When a Virtue is Not a Virtue: Conditional Virtues in Moral Evaluation

PLOS ONE, 2020

Killing people is universally considered reprehensible and evokes in observers a need to punish perpetrators. Here, we explored how observers' personality is associated with their cognitive, emotional, and punishing reactions towards perpetrators using data from 1,004 participants who responded to a set of fifteen third-party perspective moral dilemmas. Among those, four scenarios (architect, life boat, footbridge, smother for dollars) describing deliberate killings were compared to investigate the role of the content features "motive for killing" (selfish vs. utilitarian) and "evitability of victims' death". Participants' moral appropriateness ratings, emotions towards perpetrators, and assigned punishments revealed complex scenario-personality interactions. Trait psychopathy was associated with harsher punishments in all scenarios but also with less concern about killing in general, an increased moral appreciation of utilitarian motives for killing, and a reduced concern about the killing of avoidable victims. Need for cognition was associated with considering a utilitarian motive for killing as a mitigating factor, while intuitive/authority-obedient thinking was linked to a strong focus on avoidability of harm as an aggravating factor when assigning punishments. Otheroriented empathy, trait anxiety, and justice sensitivity did not account for differences in thirdparty punishments. Our explorative findings highlight the importance of inter-individual differences for moral decision making and sense of justice.

2022

A traditional tenet of virtue ethics is that a proper moral assessment of an action needs to be informed by a view of the agent; in particular, a view of their virtues or vices, as exhibited in their action. This picture has been challenged on the grounds that it is revisionary and ill-motivated. The key claim is that we are ordinarily disposed to judge the moral merits of particular actions independently of any view of the character of the agent, and that there is nothing wrong with that practice. In this paper, we identify and criticize a certain view of the nature of character that (we argue) underpins the challenge. We call this a monolithic conception of character. We sketch an alternative, non-monolithic conception, and suggest that when combined with a non-monolithic conception, the traditional tenet can be seen to be neither revisionary nor ill-motivated.

We argue that people regularly encounter situations involving moral conflicts among permissible options. These scenarios, which some have called morally charged situations, reflect perceived tensions between moral expectations and moral rights. Studying responses to such situations marks a departure from the common emphasis on sacrificial dilemmas and widespread use of single-dimension measures. In 6 experiments (n=1607), we show that people use a wide conceptual arsenal when assessing actions that can be described as suberogatory (bad but permissible) or supererogatory (good but not required). In Experiment 1 we find that people identify actions as suberogatory or supererogatory when using open descriptions to describe them. Experiment 2 shows that they differentially assess these actions in terms of how permissible, optional, and good they considered them. Experiment 3 tests the use of these evaluative dimensions with sacrificial dilemmas. We fail to find differences between these categories when people respond to dilemmas, even when controlling for trait utilitarian tendencies. By including judgments of blameworthiness and sanction, Experiments 4 and 5 provide additional evidence of the granularity and the moral significance of these evaluations. In Experiment 6 people offered their own explanations of their responses. Qualitative analyses revealed that they frequently appeal to character traits, the presence of rights, and the absence of explicit duties. Taken together these results suggest a richer spectrum of both situations and concepts relevant to characterize moral judgment than moral psychologists up to this point have generally recognized.

As shown by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, terrorism is one of the most pernicious threats to contemporary societies 1. In addition to obliterating the freedom and physical integrity of victims, terrorist practices can destabilize governments, undermine civil harmony and threaten economic development 1. This is tragically corroborated by the recent history of Colombia, a country marked by escalations of paramilitary terrorist violence 2. Although multiple disciplines are struggling to understand these atrocities, the contributions from cognitive science have been limited. Social cognition abilities 3–7 have been proposed as important variables in relation to criminal and violent profiles. Against this background, this study aimed to assess the moral judgements and social-cognitive profiles of 66 ex-combatants from a paramilitary terrorist group. We found that moral judgement in terrorists is abnormally guided by outcomes rather than by the integration of intentions and outcomes. This pattern was partially related to emotion recognition and proactive aggression scores but independent from other cognitive domains. In addition, moral judgement was the measure that best discriminated between terrorists and non-criminals.

2019

Killing people is universally considered reprehensible and evokes in observers a need to punish perpetrators. To investigate how observers’ personality influences their cognitive, emotional, and punishing reactions towards perpetrators, we analyzed data from 1,004 participants who responded to three scenarios describing deliberate killings from a third-party perspective. Utilitarian motive of killing and inevitability of harm varied systematically between scenarios. Participants’ moral appropriateness judgments, emotions towards perpetrators, and assigned punishments revealed complex scenario-personality interactions. Trait psychopathy led to more understanding emotions but harsher punishments in all scenarios. Regarding utilitarian killings, need for cognition led to milder punishments, whereas intuitive/authority-obedient thinking led to stronger negative emotions and harsher punishments. Other-oriented empathy, trait anxiety, and justice sensitivity did not account for difference...

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2018

People believe that their moral judgments are well-justified and as objective as scientific facts. Still, dual-process models of judgment provide strong theoretical reasons to expect that in reality moral judgments are substantially influenced by highly subjective factors such as attitudes. In four experiments (N = 645) we provide evidence that similarity-dissimilarity of beliefs, mere exposure, and facial mimicry influence judgments of moral character measured in various ways. These influences are mediated by changes in liking of the judged persons, suggesting that attitudinal influences lay at the core of moral character perceptions. Changes in mood do not play such a role. This is the first line of studies showing that attitudes influence moral judgments in addition to frequently studied discrete emotions. It is also the first research evidencing the affective influences on judgments of moral character.

PLOS One, 2018

Moral evaluations occur quickly following heuristic-like intuitive processes without effortful deliberation. There are several competing explanations for this. The ADC-model predicts that moral judgment consists in concurrent evaluations of three different intuitive components: the character of a person (Agent-component, A); their actions (Deed-component, D); and the consequences brought about in the situation (Consequences-component, C). Thereby, it explains the intuitive appeal of precepts from three dominant moral theories (virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism), and flexible yet stable nature of moral judgment. Insistence on single-component explanations has led to many centuries of debate as to which moral precepts and theories best describe (or should guide) moral evaluation. This study consists of two large-scale experiments and provides a first empirical investigation of predictions yielded by the ADC model. We use vignettes describing different moral situations in which all components of the model are varied simultaneously. Experiment 1 (within-subject design) shows that positive descriptions of the AD D-, and C-components of moral intuition lead to more positive moral judgments in a situation with low-stakes. Also, interaction effects between the components were discovered. Experiment 2 further investigates these results in a between-subject design. We found that the effects of the AD D-, and C-components vary in strength in a high-stakes situation. Moreover, sex, age, education, and social status had no effects. However, preferences for precepts in certain moral theories (PPIMT) partially moderated the effects of the A-and C-component. Future research on moral intuitions should consider the simultaneous three-component constitution of moral judgment.

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2019

Moral dilemmas amid war on terrorism include repeated harsh moral choices, which often pose threats to one’s moral image. Given that people strive to view themselves as moral, how do they cope with such morally compromising decisions? We suggest and test two strategies to cope with morally threatening decision-making under in-group moral responsibility amid war on terrorism: (a) trivialization of the moral dilemma and (b) resentment toward the target. Four experimental studies measured (study 1) and manipulated (studies 2–4) these hypothesized mechanisms, presenting a similar collateral damage dilemma to Israeli Jews in the context of the 2014 Gaza conflict (studies 1 and 2) and to Americans in the context of the US campaign against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) (studies 3 and 4). Results demonstrate that both trivialization and resentment facilitate harsh moral choices under conditions of moral accountability. Studying the mechanism underlying moral decision-making in conf...

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014

What sorts of trait information do people most care about when forming impressions of others? Recent research in social cognition suggests that "warmth," broadly construed, should be of prime importance in impression formation. Yet, some prior research suggests that information about others' specifically moral traits-their moral "character"-may be a primary dimension. Although warmth and character have sometimes been conceived of as interchangeable, we argue that they are separable, and that across a wide variety of contexts, character is usually more important than warmth in impression formation. We first showed that moral character and social warmth traits are indeed separable . Further studies that used correlational and experimental methods showed that, as predicted, in most contexts, moral character information is more important in impression formation than is warmth information (Studies 2-6). Character information was also more important than warmth information with respect to judgments of traits' perceived fundamentalness to identity, their uniquely human quality, their contextindependence, and their controllability (Study 2). Finally, Study 7 used an archival method to show that moral character information appears more prominently than warmth information in obituaries, and more strongly determines the impressions people form of the individuals described in those obituaries. We discuss implications for current theories of person perception and social cognition.

Across 6 studies, relationship closeness strongly influenced moral attribution. First, we found that moral attributions were stronger when one interacted with an intimate compared to less intimate other. Second, we examined attributions about those who treat some people well and others badly. Moral character attributions were worse when an actor harmed an intimate relationship partner compared to a less close relationship partner. Further, the effect of relationship partner on moral attributions was influenced by perceivers' beliefs about one's true character. Perceivers were apt to believe that one's true character is revealed when interacting with close others.