"Walking the Walk": Moral Judgment and Moral Decision-Making

HORSKÝ, Jan. "Walking the Walk": Moral Judgment and Moral Decision-Making. In Experimental Philosophy: Methods & New Directions. 2016.

Basic information

Original name

"Walking the Walk": Moral Judgment and Moral Decision-Making

Authors

HORSKÝ, Jan

Edition

Experimental Philosophy: Methods & New Directions, 2016

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Other information

Language

English

Type of outcome

Prezentace na konferencích

Field of Study

60300 6.3 Philosophy, Ethics and Religion

Country of publisher

Germany

Confidentiality degree

není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství

References:

URL

Organization unit

Faculty of Arts

Keywords in English

moral judgment; moral decision-making; moral psychology; experimental philosophy; moral behavior

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Abstract

V originále

There has been an immense interest over the last 15 years or so in the intricacies of moral judgment. Countless careers have been dedicated to the practice of using hypothetical moral scenarios in order to tackle the problem of how folk moral judgment works. Tremendous progress has been made and such approach has really proved to be useful in our quest to understand the human moral mind. I have no doubt about it. My worry is that we’ve got so caught up in this that we’ve forgotten about the other key moral process, the moral decision-making – that is, how people decide to behave and how they actually behave in moral situations. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a great societal impact in whether I judge that e.g. cheating is wrong or not, but greater nonetheless in whether I am going to cheat on my tax report or not. I find it unfortunate that with some recent exceptions (Ariely et al.’s research program on cheating comes easily to mind) and predecessors in the 60’ and 70’ (Milgram, Zimbardo and the whole situationist’s movement are prime examples of it) the moral behavior is something relatively rare to find in journal articles in moral psychology or experimental moral philosophy. I presume that the main reason for this current state is that it’s relatively easy to study (i.e. design an experiment, get a permission from IRB, recruit participants and so on) moral judgment, but much more challenging to do the same with moral decision-making. On the other hand, given the importance of such an endeavor, we shouldn’t be too much intimidated. In my talk, I will report my first steps into the experimental terrain and the first steps of the lab that I’m part of (Experimental Humanities Lab – HUME lab) into the territory of moral behavior. I will introduce our experiment that we will run this fall, in which we are trying to figure out what is the relation between moral judgment and moral decision-making. Our central question is really simple and straightforward – we want to know whether someone who values fairness highly (moral judgment) will be less likely to cheat (moral behavior) than someone who is not concerned with questions of fairness to such a degree. I’ll introduce our experimental design – our dependent and independent variables – and also cover some additional physiological measures that we’ll be using and what we are expecting that they can tell us (that participant themselves can’t or wouldn’t).