Physical Attractiveness Biases Judgments Pertaining to the Moral Domain of Purity

Research on the Beauty-is-Good stereotype shows that unattractive people are perceived to have worse moral character than attractive individuals. Yet research has not explored what kinds of moral character judgments are particularly biased by attractiveness. In this work, we tested whether attractiveness particularly biases moral character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity, beyond a more general halo effect. Across four preregistered studies ( N = 1,778), we found that unattractive (vs. attractive) individuals were judged to be more likely to engage in purity violations compared with harm violations and that this was not due to differences in perceived moral wrongness, weirdness, or sociality between purity and harm violations. The findings shed light on how physical attractiveness influences moral character attributions, suggesting that physical attractiveness particularly biases character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity.

Moral Conscientiousness and the Subjectivism/Objectivism Debate about Moral Wrongness

The Subjectivism/Objectivism debate is a debate about the facts the an action’s moral status is grounded in. Subjectivists maintain that an action’s moral status is grounded in the subjective circumstances of the agent at the time of its performance. Objectivists deny this. This chapter defends the Objectivist view against a recent argument against it by championing a picture of moral conscientiousness which is at odds with a central premise of that argument. The picture of moral conscientiousness defended is one that crucially sees the morally conscientious person’s concern not to act wrongly as degreed and sensitive to the degrees of wrongness of the options facing the morally conscientious agent. After motivating this particular conception of moral conscientiousness and defending Objectivism against the argument against it, the chapter further develops the Objectivist picture of the moral status of actions and explains the Objectivist’s conception of the relation between moral wrongness and what a morally conscientious person ought to do in her choice situation.

How social relationships shape moral wrongness judgments

Judgments of whether an action is morally wrong depend on who is involved and the nature of their relationship. But how, when, and why social relationships shape moral judgments is not well understood. We provide evidence to address these questions, measuring cooperative expectations and moral wrongness judgments in the context of common social relationships such as romantic partners, housemates, and siblings. In a pre-registered study of 423 U.S. participants nationally representative for age, race, and gender, we show that people normatively expect different relationships to serve cooperative functions of care, hierarchy, reciprocity, and mating to varying degrees. In a second pre-registered study of 1,320 U.S. participants, these relationship-specific cooperative expectations (i.e., relational norms) enable highly precise out-of-sample predictions about the perceived moral wrongness of actions in the context of particular relationships. In this work, we show that this ‘relational norms’ model better predicts patterns of moral wrongness judgments across relationships than alternative models based on genetic relatedness, social closeness, or interdependence, demonstrating how the perceived morality of actions depends not only on the actions themselves, but also on the relational context in which those actions occur.

Five Functions, and Two Kinds, of Mens Rea

This chapter sketches how mens rea serves at least five different functions, which can be grouped into two broad categories. Within the first category, it helps to establish that the defendant’s offence was an instance of culpable wrongdoing. It does this in three different ways. First, and most obviously, it contributes to findings of culpability. Secondly, it can help to identify what kind of action a person is performing: in these cases, the finding of mens rea is integral to the moral wrongness of the action for which a person is being held responsible. Thirdly, mens rea affects the availability of justifications. Whether a person’s pro tanto wrong was, all things considered, wrongful—unjustified—and an instance of wrongdoing—depends on the reasons why they did it. The other broad category concerns the principle of legitimate enactment. Mens rea has important roles to play in articulating, and notifying, the limits of citizens’ freedom. More specifically, a fourth function of mens rea is to secure fair warning to defendants, ensuring they have sufficient advance notice that, by their conduct, they risk violating the criminal law. Finally, mens rea plays a key mediating role in criminalization, being part of the trade-off between the protection of potential victims and the preservation of liberties for potential defendants.

Judging accidental harm: Due care and foreseeability of side effects

Both in philosophy and in cognitive psychology, models of moral judgment posit that individuals take into account both agents’ intentions and actions’ outcomes. The present research focused on a third crucial piece of information, agents’ negligence. In Study 1, participants judged the moral wrongness and punishability of agents’ actions that resulted in negative side effects. In the scenarios, we orthogonally manipulated whether the agent acted with or without due care and whether she had or did not have information to foresee the negative side effects of her actions. Participants judged careless agents more condemnable than careful agents, especially when negative side effects could have been easily foreseen. In Study 2, we manipulated due care in acting in cases where the agent’s primary intention was to bring about a certain outcome without knowing that such outcome would actually be harmful. Here information about the foreseeability of negative outcomes was not provided, and participants judged actions performed with care more wrong and punishable than actions performed without care. This suggests that sometimes acting carefully and nevertheless causing harm may constitute evidence of the presence of negative intentions in the agents or evidence of the fact that agents indeed could have foreseen the negative effects of their actions. Together, these findings indicate that carefulness in acting and foreseeability are highly intertwined in moral judgment, and highlight the need to improve existing processing models of moral judgment to account for people’s evaluation of agents and actions whenever negligence can be attributed.

Price gouging and the duty of easy rescue

What, if anything, is wrong with price gouging? Its defenders argue that it increases supply of scarce necessities; critics argue that it is exploitative, inequitable and vicious. In this paper, I argue for its moral wrongness and legal prohibition, without relying on charges of exploitation, inequity or poor character. What is fundamentally wrong with price gouging is that it violates a duty of easy rescue. While legal enforcement of such duties is controversial, a special case can be made for their legal enforcement in this context. This account distinguishes, morally, price gouging by corporations from that of individual entrepreneurs.

On Moral Obligations and Our Chances of Fulfilling Them

Many actions we perform affect the chances of fulfilling our moral obligations. The moral status of such actions is important and deeply neglected. In this paper, I begin rectifying this neglect by asking: under what conditions, if any, is it morally wrong to perform an action that will lower the chance of one fulfilling a moral obligation? In §1, I introduce this question and motivate concern with its answer. I argue, in §2, that certain actions an agent has good reason to believe will drastically lower their chances of fulfilling a moral obligation in the future, relative to at least one alternative action available, are pro tanto morally wrong. This answer, I argue, captures our intuitions in a range of cases, avoids the problems that other views considered here face, and can be plausibly defended against some independent objections. I conclude in §3 by noting some consequences for normative and practical ethics of the moral wrongness of at least some actions that lower the chances of fulfilling our moral obligations, and by raising a series of important questions regarding these actions for future consideration.

Judging Accidental Harm: Due Care and Foreseeability of Side Effects

Both in philosophy and in cognitive psychology, models of moral judgment predict that individuals take into account both agents’ intentions and actions’ outcomes. The present research focused on a third crucial piece of information, agents’ negligence. In Study 1, participants judged the moral wrongness and punishability of agents’ unintended actions that resulted in negative side effects. Whether the agent acted with or without due care and whether she had or did not have information to foresee the negative side effects of her action were manipulated orthogonally in the scenarios. We found that careless agents were condemned more than careful agents, especially when negative side effects could have been prevented. In Study 2, we manipulated due care in acting in non-paradigmatic cases where the agents’ primary intention was to bring about the outcome although not knowing that such outcome was actually negative for others. Here participants judged actions performed with care more wrong and punishable than actions performed without caring, suggesting that the absence of negligence was taken as evidence of the presence of a negative intention in the agents. Together, these findings highlight the need to improve existing processing models of moral judgment to account for people’s evaluation of agents’ intentions and actions’ outcomes in all those cases in which negligence can be attributed.