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.

The Social Foundations of Normative Judgment

<p>Norms suffuse our lives and are a major part of the way that we understand and structure the social world. This thesis provides an account of normative judgment that illuminates the nature of this uniquely human competence. The main argument pursued is that understanding normative judgment requires a direct and sustained understanding of its social functions. Within philosophy, discussion of normativity has often been confined to the moral domain. One major theme of this thesis is the broadening of this focus to include other domains that are rightfully considered normative. Another philosophical shibboleth is the tendency to explain features of human psychology from a conceptual perspective. A second theme of the thesis will be the insistence that empirical research is a useful addition to the project of understanding normativity. I present these ideas in three stages. First, I show why it is plausible to believe in the unity of normative domains and defend a conceptual thesis of Normative Judgment Internalism that sees norms as fundamentally bound up with reasons. Secondly, I outline a puzzle that any theory of normative judgment must answer and then critique orthodox Humean and anti-Humean theories that fail to provide such a solution. Thirdly, I explore empirical research about the nature of normative judgment and tentatively endorse a model of normative cognition that is informed by my earlier arguments.</p>

The Social Foundations of Normative Judgment

<p>Norms suffuse our lives and are a major part of the way that we understand and structure the social world. This thesis provides an account of normative judgment that illuminates the nature of this uniquely human competence. The main argument pursued is that understanding normative judgment requires a direct and sustained understanding of its social functions. Within philosophy, discussion of normativity has often been confined to the moral domain. One major theme of this thesis is the broadening of this focus to include other domains that are rightfully considered normative. Another philosophical shibboleth is the tendency to explain features of human psychology from a conceptual perspective. A second theme of the thesis will be the insistence that empirical research is a useful addition to the project of understanding normativity. I present these ideas in three stages. First, I show why it is plausible to believe in the unity of normative domains and defend a conceptual thesis of Normative Judgment Internalism that sees norms as fundamentally bound up with reasons. Secondly, I outline a puzzle that any theory of normative judgment must answer and then critique orthodox Humean and anti-Humean theories that fail to provide such a solution. Thirdly, I explore empirical research about the nature of normative judgment and tentatively endorse a model of normative cognition that is informed by my earlier arguments.</p>

INTENT-BASED MORALITY IN THIRD-PARTY INTERACTIONS: EVIDENCE FROM COLOMBIAN AND SPANISH CHILDREN

Most developmental studies of the role of outcomes and intentions in third-party moral evaluations sampled children from English-speaking countries and focused on harm and property transgressions. We tested instead 5- to 11-year-old children from Colombia and Spain (N = 123) employing moral scenarios involving disloyalty and unfairness. We found that the outcome-to-intent shift in judgements of transgression severity was moral domain-dependent in Colombian but not Spanish children. More specifically, by age 5 Spanish children judged failed intentional transgressions more severely than accidental transgressions regarding both disloyalty and unfairness. In comparison, Colombian children judged failed intentional transgressions more severely than accidental transgressions in the case of disloyalty but not unfairness. This suggests that it may be adaptive for children to develop sensitivity to intentionality earlier within the moral domain their own culture is more concerned about (e.g., loyalty in collectivistic cultures). Regarding punishment severity, we observed an outcome-to-intent shift in Spanish but not Colombian children. In other words, while Colombian children punished failed intentional transgressions and accidental transgressions equally for the whole age range, Spanish children began to punish failed intentional transgressions of both moral domains more severely than accidental transgressions around 8 years of age. Finally, neither Colombian nor Spanish children enjoyed engaging in punishment. Colombian children even anticipated administering punishment to feel worse than it actually felt during and after punishment allocation. These enjoyment findings suggest that retribution is unlikely to be the primary motive for children’s third-party punishment in this context.

Feeling as Consciousness of Value

A vast range of our everyday experiences seem to involve an immediate consciousness of value. We hear the rudeness of someone making offensive comments. In seeing someone risking her life to save another, we recognize her bravery. When we witness a person shouting at an innocent child, we feel the unfairness of this action. If, in learning of a close friend’s success, envy arises in us, we experience our own emotional response as wrong. How are these values apprehended? The three most common answers provided by contemporary philosophy explain the consciousness of value in terms of judgment, emotion, or perception. An alternative view endorsed mainly by authors inspired by the phenomenological tradition argues that values are apprehended by an intentional feeling. In this model, it is by virtue of a feeling that objects are presented as being in different degrees and nuances fair or unfair, boring or funny, good or bad. This paper offers an account of this model of feeling and its basic features, and defends it over alternative models. To this end, the paper discusses different versions of the model circulating in current research which until now have developed in parallel rather than in mutual exchange. The paper also applies the proposed account to the moral domain and examines how a feeling of values is presupposed by several moral experiences.

Classification and Taxonomy

With the explosion of interest in virtue and virtue ethics, one set of issues that has been comparatively neglected is how to categorize moral character traits. There are virtues and there are vices. Each virtue has at least one corresponding vice, perhaps many. Virtues and vices have opposite moral valences. So much is familiar. But many underexplored questions remain: For a given moral domain, are virtues and vices the only options, or could there be intermediate states of character besides these two? Do virtues and vices come in degrees? Are they incompatible with each other, such that by having one of them, one necessarily cannot have the opposing trait? If there is more than one vice for a given virtue, can a person have multiple vices at the same time? This chapter hopes to make some progress in thinking further about these questions.

Two Conceptions of Moral Realism

This paper considers the comparative merits of two conceptions of real properties, as applied to the moral domain. On the weaker conception, real properties or facts are there anyway, independent of any experience. On the stronger conception, real properties are those not constituted by the availability of some response to them. The question is whether moral realists should restrict themselves to the weaker conception, allowing that a wrong action is one that is such as to elicit blame but not holding that this could constitute wrongness in the object. This paper argues that the weaker conception is inconsistent with the main argument for moral realism, which the author takes to appeal to the phenomenology of moral deliberation.

A REPLY TO RONALD DWORKIN’S CRITIQUE OF MORAL SKEPTICISM

This paper focuses on “indeterminacy”, “objectivity” and “truth” in the work of Ronald Dworkin. The text is divided into four parts: first, I will expose the general structure of Dworkin’s conception of objectivity in the moral domain (Section 1). Next, I will present the main critiques Dworkin addresses to two of his most important philosophical enemies, namely the “external skeptic” (Section 2.1) and the “internal skeptic” (Section 2.2). I then intend to address Dworkin’s critiques by presenting counterarguments in defense of moral skepticism (Section 3). In order to clarify the debate and its points, I try to illustrate the arguments with examples whenever possible. In the concluding Section (4), I recapitulate the main points of the text.

Cultivating Honesty

The virtue of honesty has been seriously neglected in contemporary philosophy. Hardly any papers on the nature of the virtue have appeared in a leading philosophy journal in decades. Similarly, almost nothing has been said about how to cultivate the virtue of honesty. In recent work, Miller has offered a preliminary account of the nature of the virtue of honesty. In this chapter he aims to do the same with honesty cultivation. Specifically, he first looks to the psychological literature on cheating to see what dispositions most people actually possess in this moral domain. Central among them will be beliefs about the wrongness of cheating, as well as desires to cheat while also appearing honest both to others and to ourselves. With this baseline in place, Miller considers what strategies can be recommended to enhance the importance and salience of the wrongness of cheating, while weakening our desires to cheat.