harm does not occur at all. An account of these phenomena is proposed that distinguishes two processes of moral judgment: one which begins with harmful consequences and seeks a causally responsible agent, and the other which begins with an action and analyzes the mental states responsible for that action.     

Moral Conviction and Political Engagement

The 2004 presidential election led to considerable discussion about whether moral values motivated people to vote, and if so, whether it led to a conservative electoral advantage. The results of two studies—one conducted in the context of the 2000 presidential election, the other in the context of the 2004 presidential election—indicated that stronger moral convictions associated with candidates themselves and attitudes on issues of the day uniquely predicted self-reported voting behavior and intentions to vote even when controlling for a host of alternative explanations (e.g., attitude strength, strength of party identification). In addition, we found strong support for the hypothesis that moral convictions equally motivated political engagement for those on the political right and left and little support for the notion that a combination of morality and politics is something more characteristic of the political right than it is of the political left.     

Reflections on the Incompatibilist’s Direct Argument

The Direct Argument for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility is so christened because this argument allegedly circumvents any appeal to the principle of alternate possibilities – a person is morally responsible for doing something only if he could have avoided doing it – to secure incompatibilism. In this paper, I first summarize Peter van Inwagen’s version of the Direct Argument. I then comment on David Widerker’s recent responses to the argument. Finally, I cast doubt on the argument by constructing counterexamples to a rule of inference it invokes.

Are Moral Reasons Morally Overriding?

In this paper, I argue that those moral theorists who wish to accommodate agent-centered options and supererogatory acts must accept both that the reason an agent has to promote her own interests is a nonmoral reason and that this nonmoral reason can prevent the moral reason she has to sacrifice those interests for the sake of doing more to promote the interests of others from generating a moral requirement to do so. These theorists must, then, deny that moral reasons morally override nonmoral reasons, such that even the weakest moral reason trumps the strongest nonmoral reason in the determination of an act’s moral status (e.g., morally permissible or impermissible). If this is right, then it seems that these theorists have their work cut out for them. It will not be enough for them to provide a criterion of rightness that accommodates agent-centered options and supererogatory acts, for, in doing so, they incur a debt. As I will show, in accommodating agent-centered options, they commit themselves to the view that moral reasons are not morally overriding, and so they owe us an account of how both moral reasons and nonmoral reasons come together to determine an act’s moral status.

Moral Feedback and Motivation: Revisiting the Undermining Effect

Social psychologists have evidence that evaluative feedback on others’ choices sometimes has unwelcome negative effects on hearers’ motivation. Holroyd’s article (Holroyd J. Ethical Theory Moral Pract 10:267–278, 2007) draws attention to one such result, the undermining effect, that should help to challenge moral philosophers’ complacency about blame and praise. The cause for concern is actually greater than she indicates, both because there are multiple kinds of negative effect on hearer motivation, and because these are not, as she hopes, reliably counteracted by implicit features of praise and blame. The communicative ideal that she articulates does point us in the right direction, but it requires further elaboration. Once it is spelled out, we find that realizing this ideal, in light of the empirical research, requires rethinking the role of verdict-like judgments within moral feedback.

Paleo-Compatibilism and Buddhist Reductionism

Paleo-compatibilism is the view that the freedom required for moral responsibility is not incompatible with determinism about the factors relevant to moral assessment, since the claim that we are free and the claim that the psychophysical elements are causally determined are true in distinct and incommensurable ways. This is to be accounted for by appealing to the distinction between conventional truth and ultimate truth developed by Buddhist Reductionists. Paleo-compatibilists hold that the illusion of incompatibilism only arises when we illegitimately mix two distinct vocabularies, one concerned with persons, the other concerned with the parts to which persons are reducible. I explore the view, its roots in Buddhist Reductionism, and its prospects.