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\title {Moral Psychology \\ Moral Psychology vs Consequentialism?}

\maketitle

Moral Psychology vs Consequentialism?

[email protected]

\def \ititle {Moral Psychology vs Consequentialism?}

\begin{center}

{\Large

\textbf{\ititle}

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\iemail %

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\section{Introduction}

Moral psychology is the study of psychological aspects of ethical abilities.

linguistic / mathematical / aesthetic /

ethical

abilities

This is a course about ethical abilities.

act
judge
be open to moral suasion
feel

What are ethical abilities?

ACT. These are abilities to act on the basis of ethical considerations, as when you refrain from doing something because, as you later tell me, ‘it is wrong’.

JUDGE. These are also abilities to judge your own and other’s actions as morally right or wrong, and to distinguish moral transgressions from conventional ones.

SUASION. And they are abilities to be influenced by others’ moral reasoning.

FEEL. And they are abilities to feel things like disgust or guit.

Note that we should allow that there is room for discoveries about which ethical abilities particular kinds of individual possess. For example, what ethical abilities do dogs have, or do humans in the first year of life have? There is even room for discovery about the ethical abilities of adult humans.

Moral psychology is the study of psychological aspects of ethical abilities.

Similar questions could be asked about linguistic abilities, that is, abilities to communicate with words.

We can also compare ethical abilities to mathematical or aesthetic abilities. While ethical abilities are in some ways more fundamental---because they explain the possibility

These comparisons are going to be useful in what follows. Because more is known about linguistic and mathematical abilities, we may be able to use theories about these as a model for ethical abilities.

But this is a course about ethical abilities. Our main question is ...

Questions for this course:

What ethical abilities do humans have? What states and processes underpin them?

What, if anything, do discoveries about ethical abilities imply about ethics?

Structure of this course

Course Structure

Part 1: psychological underpinnings of ethical abilities

Part 2: implications for ethics?

preview ...

‘Science can advance ethics by revealing the hidden inner workings of our moral judgments, especially the ones we make intuitively. Once those inner workings are revealed we may have less confidence in some of [...] the ethical theories that are explicitly or implicitly based on them’

Greene, 2014 pp. 695--6

Aim is to understand and evaluate this claim.

Structure of this course

Course Structure

Part 1: psychological underpinnings of ethical abilities

Part 2: implications for ethics?

Trolley

A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people. You can hit a switch that will divert the trolley onto a different set of tracks where it will kill only one.

Is it okay to hit the switch?

Trolley

\emph{Trolley}

A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people. You can hit a switch that will divert the trolley onto a different set of tracks where it will kill only one.

Is it okay to hit the switch?

The important thing for me isn’t whether you find the argument compelling or not. There’s surely much more to say. It’s that the motivating for it gives us a good question, a puzzle even.

puzzle 1

Why do people tend to respond differently in Trolley and Transplant?

To solve the puzzle we have to think about the role of emotion in unreflective moral judgements ...

Moral Dumbfounding

\section{Moral Dumbfounding}

Hypothesis: Not all unreflective moral judgements depend on reasoning.

We will consider evidence for this hypothesis.

What is moral dumbfounding?

Moral dumbfounding is ‘the stubborn and puzzled maintenance of a judgment without supporting reasons’ \citep[p.~1]{haidt:2000_moral}.

‘Moral dumbfounding occurs when you make an ethical judgement but either cannot provide reasons or provide reasons that are ‘only weakly associated’ with your judgement’ \citep{dwyer:2009_moral}.

To understand this phenomenon, we need to review the experiment that gave rise to the term.

To understand moral dumbfounding, we need to review the experiment that gave rise to the term.

Haidt et al (2000; unpublished!)’s tasks

NB: I’m delibertately not mentioning the Heinz dilemma at this stage, for drama.

morally provocative but ‘harmless’: Incest; Cannibal

‘(Incest) depicts consensual incest between two adult siblings, and [...] (Cannibal) depicts a woman cooking and eating a piece of flesh from a human cadaver donated for research to the medical school pathology lab at which she works. These stories were chosen because they were expected to cause the participant to quickly and intuitively "see-that" the act described was morally wrong. Yet since the stories were carefully written to be harmless, the participant would be prevented from finding the usual “reasoning-why” about harm that participants in Western cultures commonly use to justify moral condemnation‘ \citep{haidt:2000_moral}.

‘In addition we used two "non-moral intuition" tasks: Roach and Soul. [...] In [Roach] the participant is asked to drink from a glass of juice both before and after a sterilized cockroach has been dipped into it. In the Soul task the participant is offered two dollars to sign a piece of paper and then rip it up; on the paper are the words "I, (participant's name), hereby sell my soul, after my death, to Scott Murphy [the experimenter], for the sum of two dollars." At the bottom of the page a note was printed that said: "this is not a legal or binding contract"’ \citep[p.~6]{haidt:2000_moral}

Method: ask whether wrong; counter argue; questionnaire

Method: (1) ask whether the act was wrong (or whether the participant would perform the action). (2) record the answer, and any argument given. (3) experimenter argue against the participant’s position. (4) questionnaire after each task (‘The questionnaire asked the participant to respond on a Likert scale as to her level of confusion, irritation, and confidence in her judgment, and to what extent her judgment was based on reasoning or on a "gut feeling."’).

Do try this at home!

But is Isabel dumbfounded? Maybe briefly. But is that significant? Hard to measure ...

To understand moral dumbfounding, we need to review the experiment that gave rise to the term.

Haidt et al (2000; unpublished!)’s tasks

NB: I’m delibertately not mentioning the Heinz dilemma at this stage, for drama.

morally provocative but ‘harmless’: Incest; Cannibal

nonmorally provocative but ‘harmless’: Roach; Soul

Method: ask whether wrong; counter argue; questionnaire

This condition is often forgotton but it is important for two reasons.

First, a natural assumption is that we should be able to test hypotheses about relative levels of dumbfounding rather than about absolute levels. Second, ... we’ll see late in covering Dwyer‘s argument

On the importance of the control (Heinz) task: ‘Planned contrasts were performed between the Heinz task and each of the other four tasks, because we predicted that the Heinz task would be unique in encouraging analytical reasoning’ \citep[p.~8]{haidt:2000_moral}

Results

NB: unpublished data

‘it often happened that participants made “unsupported declarations”, e.g., “It’s just wrong to do that!” or “That’s terrible!”

Note the comparison with the control!

They made the fewest such declarations in Heinz, and they made significantly more such declarations in the Incest story.’

Results ctd

NB: unpublished data

Informal observation: ‘participants often directly stated that they were dumbfounded, i.e., they made a statement to the effect that they thought an action was wrong but they could not find the words to explain themselves’ (p. 9)

‘Participants made the fewest such statements in Heinz (only 2 such statements, from 2 participants), while they made significantly more such statements in the Incest (38 statements from 23 different participants), Cannibalism (24 from 11), and Soul stories (22 from 13).’

Importance of the method: this is a control

Study 2 (not reported!):

Cognitive load increased the level of moral dumbfounding without changing subjects’ judgments.

‘In Study 2 [which is not reported in the draft] we repeated the basic design while exposing half of the subjects to a cognitive load—an attention task that took up some of their conscious mental work space—and found that this load increased the level of moral dumbfounding without changing subjects’ judgments or their level of persuadability.’ \citep[p.~198]{haidt:2008_social}.

This will be important later when we are thinking about dual process theories of moral abilities.

replication / extension / review?

Royzman et al, 2015 : more recent study doubts that dumbfounding occurs \citep{royzman:2015_curious}. This study involves three experiments. They partially replicated Haidt et al, 2000, then go on to test whether subjects really believe that the incest is harmless.

Note that, unlike Haidt et al, 2000, these researchers did not use the comparison with Heinz!

‘a definitionally pristine bout of MD is likely to be a extraordinarily rare find, one featuring a person who doggedly and decisively condemns the very same act that she has no prior normative reasons to dislike’

\citep[p.~311]{royzman:2015_curious}

Royzman et al, 2015 p. 311

‘3 of [...] 14 individuals [without supporting reasons] disapproved of the siblings having sex and only 1 of 3 (1.9%) maintained his disapproval in the “stubborn and puzzled” manner.’

\citep[p.~309]{royzman:2015_curious}

Royzman et al, 2015 p. 309

Warning: Note the absent comparison with the Heinz dilemma.

summary: moral dumbfounding

we know the definition;

some evidence --- weak, but probably occurs.

why is this relevant?

Hypothesis: Not all unreflective moral judgements depend on reasoning.

Should we make a stronger claim ... no judgements moral judgements depend on reasoning?

Remember Heinz!

There is some further relevant evidence ...

What is the role of reasoning in moral judgement? Some appear to have suggested that moral reasoning merely serves to confirm prior intuitions, special cases aside \citep{greene:2007_secret,haidt:2001_emotional}.\footnote{Although in fact Haidt’s view is more interesting. Compare \citet[p.~181]{haidt:2008_social} ‘Moral discussion is a kind of distributed reasoning, and moral claims and justifications have important effects on individuals and societies’; yet they go on to write that ‘moral reasoning is an effortful process (as opposed to an automatic process), usually engaged in after a moral judgment is made, in which a person searches for arguments that will support an already-made judgment’ \citet[p.~189]{haidt:2008_social}.} Opposing these views, \citet{hindriks:2015_how} argues that in ordinary cases of moral disengagement, moral reasoning provides anticipatory rationalization.

post-hoc rationalization

Moral reasoning merely serves to confirm prior intuitions, in nearly all cases (Haidt; Greene)

Some theorists have proposed that oral reasoning merely serves to confirm prior intuitions, in nearly all cases (Haidt; Greene). If they are right, then Dwyer’s suggestion that moral judgements are not consequences of explicit reasoning involving known principles appears sound. However ...

‘Moral disengagement occurs in situations in which someone is tempted to flout his own moral standards, and thereby to frustrate his desire to maintain self-consistency’ \citep[p.~243]{hindriks:2015_how}.

My view.

Moral dumbfounding shows that some ethical judgements are not consequences of reasoning from known principles

Other phenomena (e.g. moral disengagement) indicate that some ethical judgements are consequences of reasoning from known principles

The important thing for me isn’t whether you find the argument compelling or not. There’s surely much more to say. It’s that the motivating for it gives us a good question, a puzzle even.

puzzle 2

Why are ethical judgements sometimes, but not always, a consequence of reasoning from known principles?

To solve the puzzle we have to think about the role of emotion in unreflective moral judgements ...

Emotion Drives Unreflective Ethical Judgements

\section{Emotion Drives Unreflective Ethical Judgements}

Theoretical Claim: Emotion drives unreflective ethical judgements.

Prediction: Manipulating subjects’ emotions will influence their unreflective ethical judgements.

How to intervene on emotion? Here’s the video they used to instill disgust.

In other experiments, they triggered disgust by (i) creating a fart smell, (ii) putting participants in a dirty environment, and (iii) asking them to write about disgusting events in their own lives.

Seems like (i) and (ii) might contrast with (iii) and the video in providing unattributed feelings of disgust.

[just for me -- skip]

Schnall et al, 2008 Experiment 4

3 groups: induce disgust, sadness or neither using video clips

‘The sadness clip (from The Champ) portrayed the death of a boy’s mentor, the disgust clip (from Trainspotting) portrayed a man using an unsanitary toilet, and the neutral clip (from a National Geographic special) portrayed fish at the Great Barrier Reef’ \citep{lerner:2004_heart}.

Judge how wrong an action is in six vignettes

Half the vignettes involve disgusting actions.

Predictions:

Disgust (but not sadness) will influence moral judgements,

irrespective of whether the actions judged are disgusting.

Complication: Private Body Consciousness

Result: ‘disgust influenced moral judgment similarly for both disgust and nondisgust vignettes’.

Six vignettes (also used in Experiment 2):

‘Three of these vignettes involved a moral violation with disgust—Dog (a man who ate his dead dog), Plane Crash (starving survivors of a plane crash consider cannibalism), and Kitten (a man deriving sexual pleasure from playing with a kitten)—and three of the vignettes involved a moral violation with no disgust—Wallet (finding a wallet and not returning it to its owner), Resume (a person falsifying his resume), and Trolley (preventing the death of five men by killing one man). The instructions told participants to go with their initial intuitions when responding’ \citep[p.~1100]{schnall:2008_disgust}

Private Body Consciousness: ‘Miller, Murphy, and Buss (1981) devised a scale to measure people’s general attention to internal physical states, which they refer to as Private Body Consciousness (PBC)‘ \citep[p.~1100]{schnall:2008_disgust}.

\subsection{Vignettes from Schnall et al (2008) Experiment 4}

\emph{Dog} Frank’s dog was killed by a car in front of his house. Frank had heard that in China people occasionally eat dog meat, and he was curious what it tasted like. So he cut up the body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. How wrong is it for Frank to eat his dead dog for dinner?

\emph{Plane Crash} Your plane has crashed in the Himalayas. The only survivors are yourself, another man, and a young boy. The three of you travel for days, battling extreme cold and wind. Your only chance at survival is to find your way to a small village on the other side of the mountain, several days away. The boy has a broken leg and can- not move very quickly. His chances of surviving the journey are essentially zero. Without food, you and the other man will probably die as well. The other man suggests that you sacrifice the boy and eat his remains over the next few days. How wrong is it to kill this boy so that you and the other man may survive your journey to safety?

\emph{Wallet} You are walking down the street when you come across a wallet lying on the ground. You open the wal- let and find that it contains several hundred dollars in cash as well the owner’s driver’s license. From the credit cards and other items in the wallet it’s very clear that the wallet’s owner is wealthy. You, on the other hand, have been hit by hard times recently and could really use some extra money. You consider sending the wallet back to the owner without the cash, keeping the cash for yourself. How wrong is it for you to keep the money you found in the wallet in order to have more money for yourself?

\emph{Resume} You have a friend who has been trying to find a job lately without much success. He figured that he would be more likely to get hired if he had a more impressive resume. He decided to put some false information on his resume in order to make it more impressive. By doing this he ultimately managed to get hired, beating out several candidates who were actually more qualified than he. How wrong was it for your friend to put false information on his resume in order to help him find employment?

\emph{Kitten} Matthew is playing with his new kitten late one night. He is wearing only his boxer shorts, and the kit- ten sometimes walks over his genitals. Eventually, this arouses him, and he begins to rub his bare genitals along the kitten’s body. The kitten purrs, and seems to enjoy the contact. How wrong is it for Matthew to be rubbing himself against the kitten?

\emph{Trolley} You are at the wheel of a runaway trolley quickly approaching a fork in the tracks. On the tracks extend- ing to the left is a group of five railway workmen. On the tracks extending to the right is a single railway workman. If you do nothing the trolley will proceed to the left, causing the deaths of the five workmen. The only way to avoid the deaths of these workmen is to hit a switch on your dashboard that will cause the trolley to proceed to the right, causing the death of the single workman. How wrong is it for you to hit the switch in order to avoid the deaths of the five workmen?

Schnall et al, 2008 figure 3

Showing results from Experiment 4. Induce either Disgust or Sadness or neithre using a video clip. Then make moral judgements.

‘For high-PBC [Private Body Consciousness] (but not low-PBC) people, our disgust manipulations increased the severity of moral condemnation relative to the neutral conditions’ \citep[p.~1105]{schnall:2008_disgust}

Schnall et al, 2008 conclusions:

‘the effect of disgust applies regardless of whether the action to be judged is itself disgusting.

Second, [...] disgust influenced moral, but not additional nonmoral, judgments.

These nonmoral judgements concerned policies. ‘Six public policy items asked participants to rate whether they would support these pro- posals if they were up for a vote in the U.S. Congress on a scale from 0 (strongly oppose) to 9 (strongly support). Three items involved issues of contamination or guarding borders (i.e., spending more money for waste treatment, spending more money to “patrol the borders” against ille- gal immigrants, and making it easier for the government to “expel foreigners” with suspected links to terrorism). The other three issues did not involve such themes (i.e., allowing nondenominational school prayer, increasing federal funding for social science research, and decreasing the number of students per classroom).’ \citep[p.~1100]{schnall:2008_clean}

Third, because the effect occurred most strongly for people who were sensitive to their own bodily cues, the results appear to concern feelings of disgust rather than merely the primed concept of disgust.

Fourth, [...] induced sadness did not have similar effects.’

\citep[pp.~1105--6]{schnall:2008_disgust}

Schnall et al, 2008 pp. 1105--6

Is the prediction confirmed?

Theoretical Claim: Emotion drives unreflective ethical judgements.

Prediction: Manipulating subjects’ emotions will influence their unreflective ethical judgements.

Dual Process Theories

\section{Dual Process Theories}

Start with a simple causal model.

‘response 1’ is a variable representing which response the subject will give. [Which values it takes will depend on what sort of response it is (e.g. a verbal response, proactive gaze, button press.) We can think of it as taking three values, one for correct belief tracking, one for fact tracking, and one for any other response.]

‘process 1’ and ‘process 2’ are variables which each represent whether a certain kind of ethical process will occur and, if so, what it’s outcome is.

And the arrows show that the probability that response 1 will have a certain value is influenced by the value of the variables process 1 and process 2 (and by other things not included in the model). So it should be possible to intervene on the value of ‘process 1’ in order to bring about a change in the value of ‘response 1’.

[I’ve used thicker and thinner arrows informally to indicate stronger and weaker dependence. Strictly speaking the width has no meaning and this model doesn’t specify exactly how the values of variables are related, only that they are.]

Dual Process Theory of Ethical Abilities (core part)

Two (or more) ethical processes are distinct:
the conditions which influence whether they occur,
and which outputs they generate,
do not completely overlap.

Ok, that’s what the theory says. But what does it mean?

Actually we don’t need to consider more than one response for the present since there is no evidence concerning multiple types of response (alas!).

cognitive load study \citep{greene:2008_cognitive}

Answer the dilemma (see handout)

Ask them to read and respond to the dilemma

\subsection{Dilemma}

‘You are part of a group of ecologists who live in a remote stretch of jungle. The entire group, which includes eight children, has been taken hostage by a group of paramilitary terrorists. One of the terrorists takes a liking to you. He informs you that his leader intends to kill you and the rest of the hostages the following morning.

‘He is willing to help you and the children escape, but as an act of good faith he wants you to kill one of your fellow hostages whom he does not like. If you refuse his offer all the hostages including the children and yourself will die. If you accept his offer then the others will die in the morning but you and the eight children will escape.

‘Would you kill one of your fellow hostages in order to escape from the terrorists and save the lives of the eight children?’ \citep{koenigs:2007_damage}

Terminology

‘consequentialist response’ = yes, kill one of your fellow hostages

[For later: \citet{gawronski:2017_consequences}’s criticism about binary choices not properly relfecting the fully range of possibilities (e.g. because a negative answer might reflect a preference for inaction).]

Additional assumptions

One process makes fewer demands on scarce cognitive resources than the other.

(Terminology: fast vs slow)

The slow process is responsible for consequentialist responses; the fast for other responses.

What are ‘consequentialist responses’? Those responses where a moral judgement that would be correct on a simple consequentialist theory.

Prediction: Increasing cognitive load will selectively slow consequentialist responses

Greene et al 2008, figure 1

time pressure study

Additional assumptions

One process makes fewer demands on scarce cognitive resources than the other.

(Terminology: fast vs slow)

The slow process is responsible for consequentialist responses; the fast for other responses.

Prediction: Limiting the time available to make a decision will reduce consequentialist responses.

time pressure study

Trémolière and Bonnefon, 2014 figure 4

‘The model detected a significant effect of time pressure, p = .03 (see Table 1), suggesting that the slope of utilitarian responses was steeper for participants under time pressure. As is visually clear in Figure 4, participants under time pressure gave less utilitarian responses than control par- ticipants to scenarios featuring low kill–save ratios, but reached the same rates of utilitarian responses for the highest kill–save ratios.’ \citep[p.~927]{tremoliere:2014_efficient}

\textbf{*todo*} [save for later, more drama: [also mention \citep{gawronski:2018_effects} p.~1006 ‘reinterpreation’ and p.~992 descriptive vs mechanistsic]] \citet[p.~669]{gawronski:2017_what} argue for an alternative interpretation: The central findings of \citet{tremoliere:2014_efficient} ‘show that outcomes did influence moral judgments, but only when participants were under cognitive load or time pressure (i.e., the white bars do not significantly differ from the gray bars within the low load and no time pressure condi- tions, but they do significantly differ within the high load and time pressure conditions). Thus, a more appro- priate interpretation of these data is that cognitive load and time pressure increased utilitarian responding, which stands in stark contrast to the widespread assumption that utilitarian judgments are the result of effortful cognitive processes (Greene et al., 2008; Suter & Hertwig, 2011).

So this is our dual process theory of ethical abilities.

Dual Process Theory of Ethical Abilities (core part)

Two (or more) ethical processes are distinct:
the conditions which influence whether they occur,
and which outputs they generate,
do not completely overlap.

Dual Process Theories Meet the Puzzles

\section{Dual Process Theories Meet the Puzzles}

puzzle 1

Why do people tend to respond differently in Trolley and Transplant?

puzzle 2

Why are ethical judgements sometimes, but not always, a consequence of reasoning from known principles?

I think it is clear that our core dual process theory cannot solve them. The key is to elaborate on the nature of the processes.

So this is our dual process theory of ethical abilities.

Dual Process Theory of Ethical Abilities (core part)

Two (or more) ethical processes are distinct:
the conditions which influence whether they occur,
and which outputs they generate,
do not completely overlap.

‘a dual-process approach in which moral judgment is the product of both intuitive and rational psychological processes, and it is the product of what are conventionally thought of as ‘affective’ and ‘cognitive’ mechanisms’

\citep[p.~48]{cushman:2010_multi}.

Cushman et al, 2010 p. 48

I like to think of this contrast in terms of demands on scarce cognitive resources.

Here is the link to emotion.

puzzle 2

Why are ethical judgements sometimes, but not always, a consequence of reasoning from known principles?

Structure of this course

Course Structure

Part 1: psychological underpinnings of ethical abilities

Part 2: implications for ethics?

‘Direct Route’

Ought we to condemn incest?

Why do we condemn incest?

Ought we to rely rely on such emotional responses in cases in which there is no special concern about genetic diseases?

Greene, 2014

‘Indirect Route’

‘genetic transmission, cultural transmission, and learning from personal experience [...] are the only mechanisms known to endow [...] automatic [...] processes with the information they need to function well’

Greene 2014, p. 714

unfamiliar* problems = ‘ones with which we have inadequate evolutionary, cultural, or personal experience’

‘it would be a cognitive miracle if we had reliably good moral instincts about unfamiliar* moral problems’

‘The No Cognitive Miracles Principle:

When we are dealing with unfamiliar* moral problems, we ought to rely less on [...] automatic emotional responses and more on [...] conscious, controlled reasoning, lest we bank on cognitive miracles.’

Greene, 2014 p. 715

Trolley

\emph{Trolley}

A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people. You can hit a switch that will divert the trolley onto a different set of tracks where it will kill only one.

Is it okay to hit the switch?

‘I strongly suspect that [Transplant] is unfamiliar*, a bizarre case in which an act of personal violence against an innocent person is the one and only way to promote a much greater good.’

Greene, 2014 p. 716

conclusion

In conclusion, ...

cuts

\section{Against Resemblance}

Do sensory perceptions resemble their causes?

‘In putting forward an account of light, the first point I want to draw to your attention is that it is possible for there to be a difference between the sensation that we have of it, that is, the idea that we form of it in our imagination through the intermediary of our eyes, and what it is in the objects that produces the sensation in us, that is, what it is in the flame or in the Sun that we term ‘light’’

\citep[][p. 81 (AT XI:3)]{descartes:1998_world}

Descartes, The World (AT 3)

This quote is quite complex. Let's try to simplify. (Do this when quoting in your own work.)

Further illustration (not from The World). Descartes’ explanation of why the rainbow is a bow. Relevant because of the gap between sensory perception and the things which cause it. And shows Descartes examines sensory perceptions.

sensory perceptions
do not resemble
their causes

But what is moral psychology?

Moral Intuitions and Heuristics: Evaluating the Evidence

\section{Moral Intuitions and Heuristics: Evaluating the Evidence}

replications / related research

Never trust a single study.

Eg. the same authors pubilshed another study in the same year \citep{schnall:2008_clean} which an attempt to replicate has quite convincingly indicated that the effect is not powerful enough to have been discovered by the original study \citep{johnson:2014_does}.

How are things with \citet{schnall:2008_disgust}? \citep{chapman:2013_things} is a broadly supportive review.

Eskine et al, 2011 figure 1

\citet{eskine:2011_bad} is another study which appears to support (end extend) \citet{schnall:2008_disgust}.

Relevant because bitterness is related to disgust.

Different tastes in mouth, ‘using Wheatley and Haidt’s (2005) moral vignettes, which portray various moral trans- gressions (second cousins engaging in consensual incest, a man eating his already-dead dog, a congressman accepting bribes, a lawyer prowling hospitals for victims, a person shoplifting, and a student stealing library books)’ \citep{eskine:2011_bad}.

Also ‘using Wheatley and Haidt’s (2005) moral vignettes, which portray various moral transgressions (second cousins engaging in consensual incest, a man eating his already-dead dog, a congressman accepting bribes, a lawyer prowling hospitals for victims, a person shop-lifting, and a student stealing library books)’ \citep{eskine:2011_bad}.

‘Results revealed a significant effect of bev- erage type, F(2, 51) = 7.368, p = .002, η 2 = .224. Planned contrasts showed that participants’ moral judgments in the bitter condition (M = 78.34, SD = 10.83) were significantly harsher than judgments in the control condition (M = 61.58, SD = 16.88), t(51) = 3.117, p = .003, d = 1.09, and in the sweet condition (M = 59.58, SD = 16.70), t(51) = 3.609, p = .001, d = 1.22’ \citep{eskine:2011_bad}.

‘Judgments in the control and sweet conditions did not differ significantly, t(51) = 0.405, n.s.’ \citep{eskine:2011_bad}.

Chapman & Anderson, 2013 table 2

11 studies here. Note that two studies found no effect of manipulating disgust on moral judgement.

‘To date, almost all of the studies that have manipulated disgust or cleanliness have reported effects on moral judgment. These findings strengthen the case for a causal relationship between disgust and moral judgment, by showing that experimentally evoked disgust---or cleanliness, its opposite---can influence moral cognition’

\citep[p.~313]{chapman:2013_things}

Chapman & Anderson (2013)

conclusion so far

There seems to be a variety of evidence for the claim

that manipulating disgust-related phenomena

can influence unreflective ethical judgements.

puzzle 1

Why do people tend to respond differently in Trolley and Transplant?

puzzle 2

Why are ethical judgements sometimes, but not always, a consequence of reasoning from known principles?

Keyboard Shortcuts?

Moral Psychology vs Consequentialism?

[email protected]

Moral Dumbfounding

Emotion Drives Unreflective Ethical Judgements

Dual Process Theories

Dual Process Theories Meet the Puzzles

Moral Intuitions and Heuristics: Evaluating the Evidence

Keyboard Shortcuts`?`