scholarly journals The Drunk Utilitarian Revisited: Does Alcohol Really Increase Utilitarianism in Moral Judgment?

2021 ◽  
pp. 014616722110521
Author(s):  
Mariola Paruzel-Czachura ◽  
Katarzyna Pypno ◽  
Jim A. C. Everett ◽  
Michał Białek ◽  
Bertram Gawronski
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Inhibitory Control ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Formal Modeling ◽  
Modeling Approach ◽  
Greater Good ◽  
Higher Doses ◽  
Larger Sample

The “drunk utilitarian” phenomenon suggests that people are more likely to accept harm for the greater good when they are under the influence of alcohol. This phenomenon conflicts with the ideas that (a) acceptance of pro-sacrificial harm requires inhibitory control of automatic emotional responses to the idea of causing harm and (b) alcohol impairs inhibitory control. This preregistered experiment aimed to provide deeper insights into the effects of alcohol on moral judgments by using a formal modeling approach to disentangle three factors in moral dilemma judgments and by distinguishing between instrumental harm and impartial beneficence as two distinct dimensions of utilitarian psychology. Despite the use of a substantially larger sample and higher doses of alcohol compared with the ones in prior studies, alcohol had no significant effect on moral judgments. The results pose a challenge to the idea that alcohol increases utilitarianism in moral judgments.

scholarly journals The Drunk Utilitarian Revisited: Does Alcohol Really Increase Utilitarianism in Moral Judgment?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariola Paruzel-Czachura ◽  
Katarzyna Pypno ◽  
Jim Albert Charlton Everett ◽  
Michal Bialek ◽  
Bertram Gawronski
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Inhibitory Control ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Formal Modeling ◽  
Modeling Approach ◽  
Greater Good ◽  
Higher Doses ◽  
Larger Sample

The “drunk utilitarian” phenomenon suggests that people are more likely to accept harm for the greater good when they are under the influence of alcohol. This phenomenon conflicts with the ideas that (1) acceptance of pro-sacrificial harm requires inhibitory control of automatic emotional responses to the idea of causing harm and (2) alcohol impairs inhibitory control. The current preregistered experiment aimed to provide deeper insights into the effects of alcohol on moral judgments by using a formal modeling approach to disentangle three factors in moral dilemma judgments and by distinguishing between instrumental harm and impartial beneficence as two distinct dimensions of utilitarian psychology. Despite the use of a substantially larger sample and higher doses of alcohol compared to the ones in prior studies, alcohol had no significant effect on moral judgments. The results pose a challenge to the idea that alcohol increases utilitarianism in moral judgments.

Moral Judgment in Middle and Late Adulthood: The Effects of Age-Appropriate Moral Dilemmas and Spontaneous Role Taking

1986 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Blum Chap
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Age Difference ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Role Taking ◽  
Age Appropriate

This was a cross-sectional study of the effects of age, sex, and moral dilemma content on adult moral reasoning. Hypothetical dilemmas were presented to sixty men and women, thirty of whom were elderly and thirty in early middle age. With education controlled there were no age or sex differences in moral maturity. Dilemma content had a significant effect on moral judgment, with a tendency for each age group to use a higher level of judgment when the situation described was age-appropriate, i.e., relevant to that group's stage of life. There was a significant age difference on a measure of spontaneous role taking: old persons made more definitive moral judgments than the younger adults, who attempted to reconcile the various points of view represented in a dilemma.

scholarly journals Moral thinking across the world: Exploring the influence of personal force and intention in moral dilemma judgments

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bence Bago ◽  
Balazs Aczel ◽  
Zoltan Kekecs ◽  
John Protzko ◽  
Marton Kovacs ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Situational Factors ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Physical Contact ◽  
Moral Decisions ◽  
Large N ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact

Much research on moral judgment is centered on moral dilemmas in which deontological perspectives (i.e., emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with utilitarian judgements (i.e., following the greater good defined through consequences). A central finding of this field Greene et al. showed that psychological and situational factors (e.g., the intent of the agent, or physical contact between the agent and the victim) play an important role in people’s use of deontological versus utilitarian considerations when making moral decisions. As their study was conducted with US samples, our knowledge is limited concerning the universality of this effect, in general, and the impact of culture on the situational and psychological factors of moral judgments, in particular. Here, we empirically test the universality of deontological and utilitarian judgments by replicating Greene et al.’s experiments on a large (N = X,XXX) and diverse (WEIRD and non-WEIRD) sample across the world to explore the influence of culture on moral judgment. The relevance of this exploration to a broad range of policy-making problems is discussed.

Commentary and Rejoinder on

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 315-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Schnall ◽  
David J. Johnson ◽  
Felix Cheung ◽  
M. Brent Donnellan
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Ceiling Effect ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Peer Evaluation ◽  
Parametric Statistics ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Extreme Responses

Johnson, Cheung, and Donnellan (2014a) reported a failure to replicate Schnall, Benton, and Harvey (2008) ’s effect of cleanliness on moral judgment. However, inspection of the replication data shows that participants provided high numbers of severe moral judgments – a ceiling effect. In the original data percentage of extreme responses per moral dilemma correlated negatively with the effect of the manipulation. In contrast, this correlation was absent in the replications, due to almost all items showing a high percentage of extreme responses. Therefore the parametric statistics reported by Johnson et al. (2014a) are inconclusive regarding the reproducibility of the original effect. Direct replications are prone to error when reviewers only judge similarity of methods, but not resulting data and conclusions. It is my conclusion that preventable problems can arise if publication decisions are made without independent post-data peer evaluation.

Is Empathy Required for Making Moral Judgments?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Deigh
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Psychopathic Personality ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Psychological Profile ◽  
Main Thesis ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Additional Support

This essay is a study of the nature of moral judgment. Its main thesis is that moral judgment is a type of judgment defined by its content and not its psychological profile. The essay arrives at this thesis through a critical examination of Hume’s sentimentalism and the role of empathy in its account of moral judgment. The main objection to Hume’s account is its exclusion of people whom one can describe as making moral judgments though they have no motivation to act on them. Consideration of such people, particularly those with a psychopathic personality, argues for a distinction between different types of moral judgment in keeping with the essay’s main thesis. Additional support for the main thesis is then drawn from Piaget’s theory of moral judgment in children.

Effect of Power on Moral Judgment

1978 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 387-394
Author(s):  
Russell Hamby
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Low Power ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Factorial Design ◽  
High Power ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Need For Power ◽  
Experimenter Effects

Ambiguous effects of power on attributions of moral responsibility for an accident are interpreted to result from the intervening effects of need for power, which is aroused by the anticipation of exercising power over another. 160 subjects from introductory social psychology classes participated in a questionnaire-type experiment comparing effects of high/low carelessness, severe/minor consequences, and high/low power of the attributor in a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design. In a follow-up experiment 30 subjects were assigned to conditions of high or low power, and their needs for power and moral attributions were measured. High power seemed to arouse need for power, which was curvilinearly related to moral judgments. Those high and low in need for power attributed more moral responsibility to the perpetrator of an accident than those with moderate levels of need for power. The results suggest complicated models of both moral judgments and experimenter effects related to the level or arousal of motivations.

scholarly journals Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (17) ◽  
pp. 4688-4693 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Clark Barrett ◽  
Alexander Bolyanatz ◽  
Alyssa N. Crittenden ◽  
Daniel M. T. Fessler ◽  
Simon Fitzpatrick ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Narrow Range ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Moral Assessment ◽  
Mitigating Circumstances

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Although these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment.

Developmental Study of Moral Judgments by Japanese Children

1991 ◽  
Vol 68 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1131-1136
Author(s):  
Hirotsugu Yamauchi
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Causal Attribution ◽  
Helping Behavior ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Developmental Study ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Frequency Data ◽  
Japanese Children ◽  
Dual Scaling ◽  
Evaluative Feedback

The purpose of this study was to examine the determinants of causal attribution in the contexts of moral judgment and the developmental shifts of the determinants. Subjects were children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 ( ns = 83, 122, and 84). Moral judgments were measured by asking subjects to provide “evaluative feedback” to an hypothetical child's helping behavior. The method of dual scaling was applied to the frequency data of moral judgments. Two-dimensional solutions show that subjects judged whether the hypothetical child should be rewarded or punished and what amount of reward or punishment was given to the hypothetical child. Developmental shifts were found for moral judgment.

scholarly journals Famine, Affluence, and Amorality

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sackris
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
First Person ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Moral Decision Making ◽  
Distinct Kind ◽  
Ordinary Case ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Way

I argue that the debate concerning the nature of first-person moral judgment, namely, whether such moral judgments are inherently motivating (internalism) or whether moral judgments can be made in the absence of motivation (externalism), may be founded on a faulty assumption: that moral judgments form a distinct kind that must have some shared, essential features in regards to motivation to act. I argue that there is little reason to suppose that first-person moral judgments form a homogenous class in this respect by considering an ordinary case: student readers of Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Neither internalists nor externalists can provide a satisfying account as to why our students fail to act in this particular case, but are motivated to act by their moral judgments in most cases. I argue that the inability to provide a satisfying account is rooted in this shared assumption about the nature of moral judgments. Once we consider rejecting the notion that first-person moral decision- making forms a distinct kind in the way it is typically assumed, the internalist/externalist debate may be rendered moot.

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