Children’s distributive justice: the role of gender norms in different settings

Children ages 6, 8 and 10 (N = 66) distributed resources to a boy and a girl when the proportion of feminine and masculine resources varied, when the preferences of the boy and the girl varied, and when the setting was public or private. Children used gender norms to sort the resources but they primarily sorted the resources equally, even when it required violating gender norms. When there was an atypical preference, participants provided more atypical resources to the children. However, when the setting was public, they provided fewer atypical resources. Overall the results indicate that gender norms are especially strong in public settings but explicit information about preferences can lead children to be flexible about gender norms.     

Frankfurt and the folk: an experimental investigation of Frankfurt-style cases

An important disagreement in contemporary debates about free will hinges on whether an agent must have alternative possibilities to be morally responsible. Many assume that notions of alternative possibilities are ubiquitous and reflected in everyday intuitions about moral responsibility: if one lacks alternatives, then one cannot be morally responsible. We explore this issue empirically. In two studies, we find evidence that folk judgments about moral responsibility call into question two popular principles that require some form of alternative possibilities for moral responsibility. Survey participants given scenarios involving agents that fail to satisfy these principles nonetheless found these agents to be (1) morally responsible, (2) blameworthy, (3) deserving of blame, and (4) at fault for morally bad actions and consequences. We defend our interpretation of this evidence against objections and explore some implications of these findings for the free will debate.     

论道德继承

道德是符合社会之理而维持社会存在的人的行为价值和规范。道德有一般与特殊之分,一般道德的抽象性和特殊道德的具体性决定了二者继承方法的选择,即前者抽象继承,后者批判继承。历史上积累的道德价值和道德规范是道德继承的对象,此对象无论采取何种表述方式,终究可以用语言或者文字的形式表述为一个道德命题。因此,道德继承实质上是对道德命题的继承。道德命题是以善恶价值为内容、对某一道德状况或某一道德要求用逻辑语言所作的判断和陈述。它通常包括形式的或者逻辑的层面和实际的或者经验的层面,前者表征其一般意义,后者表征其特殊意义。理论上,前者采用抽象继承法,后者采用批判继承法,但实际上二者密不可分。因此,现实生活中的道德继承需兼顾两面,即采用一体两面相结合的道德继承模式。     

The role of emotion expectancies in adolescents' moral decision making

This study investigated the impact of emotion expectancies on adolescents’ moral decision making in hypothetical situations. The sample consisted of 160 participants from three different grade levels (mean age = 15.79 years, SD = 2.96). Participants were confronted with a set of scenarios that described various emotional outcomes of (im)moral actions and needed to decide what they would do if they were in the protagonist’s shoes. Findings demonstrate that emotion expectancies differentially influenced adolescents’ hypothetical decision making in antisocial versus prosocial behavioral contexts. Whereas negatively charged self-evaluative emotions over failing to act morally (e.g., guilt) were the strongest predictor for moral choice in antisocial behavioral contexts, positively charged self-evaluative emotions over acting morally (e.g., pride) most strongly predicted moral choice in prosocial contexts. Older adolescents paid greater attention to outcome-oriented emotions that make the decision to act morally less attractive (e.g., regret). Overall, the study suggests that emotion expectancies influence moral decision making in unique and meaningful ways.     

Implicit Puritanism in American moral cognition

Three studies provide evidence that the judgments and behaviors of contemporary Americans are implicitly influenced by traditional Puritan-Protestant values regarding work and sex. American participants were less likely to display traditional values regarding sexuality when implicitly primed to deliberate, as opposed to intuition and neutral primes. British participants made judgments reflecting comparatively liberal sexual values regardless of prime condition (Study 1). Implicitly priming words related to divine salvation led Americans, but not Canadians, to work harder on an assigned task (Study 2). Moreover, work and sex values appear linked in an overarching American ethos. Asian-Americans responded to an implicit work prime by rejecting revealing clothing and sexually charged dancing, but only when their American cultural identity was first made salient (Study 3). These effects were observed not only among devout American Protestants, but also non-Protestant and less religious Americans.     

Perception of suffering and compassion experience: brain gender disparities

Compassion is considered a moral emotion related to the perception of suffering in others, and resulting in a motivation to alleviate the afflicted party. We compared brain correlates of compassion-evoking images in women and men. BOLD functional images of 24 healthy volunteers (twelve women and twelve men; age=27±2.5 y.o.) were acquired in a 3T magnetic resonance scanner while subjects viewed pictures of human suffering previously verified to elicit compassion and indicated their compassionate experience by finger movements. Functional analysis revealed that while women manifested activation in areas involved in basic emotional, empathic, and moral processes, such as basal regions and cingulate and frontal cortices, activation in men was restricted mainly to the occipital cortex and parahippocampal gyrus. These findings suggest that compassion and its moral elements constitute gender-relative subjective phenomena emerging from differently evolved neural mechanisms and socially learned features possibly related to nurturing skills.     

Measuring Care and Justice Moral Orientation: Italian Adaptation and Revision of the MMO-2 Scale

This study presents the Italian adaptation of the Measure of Moral Orientation, second revision (MMO-2). Based on Carol Gilligan’s theory of the Ethics of Care, the MMO-2 was designed to measure two complementary moral stances, namely, Care and Justice. For this study, questionnaire responses from 683 university students were assessed against an Italian-adapted MMO-2 scale. Data were analyzed through exploratory structural equation modeling first as separate scenarios and then as a single model. The final model comprises 4 intercorrelated pairs of latent variables and shows highly satisfactory goodness of fit indices with moderate construct validity and reliability. Strengths, limitations, and directions for the future developments of the MMO-2 are discussed.     

“Staring into the abyss”: veterans’ accounts of moral injuries and spiritual challenges

The concept moral injury is receiving increased attention, especially as it pertains to military trauma. In war, service members may both observe and directly experience horrific events that one can scarcely prepare for. For some, this can result in a shattering of their assumptive world and loss of meaning. For those who are spiritually oriented, a spiritual or existential crisis may ensue. This qualitative study examines military related spiritual and moral wounds experienced by 23 veterans receiving services at a United States Veteran Administration Medical Center. In these first-person accounts, veterans provide insight into a variety of trauma-related struggles including guilt and shame, loss of trust and betrayal, the search for meaning and for the forgiveness of self and others, loneliness and withdrawal, anger, and negative changes in spiritual beliefs and practices. The findings support a call for additional trauma treatment options that address the spiritual and moral components.     

儒家德治思想及其价值的现代阐释

德治理念确立于西周时期 ,在《尚书》中已有明确表述 ,以孔子为代表的儒家学派则在某种程度上对其进行了理论上的系统化。“德治”的观念依据是天命君权的神圣性与绝对性 ,其现实基础则是以血缘家族为基本结构的宗法社会 ,而其贯彻的制度保证则是“礼乐刑政”相互辅成的互动机制。在“德治”理念的背后隐藏着王权的绝对性以及“治者”与“被治者”之间在政治地位以及价值理念上的根本不平等。但作为一种政治模式 ,“德治”充分强调了对于统治者本身之道德素质的本质要求 ,因此它仍蕴含着现代政治在现实性上趋于合理化的基本前提     

Norms with feeling: towards a psychological account of moral judgment

There is a large tradition of work in moral psychology that explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g. hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g. playing with your food). However, only recently have there been attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgment (e.g. Cognition 57 (1995) 1; Ethics 103 (1993) 337). Recent evidence indicates that affect plays a crucial role in mediating the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction. However, the prevailing account of the role of affect in moral judgment is problematic. This paper argues that the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction depends on both a body of information about which actions are prohibited (a Normative Theory) and an affective mechanism. This account leads to the prediction that other normative prohibitions that are connected to an affective mechanism might be treated as non-conventional. An experiment is presented that indicates that "disgust" violations (e.g. spitting at the table), are distinguished from conventional violations along the same dimensions as moral violations.