Moral reasoning is the study of how people think about right and wrong and how they acquire and apply moral rules. It is a subdiscipline of moral psychology that overlaps with moral philosophy, and is the foundation of descriptive ethics.
An influential psychological theory of moral reasoning was proposed by Lawrence Kohlberg of the University of Chicago, who expanded Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. Lawrence described three levels of moral reasoning: pre-conventional (governed by self-interest), conventional (motivated to maintain social order, rules and laws), and post-conventional (motivated by universal ethical principles and shared ideals including the social contract).
Description
Starting from a young age, people can make moral decisions about what is right and wrong. Moral reasoning, however, is a part of morality that occurs both within and between individuals. Prominent contributors to this theory include Lawrence Kohlberg and Elliot Turiel. The term is sometimes used in a different sense: reasoning under conditions of uncertainty, such as those commonly obtained in a court of law. It is this sense that gave rise to the phrase, "To a moral certainty;" however, this idea is now seldom used outside of charges to juries.
Moral reasoning is involved whenever people decide whether to do what is right, for example whether to tell the truth or to lie. A moral choice can be a personal, economic, or ethical one; as described by some ethical code, or regulated by ethical relationships with others. This branch of psychology is concerned with how these issues are perceived by ordinary people, and so is the foundation of descriptive ethics. There are many different forms of moral reasoning which often are dictated by culture. Cultural differences in the high-levels of cognitive function associated with moral reasoning can be observed through the association of brain networks from various cultures and their moral decision making. These cultural differences demonstrate the neural basis that cultural influences can have on an individual's moral reasoning and decision making.
Distinctions between theories of moral reasoning can be accounted for by evaluating inferences (which tend to be either deductive or inductive) based on a given set of premises. Deductive inference reaches a conclusion that is true based on whether a given set of premises preceding the conclusion are also true, whereas, inductive inference goes beyond information given in a set of premises to base the conclusion on provoked reflection.
In consequentialism (often distinguished from deontology) actions are considered right or wrong based upon the consequences of action as opposed to a property intrinsic to the action itself.
In developmental psychology
Moral reasoning first attracted a broad attention from developmental psychologists in the mid-to-late 20th century. Their main theorization involved elucidating the stages of development of moral reasoning capacity.
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget developed two phases of moral development, one common among children and the other common among adults. The first is known as the Heteronomous Phase. This phase, more common among children, is characterized by the idea that rules come from authority figures in one's life such as parents, teachers, and God. His theory is a "widely accepted theory that provides the basis for empirical evidence on the influence of human decision making on ethical behavior." In Lawrence Kohlberg's view, moral development consists of the growth of less egocentric and more impartial modes of reasoning on more complicated matters. He believed that the objective of moral education is the reinforcement of children to grow from one stage to an upper stage. Dilemma was a critical tool that he emphasized that children should be presented with; yet also, the knowledge for children to cooperate. According to his theory, people pass through three main stages of moral development as they grow from early childhood to adulthood. These are pre-conventional morality, conventional morality, and post-conventional morality. Commented out: Citation is not from Kant but from Richardson, and this is OR--no mention of Kohlberg. -->
The fifth stage is a part of the post-conventional level and is called social contract and individual rights. People in this age vary from 17 to 20 which not much people are in it. They believe morality is relative to systems of laws, and they don't think any system is necessarily superior. In this stage people begin to consider differing ideas about morality in other people and feel that rules and laws should be agreed on by the members of a society. The first of these is moral sensitivity, which is "the ability to see an ethical dilemma, including how our actions will affect others". The second is moral judgment, which is "the ability to reason correctly about what 'ought' to be done in a specific situation". From Kohlberg's perspective, one is considered as more advanced in moral reasoning as she is more efficient in using deductive reasoning and abstract moral principles to make moral judgments about particular instances. For instance, an advanced reasoner may reason syllogistically with the Kantian principle of 'treat individuals as ends and never merely as means' and a situation where kidnappers are demanding a ransom for a hostage, to conclude that the kidnappers have violated a moral principle and should be condemned. In this process, reasoners are assumed to be rational and have conscious control over how they arrive at judgments and decisions. participants were shown three types of decision scenarios: one type included moral dilemmas that elicited emotional reaction (moral-personal condition), the second type included moral dilemmas that did not elicit emotional reaction (moral-impersonal condition), and the third type had no moral content (non-moral condition). Brain regions such as posterior cingulate gyrus and angular gyrus, whose activation is known to correlate with experience of emotion, showed activations in moral-personal condition but not in moral-impersonal condition. Meanwhile, regions known to correlate with working memory, including right middle frontal gyrus and bilateral parietal lobe, were less active in moral-personal condition than in moral-impersonal condition. Moreover, participants' neural activity in response to moral-impersonal scenarios was similar to their activity in response to non-moral decision scenarios.
Another study Several philosophers have written critical responses on this matter to Joshua Greene and colleagues.
Based on these results, social psychologists proposed the dual process theory of morality. They suggested that our emotional intuition and deliberate reasoning are not only qualitatively distinctive, but they also compete in making moral judgments and decisions. When making an emotionally-salient moral judgment, automatic, unconscious, and immediate response is produced by our intuition first. More careful, deliberate, and formal reasoning then follows to produce a response that is either consistent or inconsistent with the earlier response produced by intuition, in parallel with more general form of dual process theory of thinking. But in contrast with the previous rational view on moral reasoning, the dominance of the emotional process over the rational process was proposed. Among these, studies have revealed the link between moral evaluations based on purity/sanctity dimension and reasoner's experience of disgust. That is, people with higher sensitivity to disgust were more likely to be conservative toward political issues such as gay marriage and abortion. Moreover, when the researchers reminded participants of keeping the lab clean and washing their hands with antiseptics (thereby priming the purity/sanctity dimension), participants' attitudes were more conservative than in the control condition. In turn, Helzer and Pizarro's findings have been rebutted by two failed attempts of replications.
Other studies raised criticism toward Haidt's interpretation of his data. Augusto Blasi also rebuts the theories of Jonathan Haidt on moral intuition and reasoning. He agrees with Haidt that moral intuition plays a significant role in the way humans operate. However, Blasi suggests that people use moral reasoning more than Haidt and other cognitive scientists claim. Blasi advocates moral reasoning and reflection as the foundation of moral functioning. Reasoning and reflection play a key role in the growth of an individual and the progress of societies.
Alternatives to these dual-process/intuitionist models have been proposed, with several theorists proposing that moral judgment and moral reasoning involves domain general cognitive processes, e.g., mental models, social learning or categorization processes.
Motivated reasoning
A theorization of moral reasoning similar to dual-process theory was put forward with emphasis on our motivations to arrive at certain conclusions. Ditto and colleagues likened moral reasoners in everyday situations to lay attorneys than lay judges; people do not reason in the direction from assessment of individual evidence to moral conclusion (bottom-up), but from a preferred moral conclusion to assessment of evidence (top-down). The former resembles the thought process of a judge who is motivated to be accurate, unbiased, and impartial in her decisions; the latter resembles that of an attorney whose goal is to win a dispute using partial and selective arguments. participants made responsibility judgments about an agent who drove over the speed limit and caused an accident. When the motive for speeding was described as moral (to hide a gift for his parents' anniversary), participants assigned less responsibility to the agent than when the motive was immoral (to hide a vial of cocaine). Even though the causal attribution of the accident may technically fall under the domain of objective, factual understanding of the event, it was nevertheless significantly affected by the perceived intention of the agent (which was presumed to have determined the participants' motivation to praise or blame him).
Another paper by Simon, Stenstrom, and Read (2015, Studies 3 and 4) used a more comprehensive paradigm that measures various aspects of participants' interpretation of a moral event, including factual inferences, emotional attitude toward agents, and motivations toward the outcome of decision. Participants read about a case involving a purported academic misconduct and were asked to role-play as a judicial officer who must provide a verdict. A student named Debbie had been accused of cheating in an exam, but the overall situation of the incident was kept ambiguous to allow participants to reason in a desired direction. Then, the researchers attempted to manipulate participants' motivation to support either the university (conclude that she cheated) or Debbie (she did not cheat) in the case. In one condition, the scenario stressed that through previous incidents of cheating, the efforts of honest students have not been honored and the reputation of the university suffered (Study 4, Pro-University condition); in another condition, the scenario stated that Debbie's brother died from a tragic accident a few months ago, eliciting participants' motivation to support and sympathize with Debbie (Study 3, Pro-Debbie condition). Behavioral and computer simulation results showed an overall shift in reasoning—factual inference, emotional attitude, and moral decision—depending on the manipulated motivation. That is, when the motivation to favor the university/Debbie was elicited, participants' holistic understanding and interpretation of the incident shifted in the way that favored the university/Debbie. In these reasoning processes, situational ambiguity was shown to be critical for reasoners to arrive at their preferred conclusion.
From a broader perspective, Holyoak and Powell interpreted motivated reasoning in the moral domain as a special pattern of reasoning predicted by coherence-based reasoning framework. This general framework of cognition, initially theorized by the philosopher Paul Thagard, argues that many complex, higher-order cognitive functions are made possible by computing the coherence (or satisfying the constraints) between psychological representations such as concepts, beliefs, and emotions. Coherence-based reasoning framework draws symmetrical links between consistent (things that co-occur) and inconsistent (things that do not co-occur) psychological representations and use them as constraints, thereby providing a natural way to represent conflicts between irreconcilable motivations, observations, behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes, as well as moral obligations.
Causality and intentionality
Classical theories of social perception had been offered by psychologists including Fritz Heider (model of intentional action) and Harold Kelley (attribution theory). These theories highlighted how laypeople understand another person's action based on their causal knowledge of internal (intention and ability of actor) and external (environment) factors surrounding that action. That is, people assume a causal relationship between an actor's disposition or mental states (personality, intention, desire, belief, ability; internal cause), environment (external cause), and the resulting action (effect). In later studies, psychologists discovered that moral judgment toward an action or actor is critically linked with these causal understanding and knowledge about the mental state of the actor.
Bertram Malle and Joshua Knobe conducted survey studies to investigate laypeople's understanding and use (the folk concept) of the word 'intentionality' and its relation to action. His data suggested that people think of intentionality of an action in terms of several psychological constituents: desire for outcome, belief about the expected outcome, intention to act (combination of desire and belief), skill to bring about the outcome, and awareness of action while performing that action. Consistent with this view as well as with our moral intuitions, studies found significant effects of the agent's intention, desire, and beliefs on various types of moral judgments, Using factorial designs to manipulate the content in the scenarios, Cushman showed that the agent's belief and desire regarding a harmful action significantly influenced judgments of wrongness, permissibility, punishment, and blame. However, whether the action actually brought about negative consequence or not only affected blame and punishment judgments, but not wrongness and permissibility judgments. Another study also provided neuroscientific evidence for the interplay between theory of mind and moral judgment.
Through another set of studies, Knobe showed a significant effect in the opposite direction: Intentionality judgments are significantly affected by the reasoner's moral evaluation of the actor and action. In one of his scenarios, a CEO of a corporation hears about a new programme designed to increase profit. However, the program is also expected to benefit or harm the environment as a side effect, to which he responds by saying 'I don't care'. The side effect was judged as intentional by the majority of participants in the harm condition, but the response pattern was reversed in the benefit condition.
Many studies on moral reasoning have used fictitious scenarios involving anonymous strangers (e.g., trolley problem) so that external factors irrelevant to researcher's hypothesis can be ruled out. However, criticisms have been raised about the external validity of the experiments in which the reasoners (participants) and the agent (target of judgment) are not associated in any way. As opposed to the previous emphasis on evaluation of acts, Pizarro and Tannenbaum stressed our inherent motivation to evaluate the moral characters of agents (e.g., whether an actor is good or bad), citing the Aristotelian virtue ethics. According to their view, learning the moral character of agents around us must have been a primary concern for primates and humans beginning from their early stages of evolution, because the ability to decide whom to cooperate with in a group was crucial to survival. Furthermore, observed acts are no longer interpreted separately from the context, as reasoners are now viewed as simultaneously engaging in two tasks: evaluation (inference) of moral character of agent and evaluation of her moral act. The person-centered approach to moral judgment seems to be consistent with results from some of the previous studies that involved implicit character judgment. For instance, in Alicke's (1992) Their model formally postulates that character of agent is a cause for the agent's desire for outcome and belief that action will result in consequence, desire and belief are causes for intention toward action, and the agent's action is caused by both that intention and the skill to produce consequence. Combining computational modeling with the ideas from theory of mind research, this model can provide predictions for inferences in bottom-up direction (from action to intentionality, desire, and character) as well as in top-down direction (from character, desire, and intentionality to action).
Gender difference
At one time psychologists believed that men and women have different moral values and reasoning. This was based on the idea that men and women often think differently and would react to moral dilemmas in different ways. Some researchers hypothesized that women would favor care reasoning, meaning that they would consider issues of need and sacrifice, while men would be more inclined to favor fairness and rights, which is known as justice reasoning. However, some also knew that men and women simply face different moral dilemmas on a day-to-day basis and that might be the reason for the perceived difference in their moral reasoning.