Empirical moral rationalism and the social constitution of normativity

Jebari, Joseph

doi:10.1007/s11098-018-1134-3

Cited by 8 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…As with normative motivation above, I hypothesize that the content of moral concepts will be flexible and contextually-dependent; that is, people in different cultures will feel morally motivated to behave in different ways (Cameron et al, 2015). More so than in normative motivation, however, the nature of human social organization makes some moral concepts more likely to develop than others (Jebari, 2019), which means that moral motivation, as a process, does produce some constraints for moral content. This section develops a process-based account of moral motivation, building on the previously developed principles of predictive processing and a sense of should.…”

Section: A Sense Of Should In Moral Motivation and Model-coherencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This was taken as evidence against rationalist approaches to morality (e.g. Kohlberg, 1971), where moral judgments are "reached primarily by a process of reason and reflection" (Haidt, 2001, p. 814; but see Jebari, 2019).…”

Section: Implications For Moral Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…And in turn, that social environment will be biased to have certain structural properties in its social organization, given that some forms of social organization persist and others collapse (Henrich, 2015;Muthukrishna et al, 2014). Indeed, it has been argued that this moral structuralism, where certain forms of social organization are objectively more likely to occur than others, is the most coherent way to interpret the original project of moral rationalism (see Jebari, 2019) 13 .…”

Section: Implications For Moral Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Morality and model coherence: A constructivist and biologically tractable account of moral motivation.

Theriault¹

2023

Motivation and Morality: A Multidisciplinary Approach.

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JORDAN E. THERIAULT[Their] complaint is that we have made no effort to seek consilience with neuroscience and genetics. We agree with their claim but cannot see how this counts as a mark against [moral foundations theory]. If their "expectation" about the requirements for nativist theories were to become widespread, there would be no more nativist theories. And that, we suspect, is why they have proposed an impossibly high bar.

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Section: A Sense Of Should In Moral Motivation and Model-coherencementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Implications For Moral Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Implications For Moral Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Morality and model coherence: A constructivist and biologically tractable account of moral motivation.

Theriault¹

2023

Motivation and Morality: A Multidisciplinary Approach.

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“…Indeed, some normative regularities in humans that we quite comfortably refer to as social norms might actually resemble those at work in the crickets (for example, the case of the escalator norms). More generally, observing how normative regularities emerge in other species can help us to recognize how certain types of multiply realizable social structure -such as social hierarchies -can create conditions under which social norms reliably tend to emerge (Jebari 2018).…”

Section: Is the Normative Regularities Construct Too Permissive?mentioning

confidence: 99%

A pluralistic framework for the psychology of norms

Westra

Andrews

2022

Biol Philos

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Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to domain-specific adaptations for norm acquisition. In this paper, we propose a novel methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. We begin with an analysis of the (sometimes mixed) explanatory aims of the cognitive science of social norms. From this analysis, we derive a recommendation for a reformed conception of its explanandum: a minimally psychological construct that we call normative regularities. Our central empirical proposal is that the psychological underpinnings of social norms are most likely realized by a heterogeneous set of cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms that vary between norms and between individuals, rather than by a single type of process or distinctive norm system. This pluralistic approach, we suggest, offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of social norms.

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“…We contend that our moral psychology is grounded in our ability to track and respond to the structural features of our social environment. Likewise, our moral obligations are grounded in the relationship between individuals and the stability of their social groups – a relationship that is largely independent of individual attitudes (Jebari, in preparation). Of course, we can converge on locally stable, but otherwise optional norms, and where this occurs, such norms will feel objective.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%