The role of reasoning in our moral lives has been increasingly called into question by moral psychology. Not only are intuitions guiding many of our moral judgments and decisions, with reasoning only finding post-hoc rationalizations, but reasoning can sometimes play a negative role, by finding excuses for our moral violations. The observations fit well with the argumentative theory of reasoning (Mercier H, Sperber D, Behav Brain Sci, in press-b), which claims that reasoning evolved to find and evaluate arguments in dialogic (...) contexts. This theory explains the strong confirmation bias that reasoning displays when it produces arguments, which in turn explains its tendency to rationalize our decisions. But this theory also predicts that people should be able to evaluate arguments felicitously and that, as a result, people should reason better in groups, when they are confronted with other people’s arguments. Groups are able to converge on better moral judgments. It is argued that reasoning and argumentation play an important role in our everyday moral lives, and a defense of the value of reasoning for moral change is offered. (shrink)

Scholars have advocated for the inclusion of metacognition in our understanding of the ethical decision making process and in support of moral learning. An instrument to measure metacognition as a domain-specific capacity related to ethical decision making is not found in the current literature. This research describes the development and validation of the 20-item Moral Metacognition Scale. Psychometric properties of the scale were assessed by exploration and confirmation of the factor structure, and the demonstration of convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. (...) Moral metacognition, as measured by the MMS, was significantly correlated with ethical awareness and ethical judgment. Limitations of our research, suggestions for future exploration, and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

The contemporary philosophical debate on free will and moral responsibility is rife with appeal to a variety of allegedly intuitive cases and principles. As a result, some have argued that many strands of this debate end in “dialectical stalemates,” boiling down to bedrock, seemingly intractable disagreements about intuition . Here I attempt to carve out a middle ground between conventional reliance on appeal to intuition and intuitional skepticism in regards to the philosophical discussion of moral responsibility in particular. The main (...) goal of this paper is to propose and defend a new methodological assumption that I argue responsibility theorists can and should accept, one that serves to preserve a general skepticism about the proper role of intuition in our responsibility theorizing while marking a particular class of our responsibility judgments as having a privileged epistemic status such that they can play a role in constraining our responsibility theorizing. (shrink)

Moral foundations theory chastises cognitive developmental theory for having foisted on moral psychology a restrictive conception of the moral domain which involves arbitrarily elevating the values of justice and caring. The account of this negative influence on moral psychology, referred to in the moral foundations theory literature as the ?great narrowing?, involves several interrelated claims concerning the scope of the moral domain construct in cognitive moral developmentalism, the procedure by which it was initially elaborated, its empirical grounds and the influence (...) of this conception of the moral domain on research in moral psychology. Examining these claims in light of key theoretical writings on the moral domain concept in cognitive moral developmentalism, the paper shows that the ?great narrowing? narrative is misinformed, superficial and historically inaccurate. On the basis of this critical analysis, we conclude that the primary heuristic value of the ?great narrowing narrative? is as a case lesson in the deep specificity of competing conceptions of the moral domain to the theoretical frameworks in which they are devised. (shrink)

The paper demonstrates its ‘CSR at a tipping point’ thesis by juxtaposing views of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as essential for business and societal sustainability against those that see CSR as unaffordable or irrelevant in the current economic climate. Drawing from Kohlberg's seminal theory of moral development, CSR is conceptualised as the development of organisation moral reasoning, and the proposition is illustrated by demonstrating inter-disciplinary similarities in levels of ethical concern within different approaches to the practice of marketing, human resource (...) management (HRM) and performance management. Levels of concern for CSR are related to environmental and firm-specific drivers and constraints that influence the CSR dynamic. Environmental influences on organisational CSR stances emanate from a range of stakeholder constituencies, while the importance accorded to CSR is also influenced by firm-specific factors such as the organisation's stage of development, strategy and leadership. The paper's identification of inter-disciplinary similarities in the varying levels of concern for CSR and its delineation of CSR drivers and constraints contribute to CSR theory, and these frameworks also represent analytical tools that managers can use to assess or to change an organisation's CSR stance. The multi-level perspective on CSR adopted by the paper links an organisation's overall or ‘macro’ CSR stance to the ‘meso’ levels of CSR represented by practice within its specialist functions. It proposes that the ‘CSR at a tipping point’ proposition is assessed by utilising the conceptual model in the paper within a case-study research design to determine whether specific organisations – identified as ‘CSR-positive’ ones by their relatively high level of concern for stakeholder welfare – are changing the importance they accord to CSR as a result of the new business context, and the extent to which practice in their marketing, HRM and performance management functions are shapers or consequences of this. (shrink)

When making a moral judgment, people largely care about two factors: Who did it (causal responsibility), and did they intend to (intention)? Since Piaget's seminal studies, we have known that as children mature, they gradually place greater emphasis on intention, and less on mere bad outcomes, when making moral judgments. Today, we know that this developmental shift has several signature properties. Recently, it has been shown that when adults make moral judgments under cognitive load, they exhibit a pattern similar to (...) young children; that is, their judgments become notably more outcome based. Here, we show that all of the same signature properties that accompany the outcome‐to‐intent shift in childhood characterize the “intent‐to‐outcome” shift obtained under cognitive load in adults. These findings hold important implications for current theories of moral judgment. (shrink)

Prominent theories in moral psychology maintain that a core aspect of moral competence is the ability to distinguish moral norms, which derive from universal principles of justice and fairness, from conventional norms, which are contingent on a specific group consensus. The present study investigated the psychological bases of the moral-conventional distinction by manipulating the framing of the test question, the authority’s license, and the historical context. Participants evaluated moral and conventional transgressions by answering an ‘okay for you’ test question (i.e., (...) judging according to their opinion) or an ‘okay in context’ test question (i.e., judging by imagining being a contemporary of the story protagonist). In evaluating moral transgressions that happened in a distant context or with the authority’s license, most of the participants condemned the violations when responding to the ‘okay for you’ test question, but did not do so when responding to the ‘okay in context’ test question. A similar effect of the question framing was found also on scenarios presenting conventional violations suggesting that subtle changes in the framing of the test question can influence people’s evaluations of both moral and conventional prototypical transgressions. We propose that these effects indicate the presence of moral and conventional construals of social actions that are highly flexible and context-sensitive. (shrink)

Three years ago Robert Saltonstall, Jr., Associate Vice President for Operations at Harvard University, faced an increasingly common problem in business and institutions today when he severed 68 long-service, wage employees to solve a problem of low productivity in a particular trade group. He did this using relatively conventional and creative techniques. But now three years later, he asked Nona Lyons of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who is researching the ethical dimensions of executives' decisions, to assist him in (...) evaluating how these employees felt about the process. The employees' loyalty in spite of everything has caused Saltonstall to rethink the ethics of both his decision and its execution. In this article Saltonstall asks and answers many of the questions executives face when challenged to handle work reduction decisions in a more ethical way. And Lyons assists him with commentary on some of the current research on moral decision-making which will help executives to understand why they find some of their decisions to be moral dilemmas. The article challenges executives to think about reorganization decisions in a participative way and suggests seven central issues executives should consider before commencing a participative approach. The article reaches no specific conclusion, but introduces some new ways to think about lay-off decisions and their ethical implications for those affected. (shrink)

(1994). Charles Darwin, Paul MacLean, and the lost origins of “the moral sense”: Some implications for general evolution theory. World Futures: Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 187-196.

We report on the development and initial validation of the Moralization of Everyday Life Scale, designed to measure variations in people's assignment of moral weight to commonplace behaviors. In Study 1, participants reported their judgments for a large number of potential moral infractions in everyday life; principal components analysis revealed 6 main dimensions of these judgments. In Study 2, scores on the 30-item MELS showed high reliability and distinctness from the Big 5 personality traits. In Study 3, scores on the (...) MELS were strongly correlated with scores on an early scale of moral judgments, suggesting convergent validity. (shrink)

This article is designed to explore and examine the key components of communication that emerged during the interactional analysis of a role play that took place in the classroom. The ‘actors’ were nurses who perceived the interaction to reflect an everyday encounter in a hospital ward. Permission to tape the interaction was sought and given by all persons involved. The principal ‘players’ in the scenario were: the patient, a 70-year-old-woman who had been admitted with dementia, her son and daughter, and (...) the nurse in charge of the ward. The fundamental dynamics of the use of power and restriction, truth telling, family stress, interpersonal conflict, ageism, sexism, empathy and humanism surfaced during the analysis. The findings show that therapeutic communication should be the foundation on which nursing should stand. The article continues with an exploration of the theoretical frameworks that guided the analysis of interaction and concludes by suggesting tentatively some meaningful implications for nursing practice. It plans to furnish provocative new insights into the sometimes covert communication dynamics occurring within the nurse-patient relationship. Finally, it aims to generate discussion on this little-charted realm of human social interaction. (shrink)

The possible relationship between widespread unauthorized copying of microcomputer software (also known as software piracy) and level of moral judgment is examined through analysis of over 350 survey questionnaires that included the Defining Issues Test as a measure of moral development. It is hypothesized that the higher one''s level of moral judgment, the less likely that one will approve of or engage in unauthorized copying. Analysis of the data indicate a high level of tolerance toward unauthorized copying and limited support (...) for the hypothesis. The most plausible explanation for these findings is that software copying is perceived as an issue of low moral intensity. This study calls into question the software industry''s strategy of concentrating exclusively on institutional compliance with copyright rules, rather than working to raise the perceived moral intensity about software piracy at the individual level. As long as the issue remains low in moral intensity, the industry cannot expect significant shifts in copying behaviors. Individuals must become more aware of and concerned about the nature and magnitude of harm to society and to the rightful copyright owners from unauthorized copying before their attitudes and behaviors come to reflect higher levels of moral judgment. (shrink)

Children, even very young children, distinguish moral from conventional transgressions, inasmuch as they hold that the former, but not the latter, would still be wrong if there was no rule prohibiting them. Many people have taken this finding as evidence that morality is objective, and therefore universal. I argue that reflection on the phenomenon of imaginative resistance will lead us to question these claims. If a concept applies in virtue of the obtaining of a set of more basic facts, then (...) it is authority independent, and we therefore resist the attempts of authorities to claim that it does not apply. Thus, the moral/conventional distinction is a product of imaginative resistance to claims that a concept does not apply when its supervenience base is in place (or vice versa). All we can rightfully conclude from the fact that children are disposed to make the moral/conventional distinction is that our moral concepts belong to the class of authority-independent concepts. Though the set of basic facts in virtue of which an authority-independent concept obtains must be objective, the concept itself might be conventional, inasmuch as we could easily draw its boundaries wider or narrower, or fail to have a concept that corresponds to these properties at all. (shrink)

Do children derive different benefits from group collaboration at different ages? In the present study, 183 children from two age groups took part in a class quiz as members of a group, or individually. In some groups, cohesiveness was made salient by awarding prizes to the top performing groups. In other groups, prizes were awarded to the best performing individuals. Findings, both in terms of social outcomes and performance in the quiz, indicated that the 8-year olds viewed the benefits of (...) group membership in terms of the opportunities to receive information from other members. The 13-year olds, in contrast, viewed group collaboration as a constructive process where success was connected with group cohesiveness. (shrink)

In a Web-based survey of 740 investigative journalists, competition and medium emerge as the 2 most salient predictors of journalists' tolerance of deception. Journalists who view competition as an important consideration in ethical decision making are more tolerant of deception. Television journalists have a higher tolerance of deception than print journalists. Overall, organizational factors such as medium and organization size are better predictors of deception tolerance than individual-level variables such as age, education, work experience, journalism as a college major, or (...) media ethics instruction. (shrink)

In adopting a deontological lens to assess message ethicality, this study identifies and explicates the ethical dimensions of fast food advertising through five principles of the TARES framework of persuasion ethics. In moral weight, fast food—with its high calories and low nutritional value—is negatively prejudiced. A deontological-ethical perspective, by focusing on the quality of the advertising message, shifts the focus from the product to a more measured deliberation about the moral responsibility of fast food advertisers to reposition them as moral (...) agents who are accountable for their messages. A content analysis of 380 television and print ads for fast food in Singapore shows that few ads met the TARES's expectations. Ads targeting children and teenagers are associated with lower message ethicality than ads targeting adults and the general audience, lending empirical support to the literature critical of fast food advertising's insidious approach of targeting the young. (shrink)

As anthropology becomes more interested in consciousness and its numerous states, and with a slowly increasing appeal to neuroscience for insights and explanations of consciousness, there is an understandable interest in the components of consciousness and how they combine into alternative states in different sociocultural settings. One of those components should be the complexity of information processing producing the knowing aspect of consciousness. The author introduces an approach to this aspect in the form of conceptual systems theory, a neo-Piagetian model (...) of cognitive development, which has been used to good effect to explain information processing in social situations but heretofore neglected by anthropologists. The neuroanthropological underpinnings of CST are discussed, as is the range of potential applications to ethnological and ethnographic problems. (shrink)

Debates about moral judgments have raised questions about the roles of reasoning, culture, and conflict. In response, the cognitive prototype model explains that over time, through training, and as a result of cognitive development, people construct notions of blameworthy and praiseworthy behavior by abstracting out salient properties that lead to an ideal representation of each. These properties are the primary features of moral prototypes and include social context interpretation, intentionality, consent, and outcomes. According to this model, when the properties are (...) uniform and coherent, they depict a promoral or immoral prototype, relative to the orientations of the properties. A promoral prototype is represented by an action that is supported by the culture, intentionally benevolent or other-regarding, consensual, and resulting in positive outcomes. An immoral prototype is an action that is condemned by the culture, intentionally malevolent or self-serving, lacking consent, and resulting in negative outcomes. It is hypothesized that moral prototypes will result in a high level of agreement and require effortless processing. Alternatively, when properties conflict or the situation deviates from the prototype, a nonprototype will result. It is hypothesized that nonprototypical situations will act as a source of moral disagreement and may require more effortful processing. (shrink)

Using survey methodology we examined the relationships between commitment to moral self-improvement (CMSI), religiosity, ethical problem recognition, and behavioral intentions in a sample of 242 business students. Results of the study suggest that CMSI predicts ethical problem recognition and behavioral intentions. Our findings also suggest that CMSI is positively related to religiosity. The study provides some evidence of CMSI being a mediator in the influence of religiosity on ethical problem recognition and behavioral intentions. Compared to religiosity, CMSI turned out to (...) be a better predictor of perceived importance of ethics, ethical problem recognition, and ethical behavioral intentions. The results of the study have implications for increasing understanding of ethical decision-making, future studies of business ethics, and business ethics education. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework of the intra-firm transfer of best practices in moral reasoning by integrating three streams of literature: internal knowledge transfer in strategic management, moral reasoning and epistemology in philosophy and business ethics, and leader–member exchange in human resource management. We propose that characteristics of moral reasoning (nature of moral knowledge, tacitness of moral reasoning and causal ambiguity), source characteristics (moral development of leaders), target characteristics (integrity capacity and moral development of subordinates), leader–member exchange (...) and internal ethical climate influence the transfer of best practices in moral reasoning. (shrink)

In this article, Ms. Krieger explores the controversy concerning pregnancy disability leave presented by the case of California Federal Savings v. Guerra in light of Thomas Kuhn's model of scientific paradigm change and Carol Gilligan's theory regarding sex differences in moral reasoning. She argues that the controversy reflects a period of paradigm crisis in equality jurisprudence, brought about in part by the recent inclusion of greater numbers of women into the jurisprudential community.

In this essay I develop a case for games as a primitive form of culture and an early arrival at our ancestors’ cultural gates. I analyze the modest intellectual prerequisites for game behavior including the use of metaphor, a reliance on constitutive rules, and an ability to understand the logic of entailment. In arguing for its early arrival during the late Middle and Upper Paleolithic, I develop a case for its powerful adaptive qualities in terms of both natural and sexual (...) selection. I accept ecological dominance coupled with an increasing sense of self as primary sources of selection pressure. I show how these two factors threatened homeostatic balances ranging from low arousal and atrophy to malaise, depression, and anomie. I suggest that an antidote or adaptation was found in culturally-enhanced forms of play — that is, formal, rule-governed games. The upshot of this analysis is a broadened discussion of cultural adaptation from one that often focuses on cooperation, social complexity, and language to other fundamental issues related to survival — namely, increased leisure time, enhanced arousal needs, and the health and physical skills required for a hunter-forager existence. (shrink)

In moral psychology, it has long been argued that empathy is a necessary capacity of both properly developing moral agents and developed moral agency . This view stands in tension with the belief that some individuals diagnosed with autism—which is typically characterized as a deficiency in social reciprocity —are moral agents. In this paper we propose to explore this tension and perhaps trouble how we commonly see those with autism. To make this task manageable, we will consider whether high functioning (...) individuals diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder are capable of empathetic responses. If they are, then they possess a capacity that, on the view above, is required for moral agency. If they are not so capable, and yet sometimes engage in moral behaviour, this casts some doubt on the claim that empathy is required for moral agency. This second possibility will necessitate an exploration of the capacity of some individuals with autism to engage in moral behaviour, giving us further grounds to re-see these individuals as moral agents. (shrink)

It has often been suggested that people’s ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people’s moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the (...) relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people’s moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. It is argued that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first. (shrink)

The psychological study of ethical reasoning tends to concentrate on a few specific issues, with the bulk of the research going to the study of people's attitudes toward moral rules or the welfare of others. But people's ethical reasoning is also shaped by a wide range of other concerns. Here I focus on the importance that people attach to the ideal of being yourself. It is shown that certain experimental results - results that seemed anomalous and inexplicable to researchers who (...) focused on moral rules and concern for the welfare of others - can be explained quite elegantly as the product of people's attachment to the ideal of 'being yourself'. The success of this explanation then points to the need for a more general inquiry into the role that the ideal of 'being yourself ' plays in people's ethical reasoning. (shrink)

School anti-violence programs are united in their radical condemnation of aggression, generally equated with violence. The programs advocate its elimination by priming children's emotional and cognitive controls. What goes unrecognized is the embeddedness of aggression in human beings, as well as its positive psychological and moral functions. In attempting to eradicate aggression, schools increase the risk of student disaffection while stifling the goods associated with it: status, power, dominance, agency, mastery, pride, social-affiliation, social-approval, loyalty, self-respect, and self-confidence. It is argued (...) that the distribution of power and authority to students as plausible substitutes for aggression, would enable them to express aggression in a legitimate manner and simultaneously encourage their attachment to school. A vibrant anti-violence program that attracts children will find a way for caring, amiability, sympathy, and kindness to live in tandem with competition, power, assertiveness, and anger tamed by institutional constraints. (shrink)

Piaget's social psychology is not widely discussed among psychologists, partly because much of it is still contained in untranslated French works. In this article I summarize the main lines of Piaget's social psychology and briefly indicate its relation to current theories in social psychology. Rejecting both Durkheim's sociological holism and Tarde's individualism, Piaget advances a sociological relativism in which all social facts are reducible to social relations and these, in turn, are reducible to rules, values and signs. Piaget's theory of (...) social values takes the form of a social exchange theory characterized in an abstract logical way. Piaget claims social exchange requires normative principles of reciprocity and that individual social development results in such an equilibrium because rationality itself is social and based upon social cooperation. These views, in turn, derive from Piaget's orthogenetic views concerning the course of evolution: development can be characterized as an increase in equilibrium manifested both in individual action and in social interaction. (shrink)

The current study examines moral dilemmas related to the war against terror: the amounts of force used to arrest or harm a “most wanted” terrorist: the greater the use of force, the higher the risk for harming civilians and the lower the risk to the soldiers and vice versa. The study focuses on the association between moral decisions, confidence, and level of difficulty in making the decisions and political attitudes among Israeli Defense Forces soldiers. In addition, the study examines the (...) differences between regular and reserve combat infantry soldiers regarding these variables. According to study hypotheses results indicate more right-wing political attitudes predicted greater use of force and fewer difficulties in making moral decisions, and reserve soldiers reported higher use of fire, higher confidence, and lower level of difficulty in making moral decisions compared with regular soldiers. (shrink)

In the present study business managers in Kabi Pharmacia Company were trained in the use of the autonomous method in their decision-making about solving real life business ethics problems. According to the psychological theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Kohlberg, it is possible to promote the acquisition of the autonomous ethical skill by instruction and training. Indeed, participation in a one-day educational programme which focused on the training of the autonomous cognitive ability and not on the transfer of moral content, was (...) sufficient to provide a shift in the mode of decision-making about business ethics problems towards the autonomous ethical function. This change was still stable one month later. A test was constructed by items representing current business ethics conflicts in order to assess ethical function. (shrink)

Education in business ethics focuses mainly on the improvement of ethical awareness, on philosophical issues, or on the transfer of moral content. However, serious problems with the effectiveness of these methods have been reported. In line with the psychological theories of Piaget, Vygotsky and Kohlberg, and in order to avoid the above problems, the educational effort in the present study was concentrated on the stimulation of development of the underlying autonomous cognitive ability to solve moral problems. Adults were trained to (...) solve business ethics problems according to the autonomous function. The problems were presented in the form of moral conflicts introduced by hypothetical stories. The results showed that simple instructions were sufficient to promote a significant shift in the subjects'' mode of solving the problems towards the autonomous moral function. Both the educational method and the test device are promising. Issues concerning the scoring instrument as well as questions about the transfer and application of the cognitive skill in real situations are discussed. (shrink)

The real-life complexity of moral motivation can be examined and explained by reintegrating time and development into moral inquiry. This article is one of the possible integrative steps in this direction. A dynamic developmental conception of moral motivation can be a useful bridge toward such integration. A comprehensive view of moral motivation is presented. Moral motivation is reconceptualized as a developmental process of self-organization and self-regulation out of which moral judgment and action emerge through the interplay of dynamically intertwined cognitive (...) and emotional components. Moral identity is proposed to emerge from long-term self-organization of moral motivation. In turn, as a higher-order construct, moral identity has a top-down influence on real-time self-organization. The article includes an account of short-term changes in moral motivation, and an account that connects real-time moral functioning with long-term changes. Moral motivation is qualified as a dynamic developmental process on the basis of self-organization, multicausality, nonlinearity, interconnectedness of time scales and substantial intrapersonal variability through motivational pluralism. (shrink)

This study investigates the relations between “Belief in a Just World” , religiosity and victim-blaming attitudes. In particular, the influence of BJW and religiosity on social attitudes is probed. Recent theoretical and psychometric developments in the BJW construct are considered. Thus, 176 Turkish subjects completed measures for BJW-Self /BJW-Other , “Belief in Immanent/Ultimate Justice,” attitudes towards the poor, and religiosity. Results show that Belief in Ultimate Justice and BJW-S are uniquely related to religiosity. As hypothesized, BJW-O and Belief in Immanent (...) Justice are strongly related to harsh attitudes towards the poor. However, contrary to our expectation, results do not indicate a positive link between religiosity and negative attitudes towards the poor. Study findings also provide strong cross-cultural support for the conceptual and psychometric revisions of the Just-World construct. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One of the overarching problems of the world today is that too many people see themselves as dominating other groups of people, and dominating nature. That is a root problem. And thus part of a core solution builds from Kohlberg’s commitment to a universal moral orientation, though extended to include not only all people but the more-than-human world: animals, trees, plants, species, ecosystems, and the land itself. In this article, I make a case for this form of ethical extensionism, (...) and then present psychological evidence for it in both children and adults, including studies with inner-city Black youth and their parents. Then I build on Piaget’s, Kohlberg’s, and Turiel’s emphasis that interaction with the physical and social world is a critical mechanism for development. My corollary is this: that to reverse the incredibly fast human-caused destruction of nature—the wellsprings of human existence—we need to deepen and extend people’s interactions with nature, and with its relatively wild forms, even in urban environments. Toward this end, I discuss my current body of research and framework for urban design based on what are referred to as interaction patterns. (shrink)