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Posts from April 2016

Why do People Express Moral Outrage?

Why do People Express Moral Outrage? published on

Evidence that expressions of moral outrage are in part self-serving.

Ethics and morality are commonly associated with altruism and pro-social behavior. From this perspective moral judgments are regarded as fundamentally selfless or at least group-oriented. When people express moral outrage at the transgressions of others, their expressions may arise from deep-seated intuitions or strongly-held values, but in either case it is assumed that the purpose or function of such expressions is to punish the transgressors and promote social cooperation. However, in this study, Paul Bloom and colleagues provide experimental evidence in support of a theoretical model according to which expressions of moral outrage are fundamentally selfish in nature. People who invest time and effort in condemning those who behave badly are trusted more. Thus, condemning transgressors for their bad behavior is a way of signalling to others that one is trustworthy, which can bring advantages to one in the long-run.

Original Source:
Jillian J. Jordan et al., Third-party punishment as a costly signal of trustworthiness, Nature, November 2015.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v530/n7591/full/nature16981.html

Summary description by authors:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/opinion/sunday/whats-the-point-of-moral-outrage.html?smid=fb-share&_r=3

Is Utilitarianism the Best Framework for Evaluating Lay Moral Judgments?

Is Utilitarianism the Best Framework for Evaluating Lay Moral Judgments? published on

Evidence that individuals who demonstrate utilitarian preferences to moral dilemmas show higher measures of psychopathy and Machiavellianism and life-meaninglessness.

Studies show that the vast majority of people who respond to Thomson’s famous Footbridge dilemma would not choose the utilitarian option (of pushing a large man off the track to stop a train from running over five other people). But what about the approximately 10 percent of people who do favor the utilitarian option—what sort of people are they? To find out, Bartels and Pizarro recruited over 200 undergraduate students and had them respond to several sacrificial moral dilemmas and also answer a battery of questions designed to measure some of their psychological characteristics. Participants were asked to express their levels of agreement/disagreement to statements such as “I like to see fist-fights’’ (psychopathy), “When you really think about it, life is not worth the effort of getting up in the morning’’ (no Meaning), and ‘‘The best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear’’ (Machiavellianism). The researchers found that participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions to the sacrificial moral dilemmas had higher scores on measures of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and life-meaninglessness. These results do not exactly show that utilitarianism is a flawed ethical theory, but they do suggest that there are two types of people attracted to utilitarian thinking: rationalists (i.e. those who favor rational deliberation in ethical decision-making) and psychopaths (i.e. those with a muted aversion to causing a person’s death).

Original Source:
Daniel M Bartels, David A. Pizarro, The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemma, Cognition, October 2011.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027711001351
http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mcgrawp/PDF/BartelsPizarro.2011.pdf

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