Benefiting from misfortune: when harmless actions are judged to be morally blameworthy

Dominant theories of moral blame require an individual to have caused or intended harm. However, the current four studies demonstrate cases where no harm is caused or intended, yet individuals are nonetheless deemed worthy of blame. Specifically, individuals are judged to be blameworthy when they engage in actions that enable them to benefit from another's misfortune (e.g., betting that a company's stock will decline or that a natural disaster will occur). Evidence is presented suggesting that perceptions of the actor's wicked desires are responsible for this phenomenon. It is argued that these results are consistent with a growing literature demonstrating that moral judgments are often the product of evaluations of character in addition to evaluations of acts.     

The Psychology of Dilemmas and the Philosophy of Morality

We review several instances where cognitive research has identified distinct psychological mechanisms for moral judgment that yield conflicting answers to moral dilemmas. In each of these cases, the conflict between psychological mechanisms is paralleled by prominent philosophical debates between different moral theories. A parsimonious account of this data is that key claims supporting different moral theories ultimately derive from the psychological mechanisms that give rise to moral judgments. If this view is correct, it has some important implications for the practice of philosophy. We suggest several ways that moral philosophy and practical reasoning can proceed in the face of discordant theories grounded in diverse psychological mechanisms.

Psychiatric disorders and motor vehicle accidents

The literature has often suggested a relationship between psychiatric illness and increased risk for motor vehicle accidents but few data exist, particularly those from prospective or case-controlled studies. The present study examined detailed accident and injury data from a large series (N = 1778) of motor vehicle crashes that included persons with diagnoses of psychiatric illnesses (n = 17); matched controls were also studied. As expected, drivers with psychiatric diagnoses used psychotropic medications more frequently than did controls. Drivers with psychiatric diagnoses did not have more frequent single-car crashes, unsafe speed or failure to yield violations, or less restraint use than did controls. Such drivers did less often drive motorcycles and tended to be less often cited for alcohol use. Implications of these results for efforts toward prevention and for further study are discussed.     

Will managed care change our way of being?

The authors studied psychotherapeutic practices commonly used in managed care settings and the theories and rhetorical strategies that justify them to speculate about if or how they are beginning to influence societywide understandings about the proper way of being human at the turn of the millennium. The practices--and effects--of managed care regulations on the self are interpreted by studying how the patient, the therapist, and the therapeutic relationship come to light in managed care settings. These categories are then used to speculate about the configuration of the newly emerging, 21st-century self. By extending hermeneutic concerns about instrumentalism and technicism, the authors suggest a new way of thinking about psychotherapy modeled less on positivist science and more on moral discourse. Finally, given this more hermeneutic understanding of psychotherapy, the authors speculate about alternative conceptions and arrangements of care.     

The role of conscious reasoning and intuition in moral judgment: testing three principles of harm

Is moral judgment accomplished by intuition or conscious reasoning? An answer demands a detailed account of the moral principles in question. We investigated three principles that guide moral judgments: (a) Harm caused by action is worse than harm caused by omission, (b) harm intended as the means to a goal is worse than harm foreseen as the side effect of a goal, and (c) harm involving physical contact with the victim is worse than harm involving no physical contact. Asking whether these principles are invoked to explain moral judgments, we found that subjects generally appealed to the first and third principles in their justifications, but not to the second. This finding has significance for methods and theories of moral psychology: The moral principles used in judgment must be directly compared with those articulated in justification, and doing so shows that some moral principles are available to conscious reasoning whereas others are not.     

Ideology obscured. Political uses of the self in Daniel Stern's infant

Daniel Stern's (1985) respected theory of infant development is critiqued from a social-constructionist perspective in order to demonstrate how decontextualized psychology theories inadvertantly perpetuate the political status quo. Self-invariants in the core-self phase are discussed as reflections of the current configuration of self rather than a discovery of universal elements of human development. The parental attunement response is reinterpreted as a way by which Western interiority and subjectivity are socially constructed. Language as the fundamental cause of alienation and dividedness is disputed. In Stern's theory, universal qualities of the self and the processes of language acquisition are responsible for several psychological ills characteristic of the 20th century. By exonerating political structures as causal factors, decontextualized theories legitimize, justify, and perpetuate current arrangements of power and privilege.     

Simulating murder: the aversion to harmful action

Diverse lines of evidence point to a basic human aversion to physically harming others. First, we demonstrate that unwillingness to endorse harm in a moral dilemma is predicted by individual differences in aversive reactivity, as indexed by peripheral vasoconstriction. Next, we tested the specific factors that elicit the aversive response to harm. Participants performed actions such as discharging a fake gun into the face of the experimenter, fully informed that the actions were pretend and harmless. These simulated harmful actions increased peripheral vasoconstriction significantly more than did witnessing pretend harmful actions or to performing metabolically matched nonharmful actions. This suggests that the aversion to harmful actions extends beyond empathic concern for victim harm. Together, these studies demonstrate a link between the body and moral decision-making processes.