Do Moral Beliefs Motivate Action?

Díaz, R.

Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2023).

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-023-10389-x

Abstract

Do moral beliefs motivate action? To answer this question, extant arguments have considered hypothetical cases of association (dissociation) between agents’ moral beliefs and actions. In this paper, I argue that this approach can be improved by studying people’s actual moral beliefs and actions using empirical research methods. I present three new studies showing that, when the stakes are high, associations between participants’ moral beliefs and actions are actually explained by co-occurring but independent moral emotions. These findings suggest that moral beliefs themselves have little or no motivational force, supporting the Humean picture of moral motivation.

Conclusion

In this paper, I showed that the use of hypothetical cases to extract conclusions regarding the (lack of) motivational power of moral beliefs faces important limitations. I argued that these limitations can be addressed using empirical research tools, and presented a series of studies doing so.

The results of the studies show that, when the stakes are high, the apparent motivational force of beliefs is in fact explained by co-occurring moral emotions. This supports Humean views of moral motivation. The results regarding low-stake situations, however, are open to both Humean and “watered-down” Anti-Humean interpretations.

In moral practice, it probably won’t matter if moral beliefs don’t motivate us much or at all. Arguably, most real-life moral choices involve countervailing motives with more than a little motivational strength, making moral beliefs irrelevant in any case. However, the situation might be different with regards to ethical theory. Accepting that moral beliefs have some motivational force (even if very low) could be enough to solve the Moral Problem (see Introduction)Footnote33 while rejecting that moral beliefs have motivational force would prompt us to reject one of the other claims involved in the puzzle. Future research should help us decide between competing interpretations of the results regarding low-stakes situations presented in this paper.

Overall, the results presented in this paper put pressure on Anti-Humean views of moral motivation, as they suggest that moral beliefs have little or no motivational force.

With regards to methodology, I showed that using empirical research tools improves upon the use of hypothetical cases of moral motivation by ruling out alternative interpretations. Note, however, that the empirical investigations presented in this paper build on extant hypothetical cases and the logical tools involved in the discussion of these cases. In this sense, the studies presented in this paper do not oppose, but rather continue extant work regarding cases. Hopefully, this paper paves the way for more empirical investigations, as well as discussions on the best ways to measure and test the relations between moral behavior, moral beliefs, and moral emotions.

How and Why People Want to Be More Moral

Sun, J., Wilt, J. A., et al. (2022, October 13).

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6smzh

Abstract

What types of moral improvements do people wish to make? Do they hope to become more good, or less bad? Do they wish to be more caring? More honest? More loyal? And why exactly do they want to become more moral? Presumably, most people want to improve their morality because this would benefit others, but is this in fact their primary motivation? Here, we begin to investigate these questions. Across two large, preregistered studies (N = 1,818), participants provided open-ended descriptions of one change they could make in order to become more moral; they then reported their beliefs about and motives for this change. In both studies, people most frequently expressed desires to improve their compassion and more often framed their moral improvement goals in terms of amplifying good behaviors than curbing bad ones. The strongest predictor of moral motivation was the extent to which people believed that making the change would have positive consequences for their own well-being. Together, these studies provide rich descriptive insights into how ordinary people want to be more moral, and show that they are particularly motivated to do so for their own sake.

From the General Discussion section

Self-Interest is a KeyMotivation for Moral Improvement

What motivates people to be more moral? From the perspective that the function of morality is to suppress selfishness for the benefit of others (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Wolf, 1982), we might expect people to believe that moral improvements would primarily benefit others (rather than themselves). By a similar logic, people should also primarily want to be more moral for the sake of others (rather than for their own sake).

Surprisingly, however, this was not overwhelmingly the case. Instead, across both studies, participants were approximately equally split between those who believed that others would benefit the most and those who believed that they themselves would benefit the most(with the exception of compassion; see Figure S2). The finding that people perceive some personal benefits to becoming more moral has been demonstrated in recent research (Sun & Berman, in prep). In light of evidence that moral people tend to be happier (Sun et al., in prep) and that the presence of moral struggles predicts symptoms of depression and anxiety (Exline et al., 2014), such beliefs might also be somewhat accurate.  However, it is unclear why people believe that becoming more moral would benefit themselves more than it would others. Speculatively, one possibility is that people can more vividly imagine the impacts of their own actions on their own well-being, whereas they are much more uncertain about how their actions would affect others—especially when the impacts might be spread across many beneficiaries.

However, it is also possible that this finding only applies to self-selected moral improvements, rather than the universe of all possible moral improvements. That is, when asked what they could do to become more moral, people might more readily think of improvements that would improve their own well-being to a greater extent than the well-being of others. But, if we were to ask people to predict who would benefit the most from various moral improvements that were selected by researchers, people may be less likely to believe that it would be themselves. Future research should systematically study people’s evaluations of how various moral improvements would impact their own and others’ well-being.

Similarly, when explicitly asked for whose sake they were most motivated to make their moral improvement, almost half of the participants admitted that they were most motivated to change for their own sake (rather than for the sake of others).  However, when predicting motivation from both the expected well-being consequences for the self and the well-being consequences for others, we found that people’s perceptions of personal well-being consequences was a significantly stronger predictor in both studies.  In other words, if anything, people are relatively more motivated to make moral improvements for their own sake than for the sake of others.  This is consistent with the findings of another study which examined people’s interest in changing a variety of moral and nonmoral traits, and showed that people are particularly interested in improving the traits that they believed would make them relatively happier (Sun & Berman, in prep). Here, it is striking that personal fulfilment remains the most important motivator of personal improvement even exclusively in the moral domain.

The research is here.

Huge price hikes by drug companies are immoral

Robert Klitzman
CNN.com
Originally posted September 18, 2018

Several pharmaceutical companies have been jacking up the prices of their drugs in unethical ways. Most recently, Nirmal Mulye, founder and president of Nostrum Pharmaceuticals, defended his decision to more than quadruple the price of nitrofurantoin, used to treat bladder infections, from about $500 to more than $2,300 a bottle. He said it was his "moral requirement to sell the product at the highest price."

Mulye argues that his only moral duty is to benefit his investors. As he said in defending Martin Shkreli, who in 2015 raised the price of an anti-parasite drug, daraprim, 5,000% from $13.50 to $750 per tablet, "When he raised the price of his drug he was within his rights because he had to reward his shareholders."

Mulye is wrong for many reasons. Drug companies deserve reasonable return on their investment in research and development, but some of these companies are abusing the system. The development of countless new drugs depends on taxpayer money and sacrifices that patients in studies make in good faith. Excessive price hikes harm many people, threaten public health and deplete huge amounts of taxpayer money that could be better used in other ways.

The US government pays more than 40% of all Americans' prescription costs, and this amount has been growing faster than inflation. In 2015, over 118 million Americans were on some form of government health insurance, including around 52 million on Medicare and 62 million on Medicaid. And these numbers have been increasing. Today, around 59 million Americans are on Medicare and 75 million on Medicaid.

The info is here.

Toward a Psychology of Moral Expansiveness

Daniel Crimston, Matthew J. Hornsey, Paul G. Bain, Brock Bastian
Current Directions in Psychological Science 
Vol 27, Issue 1, pp. 14 - 19

Abstract

Theorists have long noted that people’s moral circles have expanded over the course of history, with modern people extending moral concern to entities—both human and nonhuman—that our ancestors would never have considered including within their moral boundaries. In recent decades, researchers have sought a comprehensive understanding of the psychology of moral expansiveness. We first review the history of conceptual and methodological approaches in understanding our moral boundaries, with a particular focus on the recently developed Moral Expansiveness Scale. We then explore individual differences in moral expansiveness, attributes of entities that predict their inclusion in moral circles, and cognitive and motivational factors that help explain what we include within our moral boundaries and why they may shrink or expand. Throughout, we highlight the consequences of these psychological effects for real-world ethical decision making.

The article is here.

The Moral Value of Compassion

Alfred Archer
Forthcoming in Justin Caouette and Carolyn Price (Eds.) The Moral Psychology of Compassion

Introduction

Many people think that compassion has an important role to play in our moral lives. We might
even think, as Arthur Schopenhauer (2010 [1840]) did, that compassion is the basis of morality.
More modestly, we might think that compassion is one important source of moral motivation and
would play an important role in the life of a virtuous person. Recently, however philosophers such
as Roger Crisp (2008), and Jesse Prinz (2011) and psychologists such as Paul Bloom (2016) have
called into question the value of sharing in another’s suffering. All three argue that this should not
play a significant role in the life of the morally virtuous person. In its place, Crisp endorses rational
benevolence as the central form of moral motivation for virtuous people.

The issue of whether compassion is a superior form of motivation to rational benevolence is
important for at least two reasons. First, it is important for both ethics and political theory. Care
ethicists for example, seek to defend moral and political outlooks based on compassion. Carol
Gilligan, for instance, claims that care ethics is “tied to feelings of empathy and compassion” (1982,
69). Similarly, Elizabeth Porter (2006) argues in favour of basing politics on compassion. These
appeals are only plausible if we accept that compassion is a valuable part of morality. Second, the
issue of whether or not compassion plays a valuable role in morality is also important for moral
education. Whether or not we see compassion as having a valuable role here is likely to be largely
settled by the issue of whether compassion plays a useful role in our moral lives.

I will argue that despite the problems facing compassion, it has a distinctive role to play in moral
life that cannot be fully captured by rational benevolence. My discussion will proceed as follows. In
§1, I examine the nature of compassion and explain how I will be using the term in this paper. I
will then, in §2, explain the traditional account of the value of compassion as a source of moral
motivation. In §3, I will investigate a number of challenges to the value of compassionate moral
motivation. I will then, in §4, explain why, despite facing important problems, compassion has a
distinctive role to play in moral life.

The penultimate version is here.

Face-saving or fair-minded: What motivates moral behavior?

Alexander W. Cappelen  Trond Halvorsen  Erik Ø. Sørensen  Bertil Tungodden
Journal of the European Economic Association (2017) 15 (3): 540-557.

Abstract

We study the relative importance of intrinsic moral motivation and extrinsic social motivation in explaining moral behavior. The key feature of our experiment is that we introduce a dictator game design that manipulates these two sources of motivation. In one set of treatments, we manipulate the moral argument for sharing, in another we manipulate the information given to the recipient about the context of the experiment and the dictator's decision. The paper offers two main findings. First, we provide evidence of intrinsic moral motivation being of fundamental importance. Second, we show that extrinsic social motivation matters and is crowding-in with intrinsic moral motivation. We also show that intrinsic moral motivation is strongly associated with self-reported charitable giving outside the lab and with political preferences.

The research is here.

Moral Motivation

Rosati, Connie S.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 Edition)

In our everyday lives, we confront a host of moral issues. Once we have deliberated and formed judgments about what is right or wrong, good or bad, these judgments tend to have a marked hold on us. Although in the end, we do not always behave as we think we ought, our moral judgments typically motivate us, at least to some degree, to act in accordance with them. When philosophers talk about moral motivation, this is the basic phenomenon that they seek to understand. Moral motivation is an instance of a more general phenomenon—what we might call normative motivation—for our other normative judgments also typically have some motivating force. When we make the normative judgment that something is good for us, or that we have a reason to act in a particular way, or that a specific course of action is the rational course, we also tend to be moved. Many philosophers have regarded the motivating force of normative judgments as the key feature that marks them as normative, thereby distinguishing them from the many other judgments we make. In contrast to our normative judgments, our mathematical and empirical judgments, for example, seem to have no intrinsic connection to motivation and action. The belief that an antibiotic will cure a specific infection may move an individual to take the antibiotic, if she also believes that she has the infection, and if she either desires to be cured or judges that she ought to treat the infection for her own good. All on its own, however, an empirical belief like this one appears to carry with it no particular motivational impact; a person can judge that an antibiotic will most effectively cure a specific infection without being moved one way or another.

The entry is here.