Question Session 01
There are no question sessions this year, but some of the notes
from previous years are still relevant. These are included here.
Notes
Disgust: Nikki’s Question
‘Disgust is thought to have originated in distaste, a food-rejection impulse or motivation triggered by the ingestion of unpleasant-tasting substances, prototypically those that are bitter (Chapman, Kim, Susskind, & Anderson, 2009; Rozin & Fallon, 1987). Because many bitter substances are toxic (Garcia, Hankins, Denton, & Coghlan, 1975), the role of distaste in food rejection has a clear and concrete adaptive function. Distaste appears to have very ancient origins: Even sea anemones, which first evolved some 500 million years ago, will expel bitter foods from their gastric cavity (Garcia et al., 1975)’ (Chapman & Anderson, 2013, p. 300).
Chapman, Kim, Susskind, & Anderson (2009, p. 1222) provide an important clue on how to think about disgust when they refer to ‘the primitive motivational system of disgust’. My proposal would be that we treat disgust as a primary motivational state.
For a basic introduction to primary (‘primitive’) motivational states, see:
.
Glossary
foundation : I am unsure what exactly a moral foundation is; my rough working assumption is that
a foundation is an area of concern.
The proponents of Moral Foundations Theory are clear on
what makes something a moral foundation? It is
‘(a) being common in third-party normative judgments,
(b) automatic affective evaluations,
(c) cultural ubiquity though not necessarily universality,
(d) evidence of innate preparedness, and
(e) a robust preexisting evolutionary model’
(Atari et al., 2023, p. 1158).
Moral Foundations Theory : The theory that moral pluralism is true; moral foundations are innate but also subject to
cultural learning, and the Social Intuitionist Model of Moral Judgement is correct (Graham et al., 2019).
Proponents often claim, further, that cultural variation in how these innate foundations
are woven into ethical abilities
can be measured using the Moral Foundations Questionnare
(Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009; Graham et al., 2011).
Some empirical objections have been offered (Davis et al., 2016; Davis, Dooley, Hook, Choe, & McElroy, 2017; Doğruyol, Alper, & Yilmaz, 2019).
See Moral Foundations Theory: An Approach to Cultural Variation.
Social Intuitionist Model of Moral Judgement : A model on which intuitive processes are directly responsible for moral judgements (Haidt & Bjorklund, 2008).
One’s own reasoning does not typically affect one’s own moral judgements,
but (outside philosophy, perhaps) is typically used only to provide post-hoc justification
after moral judgements are made.
Reasoning does affect others’ moral intuitions, and so provides a mechanism for cultural learning.
References
Atari, M., Haidt, J., Graham, J., Koleva, S., Stevens, S. T., & Dehghani, M. (2023). Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(5), 1157–1188. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000470
Chapman, H. A., & Anderson, A. K. (2013). Things rank and gross in nature: A review and synthesis of moral disgust. Psychological Bulletin, 139(2), 300–327. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030964
Chapman, H. A., Kim, D. A., Susskind, J. M., & Anderson, A. K. (2009). In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust. Science, 323(5918), 1222–1226. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1165565
Davis, D., Dooley, M., Hook, J., Choe, E., & McElroy, S. (2017). The Purity/Sanctity Subscale of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire Does Not Work Similarly for Religious Versus Non-Religious Individuals. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 9(1), 124–130. https://doi.org/10.1037/rel0000057
Davis, D., Rice, K., Tongeren, D. V., Hook, J., DeBlaere, C., Worthington, E., & Choe, E. (2016). The Moral Foundations Hypothesis Does Not Replicate Well in Black Samples. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 110(4). https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000056
Doğruyol, B., Alper, S., & Yilmaz, O. (2019). The five-factor model of the moral foundations theory is stable across WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures. Personality and Individual Differences, 151, 109547. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109547
Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. P., & Ditto, P. H. (2013). Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism. In P. Devine & A. Plant (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 47, pp. 55–130). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-407236-7.00002-4
Graham, J., Haidt, J., Motyl, M., Meindl, P., Iskiwitch, C., & Mooijman, M. (2019). Moral Foundations Theory: On the advantages of moral pluralism over moral monism. In K. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of Moral Psychology. New York: Guilford Publications.
Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029–1046. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015141
Graham, J., Nosek, B. A., Haidt, J., Iyer, R., Koleva, S., & Ditto, P. H. (2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 366–385. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021847
Haidt, J., & Bjorklund, F. (2008). Social intuitionists answer six questions about moral psychology. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology, Vol 2: The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity (pp. 181–217). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT press.
Iyer, R., Koleva, S., Graham, J., Ditto, P., & Haidt, J. (2012). Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians. PLOS ONE, 7(8), e42366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366
Miller, L., Murphy, R., & Buss, A. (1981). Consciousness of body: Private and public. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(2), 397–406.
Schnall, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G. L., & Jordan, A. H. (2008). Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(8), 1096–1109. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167208317771