Blaming the Kids: Children’s Agency and Diminished Responsibility

By Michael Tiboris
Journal of Applied Philosophy,Vol. 31, No. 1, 2014
doi: 10.1111/japp.12046

Abstract

Children are less blameworthy for their beliefs and actions because they are young. But the relationship between development and responsibility is complex. What exactly grounds the excuses we rightly give to young agents? This article presents three distinct arguments for children's diminished responsibility. Drawing on significant resources from developmental psychology, it rejects views which base the normative adult/child distinction on children's inability to participate in certain kinds of moral communication or to form principled self-conceptions which guide their actions. The article then argues that children's responsibility ought to be diminished because (and to the degree that) they are less competent at using features of their moral agency to meet social demands. This ‘normative competence’ view is philosophically defensible, supported by research in developmental psychology, and provides us with a method to evaluate whether things like peer pressure are relevant to responsibility.

The entire article is here.

Raising a Moral Child

By Adam Grant
The New York Times - Opinion
Originally posted April 11, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

By age 2, children experience some moral emotions — feelings triggered by right and wrong. To reinforce caring as the right behavior, research indicates, praise is more effective than rewards. Rewards run the risk of leading children to be kind only when a carrot is offered, whereas praise communicates that sharing is intrinsically worthwhile for its own sake. But what kind of praise should we give when our children show early signs of generosity?

Many parents believe it’s important to compliment the behavior, not the child — that way, the child learns to repeat the behavior. Indeed, I know one couple who are careful to say, “That was such a helpful thing to do,” instead of, “You’re a helpful person.”

The entire article is here.

Arrested development: early prefrontal lesions impair the maturation of moral judgement

By Bradley Taber-Thomas, Erik Asp, Michael Koenings, Matthew Sutterer, Steven Anderson, and Daniel Tranel
Brain (2014) 137 (4): 1254-1261 first published online February 11, 2014
doi: 10.1093/brain/awt377

Summary

Learning to make moral judgements based on considerations beyond self-interest is a fundamental aspect of moral development. A deficit in such learning is associated with poor socialization and criminal behaviour. The neural systems required for the acquisition and maturation of moral competency are not well understood. Here we show in a unique sample of neurological patients that focal lesions involving ventromedial prefrontal cortex, acquired during development, result in an abnormally egocentric pattern of moral judgement. In response to simple hypothetical moral scenarios, the patients were more likely than comparison participants to endorse self-interested actions that involved breaking moral rules or physically harming others in order to benefit themselves. This pattern (which we also found in subjects with psychopathy) differs from that of patients with adult-onset ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions—the latter group showed normal rejection of egocentric rule violations. This novel contrast of patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions acquired during development versus during adulthood yields new evidence suggesting that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a critical neural substrate for the acquisition and maturation of moral competency that goes beyond self-interest to consider the welfare of others. Disruption to this affective neural system early in life interrupts moral development.

The article can be found here, behind a paywall.

Email Contact of Daniel Tranel

Should Medical Schools be Schools for Virtue?

By Daniel Sulmasy
The Journal of Internal Medicine
Originally posted in July, 2000 and still relevant today

Here is an excerpt:

As Branch writes, “Medicine, after all, is a moral profession.” Yet medicine is increasingly viewed as just another business, and the concept of medicine as a profession, as a “special” endeavor with a different set of moral obligations and expectations, has been denounced as elitist, self-serving, and detrimental to the spirit of the competitive marketplace. Some fear that the recent financial reorganization of health care, premised upon the notion that there is nothing special about medicine, poses a particularly grave threat to the essence of medicine as a profession. Others argue that the professionalism of medicine can be reconstructed in such a way that it can guard against the financial forces that threaten to undermine its moral potency.

The entire article is here.

Episode 35: Does Reading Harry Potter Make You Moral?

Very Bad Wizards Podcast

Special guest Will Wilkinson joins the podcast to talk about whether fiction makes us better people, and to discuss his recent Daily Beast article that trashed Dave's profession and livelihood. Also, Dave and Tamler try to make sense of Ancient Greek justice in a myth about incest, adultery, daughter-killing, husband-killing, matricide, cannibalism, and trash talking to disembodied heads.

The podcast is here.

Getting In Touch With Your Inner Sexual Deviant

An Interview and article by David DiSalvo
Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in all of Us
Forbes
Originally posted on October 24, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Q: One of the themes that comes through is that we feel so sure about the origins and motivations of various sexual behaviors, and for a good many of them there’s no scientific basis for feeling this way – indeed, in many cases science is far from reaching a conclusion. Why do you think we’re so prone to staunchly believing that how we feel about a sexual behavior is automatically true?

A: It’s certainly one of those areas where everyone has an opinion. But if there’s one thing I discovered while working on this book, it’s that the strength of one’s moral convictions about sex usually reflects the depths of one’s ignorance about the science of sex. The more one learns in this area, paradoxically, the more uncertain one becomes.

Human beings are “stomach philosophers”—we allow our gut feelings to make decisions about other people’s sex lives on the basis of whether or not we’re personally disgusted or uncomfortable with their erotic desires or behaviors. I draw the line at harm, but defining harm can be a slippery matter, too. Since we would be harmed, we presume that others must be harmed as well, even when that’s far from apparent. I joke in the book about how I’d be irreparably damaged if Kate Upton were to pin me to my chair and do a slow strip tease on my lap. Lovely as she is, I’m gay, and not only would I not enjoy that experience, I’d be made deeply uncomfortable by it. My straight brother or my lesbian cousin, by contrast, would process this identical Upton event very differently.

The entire interview/article is here.

How Reading Makes Us More Human

A debate has erupted over whether reading fiction makes human beings more moral. But what if its real value consists in something even more fundamental?

By Karen Swallow Prior
The Atlantic
Originally posted on June 21, 2013

A battle over books has erupted recently on the pages of The New York Times and Time. The opening salvo was Gregory Currie's essay, "Does Great Literature Make Us Better?" which asserts that the widely held belief that reading makes us more moral has little support. In response, Annie Murphy Paul weighed in with "Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer." Her argument is that "deep reading," the kind of reading great literature requires, is a distinctive cognitive activity that contributes to our ability to empathize with others; it therefore can, in fact, makes us "smarter and nicer," among other things. Yet these essays aren't so much coming to different conclusions as considering different questions.

To advance her thesis, Paul cites studies by Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, and Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto. Taken together, their findings suggest that those "who often read fiction appear to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and view the world from their perspective." It's the kind of thing writer Joyce Carol Oates is talking about when she says, "Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."

Oatley and Mar's conclusions are supported, Paul argues, by recent studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science. This research shows that "deep reading -- slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity -- is a distinctive experience," a kind of reading that differs in kind and quality from "the mere decoding of words" that constitutes a good deal of what passes for reading today, particularly for too many of our students in too many of our schools (as I have previously written about here).

Paul concludes her essay with a reference to the literary critic Frank Kermode, who famously distinguishes between "carnal reading" -- characterized by the hurried, utilitarian information processing that constitutes the bulk of our daily reading diet -- and "spiritual reading," reading done with focused attention for pleasure, reflection, analysis, and growth. It is in this distinction that we find the real difference between the warring factions in what might be a chicken-or-egg scenario: Does great literature make people better, or are good people drawn to reading great literature?

The entire article is here.

The Limits of Moral Argument: Tamler Sommer presents at TEDx

Tamler Sommers is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston and holds a joint appointment with the Honors College. His research and teaching are in the areas of ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law, specializing in issues relating to free will, moral responsibility, punishment, and revenge.

Uploaded on December 17, 2011





The link to this video will be kept in the Audio and Video Resource page of this site.

Studying Childhood Morality via Social Groups and Cognition

Rhodes, M. (in press). Naive theories of social groups. Child Development.

Here are some excerpts from this paper regarding the importance of studying moral development.

Yet, despite preschoolers’ general commitment to fairness, the possibility that children view people as having special moral obligations to their own group members cannot be entirely ruled out. This possibility is consistent with several theoretical accounts of morality proposed by social and cultural psychologists (Cohen, Montoya, & Insko, 2006; Dovidio, 1984; Haidt & Joseph, 2007; Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Levine, Cassidy, Brazier, & Reicher, 2002; Levine & Thompson, 2004), and there is recent developmental data that appear consistent with this possibility (Castelli, De Amicis, & Sherman, 2007; Rhodes & Brickman, 2011). Thus, this remains an important area for future work.

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Whereas the majority of research in this area has examined how children appeal to individual mental states to make these predictions, there has recently been increasing emphasis on understanding how children make these predictions by reference to social causes that extend beyond the individual, including social categories, norms, and morality (Hirschfeld, 1996; Olson & Dweck, 2008; Wellman & Miller, 2008). This emphasis—on considering children’s naı¨ve sociology along with their naive psychology—is particularly important given that preschool-age children often weight the causal features  specified by naive sociology (e.g., categories, norms) more heavily than individual mental states (e.g., traits, desires) to predict individual action (Berndt & Heller, 1986; Biernat, 1991; Diesendruck & haLevi, 2006; Kalish, 2002; Kalish & Shiverick, 2004; Lawson & Kalish, 2006; Rhodes & Gelman, 2008; Taylor, 1996).

The entire paper is here.

Empathy Plays a Key Role in Moral Judgments

Science Daily
Originally published May 22, 2013

Is it permissible to harm one to save many? Those who tend to say "yes" when faced with this classic dilemma are likely to be deficient in a specific kind of empathy, according to a report published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

Philosophers and psychologists have long argued about whether there is one "right" answer to such moral questions, be it utilitarian ethics, which advocates saving as many as possible, even if it requires personally harming an individual, or non-utilitarian principles, which mandate strict adherence to rules like "don't kill" that are rooted in the value of human life and dignity.

In their new report, co-authors Liane Young, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College, and Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht of the Institute of Cognitive Neurology and Favaloro University in Argentina, address two key questions related to moral decision-making: First, what specific aspect of emotional responding is relevant for these judgments? Second, is this aspect of emotional responding selectively reduced in utilitarian respondents or enhanced in non-utilitarians?

The entire story is here.

The entire article is here.

Abstract

Is it permissible to harm one to save many? Classic moral dilemmas are often defined by the conflict between a putatively rational response to maximize aggregate welfare (i.e., the utilitarian judgment) and an emotional aversion to harm (i.e., the non-utilitarian judgment). Here, we address two questions. First, what specific aspect of emotional responding is relevant for these judgments? Second, is this aspect of emotional responding selectively reduced in utilitarians or enhanced in non-utilitarians? The results reveal a key relationship between moral judgment and empathic concern in particular (i.e., feelings of warmth and compassion in response to someone in distress). Utilitarian participants showed significantly reduced empathic concern on an independent empathy measure. These findings therefore reveal diminished empathic concern in utilitarian moral judges.

Citation: Gleichgerrcht E, Young L (2013) Low Levels of Empathic Concern Predict Utilitarian Moral Judgment. PLoS ONE 8(4): e60418. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0060418

In Steubenville, why didn't other girls help?

By Rachel Simmons
Special to CNN
Originally posted March 21, 2013

Is anyone else wondering why the Steubenville, Ohio rape victim's two best friends testified against her? With this week's arrest of two other girls who "menaced" the teen victim on Facebook and Twitter, we have the beginnings of an answer.

Rape culture is not only the province of boys. The often hidden culture of girl cruelty can discourage accusers from coming forward and punish them viciously once they do. This week, two teenage boys were found guilty of raping a 16-year-old classmate while she was apparently drunk and passed out during a night of parties last August. Everyone who was there and said nothing that night was complicit; if we want to prevent another Steubenville, the role of other girls must also be considered.

On the night in question, girls watched the victim (Jane Doe) become so drunk she could hardly walk. Why didn't any of them help her? Why, after Jane Doe endured the agonizing experience of a trial in which she viewed widely circulated photos of herself naked and unconscious, did one of the arrested girls tweet: "you ripped my family apart, you made my cousin cry, so when I see you xxxxx, it's gone be a homicide." Why were two lifelong friends sitting on the other side of the courtroom?

The accusation of rape disrupts the intricate social ecosystem of a high school, one in which girls often believe that they must preserve both their own reputations and relationships with boys above all else. This is a process that begins for girls long before their freshman year and can have violent consequences.

The entire story is here.

Situationism and Confucian Virtue Ethics

By Deborah S. Mower

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
February 2013, Volume 16, Issue 1, pp 113-137

Abstract

Situationist research in social psychology focuses on the situational factors that influence behavior. Doris and Harman argue that this research has powerful implications for ethics, and virtue ethics in particular. First, they claim that situationist research presents an empirical challenge to the moral psychology presumed within virtue ethics. Second, they argue that situationist research supports a theoretical challenge to virtue ethics as a foundation for ethical behavior and moral development. I offer a response from moral psychology using an interpretation of Xunzi—a Confucian virtue ethicist from the Classical period. This Confucian account serves as a foil to the situationist critique in that it uncovers many problematic ontological and normative assumptions at work in this debate regarding the prediction and explanation of behavior, psychological posits, moral development, and moral education. Xunzi’s account of virtue ethics not only responds to the situationist empirical challenge by uncovering problematic assumptions about moral psychology, but also demonstrates that it is not a separate empirical hypothesis. Further, Xunzi’s virtue ethic responds to the theoretical challenge by offering a new account of moral development and a ground for ethical norms that fully attends to situational features while upholding robust character traits.

The entire article is here.

Moral Identity versus Moral Reasoning in Religious Conservatives

Do Christian Evangelical Leaders Really Lack Moral Maturity?

By Judith Needham-Penrose and Harris L. Friedman
The Humanistic Psychologist
Volume 40, Issue 4, 2012

Abstract

Research using moral dilemmas has consistently found religious conservatives make poorer moral decisions than liberals. A sample of 104 Evangelical Christians leaders were found to score poorly in moral reasoning using this approach, but were also found to have high moral identity. Their moral identity correlated highly with self-reported moral behavior, yet their moral decision-making did not, suggesting moral identity is more salient than decision-making in their moral development. A subsample of 10 who scored low on moral decision-making but high on other moral indicators was qualitatively found to have a sophisticated morality based on different assumptions than used in past research. These findings are discussed in terms of bias in past research using moral dilemmas that denigrate religious conservatives.


The article can be found here.

Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty

Annual Review of Law and Social ScienceVol. 8: 85-104
Max H. Bazerman and Francesca Gino


What makes even good people cross ethical boundaries? Society demands that business and professional schools address ethics, but the results have been disappointing. This paper argues that a behavioral approach to ethics is essential because it leads to understanding and explaining moral and immoral behavior in systematic ways. The authors first define business ethics and provide an admittedly biased history of the attempts of professional schools to address ethics as a subject of both teaching and research. They next briefly summarize the emergence of the field of behavioral ethics over the last two decades, and turn to recent research findings in behavioral ethics that could provide helpful directions for a social science perspective to ethics. These new findings on both intentional and unintentional unethical behavior can inform new courses on ethics as well as new research investigations. Such new directions can meet the demands of society more effectively than past attempts of professional schools. They can also produce a meaningful and significant change in the behavior of both business school students and professionals. Key concepts include:

• Shifting the modes of thought can lead to profound differences in how we make ethical decisions. This has implications at the individual and at the societal level.
• Until recently, little empirical attention was given to how people actually behave when they face ethical dilemmas and decisions or to how their behavior can be improved.
• A behavioral ethics approach does not teach students how they should behave when facing ethical dilemmas, nor inform them about what philosophers or ethicists would recommend. Instead it sees an opportunity in helping students and professionals better understand their own behavior in the ethics domain, and compare it to how they would ideally like to behave.
• Behavioral ethics identifies levers at both the individual and the institutional level to change ethically questionable behaviors when individuals are acting in unethical ways that they would not endorse with greater reflection.
• Prior to the 1990s, it was rare for professional schools to have a significant focus on the area of ethics (or business ethics more specifically) in the courses offered to students. Courses that were taught used philosophical approaches or suggested that morality is a rather stable personality trait that individuals develop by going through differences phases of development.

Abstract

Early research and teaching on ethics focused on either a moral development perspective or philosophical approaches, and used a normative approach by focusing on the question of how people should act when resolving ethical dilemmas. In this paper, we briefly describe the traditional approach to ethics and then present a (biased) review on the behavioral approach to ethics. We define behavioral ethics as the study of systematic and predictable ways in which individuals make ethical decisions and judge the ethical decisions of others that are at odds with intuition and the benefits of the broader society. By focusing on a descriptive rather than a normative approach to ethics, behavioral ethics is better suited than traditional approaches to address the increasing demand from society for a deeper understanding of what causes even good people to cross ethical boundaries.

A version of the paper is here.

Our moral motivations

Humans have evolved from being driven by self-interest to being team players who want their lives to count for something, argues University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

By Kirsten Weir
The Monitor on Psychology
June 2012, Vol 43, No. 6
Print version: page 24

In the midst of a superheated election, in which truth is hard to come by and personal attacks are commonplace, it's hard to imagine politics having much to do with morality. However, in his new book, "The Righteous Mind," positive psychology pioneer Jonathan Haidt, PhD, argues that even our divisive political system arose from a deep-seated human need to work toward a greater good.

In his search for the roots of morality, he explores our species' evolution from our individualistic primate ancestors to deeply cooperative human beings, and describes how religious and political institutions helped enable that transformation.

The Monitor spoke with Haidt about his research and how we might bring politics — and psychology — back to their moral roots.

The entire article is here.

Moral Psychology and Information Ethics

Moral Psychology and IE

Posted with permission from C.R. Crowell.