The Library
Contractualist concerns shape moral decisions and moral judgments
Tools
Tools
Tools
Le Pargneux, Arthur, Chater, Nick and Zeitoun, Hossam (2022) Contractualist concerns shape moral decisions and moral judgments. In: CogSci 2022, Toronto, Canada, 27-30 Jul 2022. Published in: CogSci Proceedings (In Press)
![[img]](http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/application_pdf.png) |
PDF
CogSci_2022_acceptance_letter.pdf - Unspecified Version Embargoed item. Restricted access to Repository staff only - Requires a PDF viewer. Download (0b) |
Abstract
Psychologists often appeal to two normative ethical theories — consequentialism and deontology — to explain the processes of moral judgment and decision making. By contrast, a third influential philosophical tradition — contractualism — has received little empirical investigation. For contractualism, ethics is a matter of (hypothetical) agreements, and an action is viewed as morally permissible if all the relevantly affected parties could (reasonably) agree to it. Drawing upon virtual bargaining — a specific form of contractualist reasoning that provides a framework for understanding social interactions — we investigate moral contractualism experimentally. We provide evidence of characteristically contractualist moral decisions in a new incentivized game. Then, we show that contractualist concerns also influence moral judgments across three key settings: in our game, in vignettes depicting everyday social interactions, and in a classic sacrificial dilemma. Thus, across five pre-registered online experiments (n = 3,636), we find that characteristically contractualist considerations heavily shape both moral decisions and moral judgments. We propose that research in moral psychology must look beyond the traditional dichotomy between consequences and rules: contractualist concerns (e.g., agreement, consent, mutual interests) are essential to understanding moral cognition.
| Item Type: | Conference Item (Speech) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) | ||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School > Behavioural Science Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School > Strategy & International Business Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School |
||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | CogSci Proceedings | ||||||
| Official Date: | 2022 | ||||||
| Dates: |
|
||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | In Press | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access | ||||||
| Conference Paper Type: | Speech | ||||||
| Title of Event: | CogSci 2022 | ||||||
| Type of Event: | Conference | ||||||
| Location of Event: | Toronto, Canada | ||||||
| Date(s) of Event: | 27-30 Jul 2022 | ||||||
| Related URLs: |
Request changes or add full text files to a record
Repository staff actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
