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PubMed2002

Norms with feeling: towards a psychological account of moral judgment.

There is a large tradition of work in moral psychology that explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g. hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g. playing with your food). However, only recently have there been attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgment (e.g. Cognition 57 (1995) 1; Ethics 103 (1993) 337). Recent evidence indicates that affect plays a crucial role in mediating the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction. However, the prevailing account of the role of affect in moral judgment is problematic. This paper argues that the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction depends on both a body of information about which actions are prohibited (a Normative Theory) and an affective mechanism. This account leads to the prediction that other normative prohibitions that are connected to an affective mechanism might be treated as non-conventional. An experiment is presented that indicates that "disgust" violations (e.g. spitting at the table), are distinguished from conventional violations along the same dimensions as moral violations.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2001

The relationship between pharmacists' tenure in community setting and moral reasoning.

OBJECTIVE: To explore the relationship between pharmacists' tenure in the community setting and their moral reasoning abilities. DESIGN: Systematic random sample design. SETTING: A large southeastern city in the United States. PARTICIPANTS: 450 independent and chain community pharmacists identified from the state board of pharmacy list of licensed community pharmacists. INTERVENTIONS: A mailed questionnaire that included a well-known moral reasoning instrument and collected demographic information. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Moral Reasoning abilities and tenure of community pharmacists. RESULTS: As a group, community pharmacists with greater years of tenure in community practice scored significantly lower on moral reasoning than those pharmacists with fewer years of tenure (p=0.016). CONCLUSION: Four plausible explanations for the results are given including: a) a selection of lower ethical reasoners and/or an exodus of higher ethical reasoners from the community setting; b) a retrogression in the moral reasoning skills as community pharmacists obtain tenure in this setting; c) differences between the low and high moral reasoning groups may be due to a cohort effect; and d) the obtained practitioner sample may not have been representative of the population of community pharmacists.

Community Pharmacy Services↗

PubMed1999

Maltreated and nonmaltreated preschoolers' conceptions of hypothetical and actual moral transgressions.

Maltreated and nonmaltreated preschoolers' (mean age = 4 years 6 months) judgments regarding hypothetical and actual moral transgressions were examined. Thirty-six maltreated children (17 physically abused and 19 neglected) and 19 comparison nonmaltreated children judged, justified, and evaluated affective responses to 6 hypothetical moral transgressions. Perpetrators and victims also judged and evaluated affective responses to actual classroom moral transgressions. All children evaluated moral transgressions as very serious, punishable, and wrong in the absence of rules. Moral judgments and justifications differed as a function of context (hypothetical vs. actual) and type of transgression but not maltreatment status. Affective responses differed as a function of maltreatment subtype and gender. Maltreated and nonmaltreated children may differ in the organization of their affective responses rather than in their moral evaluations.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed1986

Systematic variability in the quality of moral action, as defined in two formulations.

Whether the often-reported, low level correlations among moral scores for different situations are due to systematic variations in both contexts and persons' functioning was investigated within two moral systems: Kohlberg's (1981) and an interactional formulation (Haan, 1978). The sample was 119 university students, members of 15 naturally existing friendship groups. First they were individually interviewed; then, as friendship groups, they took part in five sessions of about 3 hr each; 10 groups played moral games, whereas 5 groups discussed hypothetical dilemmas. The students were reinterviewed individually, soon after the five sessions, and again 3-4 months later. Thus eight moral scores were secured for each moral system. Measures of characteristic ego functioning and friends' sociometric evaluations were obtained before the sessions along with situationally evoked ego functioning and the groups' functioning during the sessions. Inconsistent moral performance occurred according to both systems, but variations could be attributed to systematic situational effects of contextual stress, contents of dilemmas, and operational style of friendship groups, and to individual differences in the students' characteristic and situationally evoked ways of resolving conflict. Differences between the two systems in the effects of ego strategies were most striking.

Character↗

PubMed1993

Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?

Are disgusting or disrespectful actions judged to be moral violations, even when they are harmless? Stories about victimless yet offensive actions (such as cleaning one's toilet with a flag) were presented to Brazilian and U.S. adults and children of high and low socioeconomic status (N = 360). Results show that college students at elite universities judged these stories to be matters of social convention or of personal preference. Most other Ss, especially in Brazil, took a moralizing stance toward these actions. For these latter Ss, moral judgments were better predicted by affective reactions than by appraisals of harmfulness. Results support the claims of cultural psychology (R.A. Shweder, 1991a) and suggest that cultural norms and culturally shaped emotions have a substantial impact on the domain of morality and the process of moral judgment. Suggestions are made for building cross-culturally valid models of moral judgment.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Moral conviction: another contributor to attitude strength or something more?

Attitudes held with strong moral conviction (moral mandates) were predicted to have different interpersonal consequences than strong but nonmoral attitudes. After controlling for indices of attitude strength, the authors explored the unique effect of moral conviction on the degree that people preferred greater social (Studies 1 and 2) and physical (Study 3) distance from attitudinally dissimilar others and the effects of moral conviction on group interaction and decision making in attitudinally homogeneous versus heterogeneous groups (Study 4). Results supported the moral mandate hypothesis: Stronger moral conviction led to (a) greater preferred social and physical distance from attitudinally dissimilar others, (b) intolerance of attitudinally dissimilar others in both intimate (e.g., friend) and distant relationships (e.g., owner of a store one frequents), (c) lower levels of good will and cooperativeness in attitudinally heterogeneous groups, and (d) a greater inability to generate procedural solutions to resolve disagreements.

Abortion, Induced↗

PubMed1995

Long-term care nurses' moral convictions.

Moral certainty and uncertainty have a profound impact on nurses' ethical choices. In order to describe these concepts, the author examined long-term care nurses' convictions about the issue of withholding or withdrawing artificial nutrition and hydration from elders. A convenience sample of 25 BSN and MSN-prepared long-term care nurses were interviewed and asked to describe their experiences with this issue. A qualitative analysis utilizing Colaizzi's (1978) methodology was performed. Five categories of conviction emerged from the data. These five categories included absolute moral conviction, strong moral conviction, moderate moral conviction, moral uncertainty with conviction and moral uncertainty. Eighty-four per cent of the sample was convinced that tube feeding was not always in the resident's best interest. Sixteen per cent of the sample were uncertain, but were convinced that the resident should not suffer. A pattern emerged from the interview results and the answers to three additional questions. The pattern suggests that the more experience a nurse has with nontreatment the more likely she or he is to agree with it. In this paper, the five categories of conviction are compared and contrasted, the pattern of conviction described, and the implications of the findings for nursing discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

The essence of women's moral perspectives in anger expression situations.

This inquiry's purpose was to describe the meaning (essence) of moral perspective in adult women's experiences of anger expression. Moral perspectives have been perceived as pivotal to how one constructs and problem-solves real life dilemmas. Since some modes of anger expression have been identified as unhealthy, uncovering the meaning of moral perspectives in women's anger expression experiences could be significant to women's health. Through phenomenological interviews, 24 women, aged 21-65 (4 African-American and 20 Euro-American), reflected on an experience when they were angry and had to think about the right way to express their anger. Significant statements were extracted and thematized. Next, themes were clustered into the following essences of the experience: the realities of the self as moral, the morality of anger expression and the morality of outcomes.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

The history of nursing in the home: revealing the significance of place in the expression of moral agency.

The history of nursing in the home: revealing the significance of place in the expression of moral agency The relationship between place and moral agency in home care nursing is explored in this paper. The notion of place is argued to have relevance to moral agency beyond moral context. This argument is theoretically located in feminist ethics and human geography and is supported through an examination of historical documents (1900-33) that describe the experiences and insights of American home care/private duty nurses or that are related to nursing ethics. Specifically, the role of place in inhibiting and enhancing care, justice, good relationships, and power in the practice of private duty nurses is explored. Several implications for current nursing ethics come out of this analysis. (i) The moral agency of nurses is highly nuanced. It is not only structured by nurses' relationships to patients and health professionals, i.e. moral context, it is also structured by the place of nursing care. (ii) Place has the potential to limit and enhance the power of nurses. (iii) Some aspects of nursing's conception of the good, such as what constitutes a good nurse-patient relationship, are historically and geographically relative.

Ethics, Nursing↗

PubMed2003

Differences in the justification of choices in moral dilemmas: effects of gender, time pressure and dilemma seriousness.

The effects on moral reasoning of gender, time pressure and seriousness of the issue at hand were investigated. In Experiment 1, 72 university students were presented with moral dilemmas and asked what actions the actors involved should take and to justify this. Women were found to be more care-oriented in their reasoning than men, supporting Gilligan's moral judgment model. Both time pressure and consideration of non-serious as opposed to serious moral dilemmas led to an increase in a justice orientation compared with a care orientation in moral judgments. In Experiment 2, a similar task was given to 80 persons of mixed age and profession, and the participants' moral reasoning was coded in terms of its being either duty-orientated (duty, obligations, rights) or consequence-oriented (effects on others). Men were found to be more duty-oriented than women, and time pressure to lead to a greater incidence of duty orientation.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

A method in search of a purpose: the internal morality of medicine.

I begin this commentary with an expanded typology of theories that endorse an internal morality of medicine. I then subject these theories to a philosophical critique. I argue that the more robust claims for an internal morality fail to establish a stand-alone method for bioethics because they ignore crucial non-medical values, violate norms of justice and fail to establish the normativity of medical values. I then argue that weaker versions of internalism avoid such problems, but at the cost of failing to provide a clear sense in which their moral norms are internal or can ground a comprehensive approach to moral problems. Finally, I explore various functions that an internal morality might serve, concluding with the observation that, while there may be a core of good sense to the notion of an internal morality of medicine, our expectations for it must be drastically lowered.

Delivery of Health Care↗

PubMed2004

Therapeutic doubt and moral dialogue.

This paper aims at analysing the problem of remainder and regret in moral conflicts. Four different approaches are subject of investigation: a moral-theoretical strategy aimed at consistency; a narrative approach of moral coherence and open consensus; Plato's moral methodology of dialogue and aporetic resolution of moral conflicts and finally, an approach deduced from Greek tragedy of emotional resolution of moral conflicts. A central argument is that since there exists no theoretically convincing way of solving the problem of remainder and regret, the attention should instead be directed towards finding alternative ways of coping with this problem. The three last approaches subject of investigation attempt--each in their own way--to do this. Teaching medical ethics to medical students and the burning issue of medical fallibility is used to demonstrate the relevance of these forms of resolution in a medical context.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2001

Zygmunt Bauman's poisoned gift of morality.

Bauman's attempt to develop a sociological theory of morality turning around fundamental premises of Durkheim's approach fails in the last analysis, since in Bauman's view the 'moral party of two' does not constitute a social situation. It is argued that the necessary condition to think sociologically about morality is the concept of reciprocity and thus one can arrive at a view of morality in postmodernity consistent with Bauman's earlier theory of practice. If Bauman's idea about responsibilty as the core of morality is transformed to the idea of an appeal of history to compassion and is supplemented with the idea of reciprocity as an emerging norm it is possible to outline a sociological theory of moral practice according to postmodern conditions.

Ethics↗

PubMed1989

Moral judgments of aggressive and nonaggressive children.

Moral judgments were studied in 103 aggressive and 79 nonaggressive 10-year-old Finnish children. Their aggressiveness was evaluated by means of peer ratings. Moral judgments were assessed by presenting them with stories from their daily lives that contained moral conflicts. The results showed that the children did not adopt a constant level of moral reasoning; instead, judgments were situation specific. Furthermore, the moral cognitions of aggressive children did not differ from those of their nonaggressive peers, although sex-related differences tended to be significant: Boys adopted absolute moral standards, whereas girls' judgments were more relative.

Aggression↗

PubMed1990

Play narratives in 36-month-old children. Early moral development and family relationships.

Whether there is significant moral development prior to the resolution of the oedipal conflict has been a source of debate between classic psychoanalytic and more recent clinical theories. We devised a play narrative technique, using standard story stems, to elicit 36-month-olds' representations of affective themes related to moral conflicts. Since morality is both influenced by interactions with significant others and involves dealing with the roles of others in the midst of conflict, we also explored narrative representations of the family. Results indicate that children as young as 36 months represent a considerable amount of moral development in narrative form. Children were able to articulate coherent stories about rules, reciprocity, empathy, and internalized prohibitions. Most remarkable was their ability to deal with alternative outcomes in order to resolve a moral dilemma. With respect to family relationships, the majority of the children represented a range of family figures who served as reparative agents and who initiated prosocial interventions for conflict. Interestingly, the children portrayed less difficulty with separation from parents when the parents were physically absent than when they were present but not available. We conclude that our narrative story stem technique offers promising opportunities for learning more about early moral development and family relationships in 3-year-olds.

Child, Preschool↗

PubMed2006

Goal orientations and moral identity as predictors of prosocial and antisocial functioning in male association football players.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of task and ego goal orientation and moral identity on prosocial and antisocial judgement and behaviour in football. The interaction between task and ego orientation in predicting these variables was also examined. Participants were 210 adult male footballers (age 25 +/- 6 years) competing at recreational (n = 133) and semi-professional (n = 77) levels. They completed questionnaires measuring task and ego goal orientation, the importance of moral identity, prosocial and antisocial judgement, frequency of prosocial and antisocial behaviours in football, and social desirability. Regression analysis revealed no main effects for goal orientations and moral identity on prosocial judgement and behaviour. However, a significant interaction effect between task and ego orientation emerged in relation to prosocial judgement. Specifically, task orientation positively predicted prosocial judgement only at low levels of ego orientation. Ego orientation emerged as a positive predictor of antisocial judgement and behaviour, whereas moral identity negatively predicted these variables. The differentiation between prosocial and antisocial aspects of morality was supported. It was concluded that examining moral identity and interactions between task and ego orientation adds to our understanding of the influence of these variables on prosocial and antisocial functioning in sport.

Adult↗

PubMed1980

The relationship of perceived latitude of choice to morale in a nursing home environment.

An Importance, Locus and Range of Activities Checklist (The Perceived Latitude of Choice Scale) and the Philadelphia Geriatric Center Morale Scale were administered to 17 institutionalized elderly women. The Perceived Latitude of Choice instrument contained 37 items representing activities of daily life which subjects rated for personal importance and range of choice available. The morale scale contained 17 items presented in a dichotomous format that would indicate high or low morale. A number of positive correlations were observed between morale and perceived degree of choice, with Attitude Toward Own Aging the factor on the morale scale showing the strongest relationships to choice. The degree of choice available for privacy stood out as one of the most important items related to morale. A number of methodological considerations were discussed relating to the use of correlations, restrictions of range of scores and selection of subjects from populations.

Activities of Daily Living↗

PubMed2003

Morals and the human brain: a working model.

Morality has been at the center of informal talks and metaphysical discussions since the beginning of history. Recently, converging lines of evidence from evolutionary biology, neuroscience and experimental psychology have shown that morality is grounded in the brain. This article reviews the main lines of investigation indicating that moral behavior is a product of evolutionary pressures that shaped the neurobehavioral processes related to the selective perception of social cues, the experience of moral emotions and the adaptation of behavioral responses to the social milieu. These processes draw upon specific cortical-subcortical loops that organize social cognition, emotion and motivation into uniquely human forms of experience and behavior. We put forth a model of brain-behavior relationships underlying moral reasoning and emotion that accommodates the impairments of moral behavior observed in neuropsychiatric disorders. This model provides a framework for empirical testing with current methods of neurobehavioral analysis.

Brain↗