Moral and Value-Based Judgment

Moral and Value-Based Judgment

Celeste Allen

Introduction

Overview

Moral, value-driven judgment is a complex mode of thinking not fully understood in the field of psychology, but nonetheless a very common occurrence in everyday life. Little is known about the theories underlying moral cognition. I explore the basic psychological processes underlying moral cognition: deontology and consequentialism. Furthermore, I account for current research that uses social dilemmas to better account for moral cognition and elucidate the “trolley problem” and the “footbridge problem.” I also discuss findings based on the “affect-back theory” in value-based judgment. The aforementioned topics are discussed in significantly greater detail Literature Review section below.

Literature Review

Information gathered from Daniel M. Bartels articles “Accounting for some of theFlexibility of Moral Value-driven Judgment,” “Morally-Motivated Decision Making,” and “Principled Moral Sentiment and the Flexibility of Moral Judgment and Decision Making”

These articles, to varying degrees, addressed psychological research working to find a normative model for value-driven judgment that will lead to an accurate determination of the degree to which people’s moral cognition is “rigid” and human methodology in making morally-centered decisions.

In order to better understand how rigid or flexible the processes are in value-driven judgment, researchers have examined two very distinct normative ethical theories: deontology and consequentialism. While deontology and consequentialism both examine the outcome of an action in evaluating the extent to which the act or decision is moral.

Deontology focuses on the extent to which moral rules were followed in arriving at the consequence (Kagan, 1998). This perspective evaluates whether or not moral rules of right and wrong were followed. Choices made that follow this school of thought are governed by “protected values,” (PVs), which are types of moral rules—for instance, “do no harm” (Baron & Spranca, 1997). In this method, a distinction is made between doing and allowing harm. Implicit in the notion of doing harm is the individual’s awareness that harm is being done. For instance, if a deontologist were a jurer in a murder trial, he or she would evaluate a defendant quite differently who committed a pre-meditated murder as opposed to a defendant that plead psychological insanity. Deontologists do not sympathize with or allow an individual to knowingly act in harmful ways, regardless of outcome (Davis, 1993). Endorsement of PVs has been linked to the “omission bias”—a preference for indirect, more impersonal harm caused by omissions or rather, the failure to act (Ritov & Baron, 1999).

Consequentialism, on the other hand, balances costs and benefits. Thismethod looks strictly at comparing the outcomes of various moral dilemmas, disregarding entirely the ‘means to an end’ (Pettit, 1993).

Psychologists also conduct research surrounding the concept of ethical dilemmas in order to uncover a normative model for value-driven judgment.

Recent studies have asked participants to judge the permissibility of acts that do harm to one person to prevent harm to others. Such judgments appear to be strictly emotion-based because the most influential factors were all based around the individual’s emotional response to the action as well as the individual’s tendency to allow emotional reactions to direct judgment. (Cushman et. al, 2006; Green et al., 2001; Nichols & Mallon, 2006)

For example, researchers have compared reactions to the “trolley problem”—where a protagonist may flip a switch to divert runaway train car threatening to kill five railway workers onto a track where it will kill only a single railway worker—to reactions to the “footbridge problem”—where the only way to save the five railway workers is by pushing a fat man off a footbridge onto the tracks below.

These results are believed to indicate that people tended to view flipping the switch in the “trolley problem” as acceptable and pushing the man off the bridge in the “footbridge problem” as unacceptable (Green et al., 2001). The researchers believe that the discrepancies in moral judgment between the “trolley problem” and the “footbridge problem” were contingent upon whether or not the judger felt he was actively involved in inflicting harm, which determined the emotional reactivity of the judger. The impersonal act of flipping a switch in the “trolley problem” did not elicit the same emotions as the very active role of pushing a man off a bridge, which was part of the “footbridge problem.”

Other researchers argue that moral cognition depends on an “affect-backed normative theory,” which contains a set of reactionary moral rules that are helpful in predicting under which circumstances judgers will deem a decision morally wrong (Nichols & Malon, 2006).

The results from this research display the following processes at work in shaping moral judgment: assessment of any “protected values” (part of the deontology theory) and an emotional reaction (Nichols, 2002; Nichols & Mallon, 2006). The researchers found the violation of norms that elicited an emotional reaction, (i.e., picking one’s nose) in this case, a reaction of disgust, to be less acceptable than norm violations that did not (i.e., blowing one’s nose).

Also, Nichols and Mallon (2006) uncovered a third process at work in shaping moral judgment: cost-benefit analysis, (a part of the consequentialist theory). They found that even affect-backed moral rules can be overcome in the most extreme circumstances.

Information gathered from Johnathan Baron’s Thinking and Deciding, the chapter titled “Moral Judgment and Choice” as well as from David De Cremer’s article “Accountability and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: The Influence of Others’ Reputational Concerns”

The information I drew from these resources was in my own personal theorizing in which I hypothesize and support a relationship between cooperative theory and social dilemmas, and the over-arching implications for moral value-based judgment, especially in better understanding PVs.

Relationship to Other Topics:

Moral value-based judgment, in large part, guides how we respond to social dilemmas. For instance, consequentialist and deontological processes are involved in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. If a person feels that lying is wrong, then despite the negative consequences he or she may experience by incriminating himself, he will “cooperate” and be truthful. However, following a deontological process in this situation, a person would be weighing the consequences of defection versus cooperation. Similarly, the application of value-based judgment extends to The Centipede Game and the Ultimatum Game. As in these social dilemmas, issues of fairness also apply heavily to value-based judgment and are often found to be a contributing factor of irrational behavior.

Someof the main concepts that are specifically relevant to moral-based judgment areframing effects and de-contextualization, though these specific findings have not yet been researched.For instance, judging an act permissible or impermissible thus appears to be influenced by the amount of attention directed to consequences favoring violating the moral rule. The amount of attention directed to the consequences can be heavily influenced by the framing effects of the problem. By framing a certain moral problem to use statistics of lives saved as opposed to lives lost, for instance, would direct the judgers attention away from the serious consequences (death), and thus making highly probable the judger overlook a protected value and make a decision using an evaluative form of cognitive process in line with consequentialism.

Because of the high stakes involved in many value-based judgments, the liklihood that an individual experiences regret when she makes a “wrong” decision, are very high. The role of potential regret and guilt, then, are quite significant in value-based decision-making process, especially as individuals weigh various consequences and outcomes.

Works Cited

Baron, Jonathan. Thinking and Deciding. “Chapter 16: Moral Judgment and Choice.” Dordrecht, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.

Bartels, Daniel M. Accounting for some of the Flexibility of Moral Value-driven Judgment.

Bartels, Daniel M. and Douglas L. Medin. Morally-Motivated Decision Making.

Bartels, Daniel M. Principled Moral Sentiment and the Flexibility of Moral Judgment and Decision Making.

De Cremer, David and Muriel Bakker. Accountability and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: The Influence of Others’ Reputational Concerns.