Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Natural Law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Natural Law. Show all posts

Saturday, April 8, 2023

Moral Appraisals Guide Intuitive Legal Determinations

Flanagan, B., de Almeida, G. F. C. F., et al (2021). 
SSRN Electronic Journal.
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3955119

Abstract

Objectives:

We sought to understand how basic competencies in moral reasoning influence the interpretation and application of private, legal, and institutional rules. 

Hypotheses:

We predicted that moral appraisals, implicating both outcome-based and mental state reasoning, would shape participants’ application of various rules and statutes—and asked whether these effects arise differentially under intuitive versus reflective reasoning conditions. 

Methods:

In six vignette-based experiments (total N = 2502), participants considered a wide range of written rules and laws and were asked to decide whether a protagonist had violated the statute in question. We manipulated morally relevant aspects of each incident—including the valence of the statute’s purpose (Experiment 1) and of the outcomes that ensued (Experiments 2 and 3), as well as the protagonist’s accompanying mental state (Experiment 5). In two studies, we simultaneously varied whether participants decided under time pressure or following a forced delay (Experiments 4 and 6). 

Results: 

Integrative moral appraisals of the rule’s purpose, the agent’s extraneous blameworthiness and their epistemic state impacted legal determinations, and helped to explain participants’ departure from rules’ literal interpretation. These counter- literal verdicts were stronger under time pressure and were weakened by the opportunity to reflect. 

Conclusions: 

Under intuitive reasoning conditions, legal determinations draw heavily on core competencies in moral cognition, such as outcome-based and mental state reasoning. In turn, cognitive reflection dampens these effects on statutory interpretation, giving rise to a broadly textualist response pattern.

Public Significance Statement

When deciding whether someone has violated a written rule or law, lay judges initially consult their moral instincts about the incident. In other words, the capacity for legal reasoning draws on our basic moral sense—a finding that resonates with theories of natural law. With enough time to reflect, they then draw closer to the letter of the law. This finding could help to explain a recurring observation: for ‘frontline’ decisions made under time constraints (e.g., while policing) to be contested in court after a more careful exercise in statutory interpretation.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Unraveling the Church Ban on Gay Sex

By Gary Gutting
The New York Times
Originally published March 12, 2015

Here is an excerpt:


The primary arguments derive from what is known as the “natural-law tradition” of ethical thought, which begins with Plato and Aristotle, continues through Thomas Aquinas and other medieval and modern philosophers, and still flourishes today in the work of thinkers like John Finnis and Robert George. This tradition sees morality as a matter of the moral laws that follow from what fundamentally makes us human: our human nature. This is what the archbishop was referring to when he said that homosexual acts are contrary to natural law. This has long been a major basis for the church’s claim that homosexual acts are immoral — indeed “gravely sinful.”

The problem is that, rightly developed, natural-law thinking seems to support rather than reject the morality of homosexual behavior. 

The entire article is here.