The Perceived Objectivity of Ethical Beliefs: Psychological Findings and Implications for Public Policy

Goodwin, Geoffrey P.; Darley, John M.

doi:10.1007/s13164-009-0013-4

Cited by 83 publications

(73 citation statements)

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“…In addition, we have argued that exposure to moral relativism may relax our moral standards because it implies that our moral beliefs are ultimately subjective. However, Goodwin & Darley (2010) have argued that moral relativism also requires more abstract and reflective thinking. In our own materials, relativist arguments asked participants to step back from their feelings while absolutist arguments asked participants to rely on them.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exposure to moral relativism compromises moral behavior

Tage

Holyoak

2013

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

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• We examined whether exposure to moral relativism would compromise moral behavior.• Participants who read a relativist argument were more likely to cheat.• Participants who read an absolutist moral definition were less willing to steal.• The subjectivity of morality implied by relativism appears to compromise behavior. a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o Across two studies we investigated the relationship between moral relativism versus absolutism and moral behavior. In Experiment 1, we found that participants who read a relativist argument for tolerating female genital mutilation were more likely to cheat to win an incentivized raffle than participants who read an absolutist argument against female genital mutilation, or those in a control condition. In Experiment 2, participants who read a definition of morality phrased in absolutist terms expressed less willingness to engage in petty theft than those who read a definition of morality phrased in relativist terms, or those in a control condition. Experiment 2 also provided evidence that effects were not due to absolutist arguments signaling that fewer behaviors are morally permissible, nor to relativist arguments defending more disagreeable moral positions. Rather, the content of the philosophical positions themselves-the fact that relativism describes morality as subjective and culturally-historically contingent, whereas absolutism describes morality as objective and universal-makes individuals more likely to engage in immoral behaviors when exposed to moral relativism compared to moral absolutism.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exposure to moral relativism compromises moral behavior

Tage

Holyoak

2013

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

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“…By contrast, objective claims are mind-independent (e.g. "2 + 2 = 4" is true, regardless of what anyone believes; Goodwin & Darley, 2010;Sayre-McCord, 1986). It follows that subjective claims should evoke mental state representations, because mental state representations are necessary to evaluate the claim 1 .…”

Section: Metaethics and Mental State Representationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By contrast, objective claims are mind-independent (e.g. "2 + 2 = 4" is true, regardless of what anyone believes; Goodwin & Darley, 2010;Sayre-McCord, 1986 What this all means for moral claims, is that if morals are represented as subjective, then they should elicit greater activity in brain regions responsible for mental state representation.This hypothesis is made testable by recent work in social neuroscience: a set of brain regionsthe Theory of Mind (ToM) network-has been consistently implicated in mental state representation (Amodio & Frith, 2006;Decety & Cacioppo, 2012;Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003;Young, Camprodon, Hauser, Pascual-Leone, & Saxe, 2010;Young & Saxe, 2009; for reviews see Schurz et al, 2014; Van Overwalle, 2009). Within this network, some regions of interest (ROIs) are more active during tasks that involve general forms of social cognition, such as trait inference, or assessing the similarity of others to the self (dorsal/ventral-medial prefrontal cortex; DMPFC, VMPFC; Amodio & Frith, 2006;Decety & Cacioppo, 2012;Harris, Todorov, & Fiske, 2005; Jenkins & Mitchell, 2010;Ma, Vandekerckhove, Van Hoeck, & Van Overwalle, 2012;Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005;Ochsner et al, 2005;Schurz et al, 2014; Van Overwalle, 2009;Young & Saxe, 2009).…”

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confidence: 99%

Examining overlap in behavioral and neural representations of morals, facts, and preferences.

Theriault¹,

Waytz²,

Heiphetz³

et al. 2017

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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OVERLAP IN MORALS, FACTS, AND PREFERENCES 2Metaethical judgments refer to judgments about the information expressed by moral claims.Moral objectivists generally believe that moral claims are akin to facts, whereas moral subjectivists generally believe that moral claims are more akin to preferences. Evidence from developmental and social psychology has generally favored an objectivist view; however, this work has typically relied on few examples, and analyses have disallowed statistical generalizations beyond these few stimuli. The present work addresses whether morals are represented as fact-like or preference-like, using behavioral and neuroimaging methods, in combination with statistical techniques that can a) generalize beyond our sample stimuli, and b) test whether particular item features are associated with neural activity. Behaviorally, and contrary to prior work, morals were perceived as more preference-like than fact-like. Neurally, morals and preferences elicited common magnitudes and spatial patterns of activity, particularly within dorsal-medial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a critical region for social cognition. This common DMPFC activity for morals and preferences was present across whole-brain conjunctions, and in individually localized functional regions of interest (targeting the Theory of Mind network). By contrast, morals and facts did not elicit any neural activity in common.Follow-up item analyses suggested that the activity elicited in common by morals and preferences was explained by their shared tendency to evoke representations of mental states. We conclude that morals are represented as far more subjective than prior work has suggested. This conclusion is consistent with recent theoretical research, which has argued that morality is fundamentally about regulating social relationships.Keywords: metaethics, morality, social cognition, fMRI, theory of mind OVERLAP IN MORALS, FACTS, AND PREFERENCES 3Examining overlap in behavioral and neural representations of morals, facts, and preferences.Moral claims (e.g. "eating meat is wrong") can be evaluated on multiple levels. One may agree or disagree with a given claim (a first-order judgment); however, independent of this, one may make a second-order (i.e. metaethical) judgment-regardless of whether you agree or disagree, what information does the claim express? Moral objectivists generally believe that moral claims are either true or false, and that this truthfulness is independent of anyone's personal beliefs (i.e. moral claims are akin to facts). By contrast, moral subjectivists believe that personal beliefs govern whether moral claims are true-or that moral claims cannot be true or false at all (i.e. moral claims are akin to preferences; Sayre-McCord, 1986; for review, see Goodwin & Darley, 2010). Metaethical questions are the subject of intense philosophical debate, yet they are highly relevant to cognitive, social, and moral psychology. Metaethical questions ask how moral information is represented. It is possible that morals are represented...

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“…This finding contrasts with a presupposition that runs strongly through some philosophical writing-that ethical beliefs as a whole are objective or subjective, and that one's meta-ethical view should apply en masse to one's entire set of ethical beliefs, in a top-down, deductive fashion-what Sinnott-Armstrong (2009) refers to as the uniformity assumption." 16 In more recent work, Goodwin and Darley (2010; have begun to consider explanations that do not involve attributions of inconsistency but rather assume there are important differences between distinct classes of ethical statements to which ordinary individuals' metaethical judgments are sensitive.…”

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confidence: 99%

Moral objectivism across the lifespan

Beebe

Sackris

2016

Philosophical Psychology

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We report the results of a cross-sectional study that examined folk metaethical judgments in participants between the ages of 12 and 88. We found that participants in their late teens and early twenties attributed less objectivity to ethical statements than participants in older or younger age groups. We also critically examine other recent investigations of folk metaethical intuitions and compare our results to certain well-known findings in the moral development literature.keywords: moral psychology, metaethics, objectivism, subjectivism, relativism Philosophers have long assumed that the vast majority of ordinary people are unrestricted moral objectivists-i.e., that they take moral claims to be objectively true or false and to apply to all people regardless of culture. For example, J. L. Mackie (1977, 33) famously claimed:The ordinary user of moral language means to say something about whatever it is that he characterizes morally, for example a possible action, as it is in itself… and not about, or even simply expressive of, his, or anyone else's, attitude or relation to it… one that is absolute, not contingent upon any desire or preference or policy or choice. 2More recently, Michael Smith (1994, 6, 84) has argued that "we seem to think moral questions have correct answers; that the correct answers are made correct by objective moral facts." and that "it is a platitude that our moral judgements at least purport to be objective."1 Despite the prevalence of these claims within the philosophical community 2 , however, the fact remains that they lack any empirical basis. 2 Similar claims can be found in Brink (1989) and Darwall (1998). 3(forthcoming) found that not only is there significant diversity among individuals with regard to the objectivity they attribute to ethical claims; there is also significant diversity of opinion with respect to whether individuals take certain issues such as abortion or anonymously donating money to charity to be ethical issues at all, despite the fact that philosophers overwhelmingly regard these issues as ethical.In the present article we report the results of a study that contributes to this growing body of empirically-based investigations of folk metaethical judgments. The two primary motivations for our project are that existing studies of folk metaethical judgments almost always employ problematic measures of moral objectivism and do not sample from a wide range of age groups.We show that individuals in their late teens and twenties often question or reject moral objectivism to a greater extent than at any other time in their lives. Before reporting the results of our study, we first review some of the difficulties and limitations of other studies of folk moral objectivism and explain how we attempted to overcome them in our own. Background and MotivationAs is well known, philosophers divide the field of ethics into metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. (1.5) Are there moral facts, and if so, how do these facts compare to scientific facts? Goodwin and Darley (...

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The Perceived Objectivity of Ethical Beliefs: Psychological Findings and Implications for Public Policy

Cited by 83 publications

References 82 publications

Exposure to moral relativism compromises moral behavior

Exposure to moral relativism compromises moral behavior

Examining overlap in behavioral and neural representations of morals, facts, and preferences.

Moral objectivism across the lifespan

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