Rodrigo Díaz and Ivar Hannikainen
Affiliation: CSIC
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: Emotion, Belief, Moral psychology, Ethics
Date: Friday 5th of September
Time: 15:30
Location: Room 154 (154)
View the full session: Morality & Social Cognition
Consider the following example. It’s a beautiful summer evening, and you are taking a walk around your neighborhood. You turn the corner and see a man punching his daughter. You judge this behavior as morally unacceptable. Do you reach this judgment through reasoning, as with a mathematical judgment? Or is the judgment guided by your emotions, as with a judgment of beauty? Now imagine that you are a parent, and your daughter has torn out the pages from a rare edition of your favorite novel. You are quite angry and the thought of physically punishing your daughter crosses your mind. Nevertheless, you refrain from doing so. What has motivated your self-control? Is it your belief that parental violence is morally wrong, or your aversion toward it? Answers to the questions above separate two (families of) philosophical theories: Moral rationalism and moral sentimentalism. Moral rationalism claims that moral judgment (e.g., judging that parental violence is morally wrong) is based on our reasoning capacities (Schroeter et al., 2018) and that moral behavior (e.g., refraining from engaging in parental violence) can be motivated entirely by belief (May, 2013). Meanwhile, moral sentimentalism claims that moral judgment is based on our emotional capacities (Prinz, 2007) and that emotion is necessary to motivate moral behavior (Sinhababu, 2017). The debate between moral sentimentalism and moral rationalism is one of the most significant disputes in early modern philosophy (Gill, 2008). The debate is sometimes referred to as the debate between Humean and anti-Humean views of morality, in acknowledgement of the seminal work of David Hume, who famously claimed that “reason is the slave of the passions” (Hume, 1739). In the late 20th century, a series of findings in cognitive (neuro)science seemed to have settled the debate in favor of sentimentalist views. Work with psychopaths and sociopaths suggested that emotional impairments lead to immoral behavior (Blair, 1995) and neuroimaging studies showed that moral judgment involves emotional processing (Greene et al., 2001). However, the results above allow for alternative explanations in rationalist terms. Although psychopaths and sociopaths are indeed emotionally blunted, they also show reasoning impairments and poor attention spans (Maibom, 2005), and neuroimaging studies show that moral judgment recruits activity in brain regions associated with emotion, but these brain areas are also associated with many other psychological processes (Díaz, 2019). In short, the existing empirical findings can be interpreted in both sentimentalist and rationalist terms. However, this situation should not lead us to completely give up on using empirical evidence to inform the debate between rationalism and sentimentalism. Instead, the careful conceptual work that guided the abovementioned reassessments of the data should feed back into the design of new empirical studies. The Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ; Graham et al., 2011; see Atari et al., 2023 for the latest version) is arguably the most popular measure of people’s morals. The idea behind the MFQ is that morality can be built on a combination of six different foundations: Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Differences in moral values are understood as differences in the moral importance given to each of these foundations. Although some items in the MFQ mention emotions (e.g., one of the items measuring Care values is: “Compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue”), most of them directly target moral beliefs. Recent research has shown that when considering both moral beliefs about the importance of Care as measured by the MFQ (e.g., “I believe we should avoid people’s suffering first and foremost”) and moral emotions toward the same issues (e.g., “I feel guilty when people suffer as a consequence of my actions”), only moral emotions significantly predict moral motivation. Specifically, when considering both moral beliefs and moral emotions related to Care, only the latter predicts efforts to adopt health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic (Díaz, 2023). In this paper, we introduce a new measure of people’s morals that focuses on their emotions toward each moral foundation: The Moral Emotions Questionnaire (MEQ). Items in the MEQ are inspired by those in the MFQ but assess moral emotions (e.g., “I feel outraged when…”) rather than moral beliefs (e.g., “I think it’s morally wrong that…”). To test the validity and predictive power of MEQ against the MFQ, we will present findings from a study incorporating both questionnaires along with measures of moral judgment and motivation that have been associated with MFQ scores. These measures include: willingness to report unethical behavior or “whistleblowing” (Waytz et al., 2013), responses to sacrificial dilemmas (Crone & Laham, 2015), commitment to lifestyle changes to mitigate climate change (Dickinson et al., 2016), attributions of blame and responsibility to victims or “victim-blaming” (Niemi & Young, 2016), fair behavior in a dictator game (Schier et al., 2016; Díaz, 2023), and perceived morality of food waste and self-reported food waste (Bretter et al., 2023). We expect our results to contribute to the ongoing philosophical debate between moral rationalism and moral sentimentalism, while providing a valuable instrument for psychologists seeking to explain and predict moral behavior.