Hagop Sarkissian, John Park, David Tien, Jennifer Wright & Joshua Knobe
Mind and Language 26 (4):482-505 (2011)
Abstract:
It has often been suggested that people's ordinary understanding of morality involves a belief in objective moral truths and a rejection of moral relativism. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist moral intuitions when considering individuals from their own culture, but they offered increasingly relativist intuitions considering individuals from increasingly different cultures or ways of life. The authors hypothesize that people do not have a fixed commitment to moral objectivism but instead tend to adopt different views depending on the degree to which they consider radically different perspectives on moral questions.
The article is here.
Showing posts with label Objective Values. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Objective Values. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
Friday, September 23, 2016
Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles
Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan
NBER Working Paper No. 22611
September 2016
NBER Working Paper No. 22611
September 2016
Abstract
Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a U.S. state between 1996 and 2012, we
analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games
played by a prominent college team in the state. We investigate the behavior of judges, the
conduct of whom should, by law, be free of personal biases and emotions. We find that
unexpected losses increase disposition (sentence) lengths assigned by judges during the week
following the game. Unexpected wins, or losses that were expected to be close contests ex-ante,
have no impact. The effects of these emotional shocks are asymmetrically borne by black
defendants. We present evidence that the results are not influenced by defendant or attorney
behavior or by defendants’ economic background. Importantly, the results are driven by judges
who have received their bachelor’s degrees from the university with which the football team is
affiliated. Different falsification tests and a number of auxiliary analyses demonstrate the
robustness of the findings. These results provide evidence for the impact of emotions in one
domain on a behavior in a completely unrelated domain among a uniformly highly-educated
group of individuals (judges), with decisions involving high stakes (sentence lengths). They also
point to the existence of a subtle and previously-unnoticed capricious application of sentencing.
Friday, September 18, 2015
Are Arguments about GMO Safety Really About Something Else?
By Gregory E. Kaebnick
The Hastings Center Blog
Originally published August 28, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
Saletan is trying to examine the impact of GMOs in more or less this objective way. Perhaps, however, the fiercer, dyed-in-the-wool opponents of GMOs are looking beyond health and safety, strictly construed in terms of quantifiable aspects of human well-being, to something else. One possibility is that they are indeed focused on health and safety but are put off by something about the particular form of the threat. Moral psychologists such as Paul Slovic and Daniel Kahneman have noted that the perception of a risk’s severity does not cleanly track the quantifiable outcomes. Different ways of dying may be perceived as better or worse, even though death is the measurable outcome in both cases. After September 11, 2001, air travel dropped significantly and many people who might have been expected to fly in planes, and safely reach their destinations, went by car instead and died in automobile accidents. Viewed strictly in terms of the quantifiable risk of death, the decision to go by car looks silly. But maybe, the risk assessor (and scholarly critic of risk assessment) Adam Finkel has proposed, what put people off flying was not the risk of death alone but the prospect of “death preceded by agonizing minutes of chaos and the awful opportunity of being able to contact loved ones before the grisly culmination of another’s suicide mission.”
The entire article is here.
The Hastings Center Blog
Originally published August 28, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
Saletan is trying to examine the impact of GMOs in more or less this objective way. Perhaps, however, the fiercer, dyed-in-the-wool opponents of GMOs are looking beyond health and safety, strictly construed in terms of quantifiable aspects of human well-being, to something else. One possibility is that they are indeed focused on health and safety but are put off by something about the particular form of the threat. Moral psychologists such as Paul Slovic and Daniel Kahneman have noted that the perception of a risk’s severity does not cleanly track the quantifiable outcomes. Different ways of dying may be perceived as better or worse, even though death is the measurable outcome in both cases. After September 11, 2001, air travel dropped significantly and many people who might have been expected to fly in planes, and safely reach their destinations, went by car instead and died in automobile accidents. Viewed strictly in terms of the quantifiable risk of death, the decision to go by car looks silly. But maybe, the risk assessor (and scholarly critic of risk assessment) Adam Finkel has proposed, what put people off flying was not the risk of death alone but the prospect of “death preceded by agonizing minutes of chaos and the awful opportunity of being able to contact loved ones before the grisly culmination of another’s suicide mission.”
The entire article is here.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Why Aristole Wants You to Be Good
By Kristjan Kristjansson
Big Ideas at Slate.com
Here is an excerpt:
Many social scientists consider this philosophical question quirky at best. The reason? An abundance of psychological evidence demonstrates the extrinsic benefits of moral choices over immoral ones, even for psychology’s Eldorado: subjective well-being. Of course, even though social scientists pride themselves on their value-neutrality, they are rarely neutral with regard to what they consider the “ungrounded grounder” of all human strivings, namely happiness, and they typically understand happiness as subjective well-being.
A case in point here is the copious literature on the benefits of the moral emotion of gratitude for subjective well-being. We now know with certainty—at least the sort of certainty to which any social scientific inquiry can aspire—that grateful people are in general happy people. Over and above that, meticulous empirical research on gratitude has shown all sorts of instrumental benefits for what social scientists call “pro-social ends.” Thus, as a moral barometer, gratitude attends affirmatively to a positive moral change in our environment; as a moral motivator, gratitude urges us to contribute to the welfare of our benefactor (or even third parties) in the future; as a moral reinforcer, gratitude makes benefactors more likely to replicate their benevolent acts at later junctures and in different contexts.
The entire article is here.
Big Ideas at Slate.com
Here is an excerpt:
Many social scientists consider this philosophical question quirky at best. The reason? An abundance of psychological evidence demonstrates the extrinsic benefits of moral choices over immoral ones, even for psychology’s Eldorado: subjective well-being. Of course, even though social scientists pride themselves on their value-neutrality, they are rarely neutral with regard to what they consider the “ungrounded grounder” of all human strivings, namely happiness, and they typically understand happiness as subjective well-being.
A case in point here is the copious literature on the benefits of the moral emotion of gratitude for subjective well-being. We now know with certainty—at least the sort of certainty to which any social scientific inquiry can aspire—that grateful people are in general happy people. Over and above that, meticulous empirical research on gratitude has shown all sorts of instrumental benefits for what social scientists call “pro-social ends.” Thus, as a moral barometer, gratitude attends affirmatively to a positive moral change in our environment; as a moral motivator, gratitude urges us to contribute to the welfare of our benefactor (or even third parties) in the future; as a moral reinforcer, gratitude makes benefactors more likely to replicate their benevolent acts at later junctures and in different contexts.
The entire article is here.
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