Suchergebnisse

It is often thought that an agent may be held morally responsible for bringing about a negative outcome only if they could have done otherwise. Inspired by previous research linking moral judgment to free will ascriptions and representations of possibility, we probe the reverse link: Does learning about a morally undesirable outcome make preferable alternatives appear more possible? We find modest evidence that this could be the case. In a preregistered experiment, we presented 317 participants with animated footage of a traffic accident in which two bystanders fail to intervene as a third person gets run over by bus, and manipulated whether the victim was evil, virtuous, or neutral. Judging from the same visual input, people indicate that saving an evil victim would have been slightly less possible than saving a virtuous or neutral victim, and arriving at the conclusion that it would have been possible demanded more time. Using drift-diffusion modeling to better understand the underlying cognitive processes, we found that participants were biased against counterfactual attempts to save the evil victim's life, but then gathered evidence toward their decisions at the same rate regardless of the victim's morality.

AbstractAccording to the so-called Classical Theory, concepts are mentally represented by individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions. One of the principal empirical objections against this view stems from evidence that people judge some instances of a concept to be moretypicalthan others. In this paper we present and discuss four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which this 'typicality effect' holds for the concept ofbasic needs. Through multiple operationalizations of typicality, our studies yielded evidence for a strong effect of this kind: (1) Participants tended to recall the same core examples of the concept in a free-listing task. (2) They judged some basic needs to be more typical than others. (3) The items that were judged to be more typical were listed more frequently in the free-listing task. (4) These items were listed earlier on in the free-listing task. (5) Typical basic needs, as well as non needs, were classified faster than atypical basic needs in a reaction time study. These findings suggest that the concept of basic needs may have a non-classical (e.g., exemplar or prototype) structure. If so, the quest for a simple and robust intensional analysis of the concept may be futile.

The research was supported by a Swiss National Science Foundation grant (PZ00P1_179912, PI Markus Kneer). Data and materials are available on the Open Science Framework at: osf.io/dpsq9/?view_only=54a7c150e03d4d78819b2954cee3a240. ; At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline medical professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique lens through which to understand how the public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives. In three studies (total N = 2298), we examined people's moral attitudes toward triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitarian triage policies. These utilitarian tendencies did not stem from period change in moral attitudes relative to pre-pandemic levels--but rather, from the heightened realism of triage dilemmas. Participants favored utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas when compared to structurally analogous, non-medical dilemmas—and such support was rooted in prosocial dispositions, including empathy and impartial beneficence. Finally, despite abundant evidence of political polarization surrounding Covid-19, moral views about critical care triage differed modestly, if at all, between liberals and conservatives. Taken together, our findings highlight people's robust support for utilitarian measures in the face of a global public health threat, and illustrate how hypothetical scenarios in moral psychology (e.g. trolley cases) should strive for more experiential and psychological realism, otherwise their results might not generalize to real-world moral dilemmas. ; Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) European Commission PZ00P1_179912

Apesar da ausência de previsão expressa na Constituição, o posicionamento que vem ganhando destaque entre os juristas é o de que o direito à felicidade está implícito em nosso ordenamento, já tendo, inclusive, sido invocado por ministros do STF na resolução de casos emblemáticos. Sendo assim, torna-se importante compreender o conceito de felicidade. Pesquisas empíricas recentes - na contramão do usualmente defendido por psicólogos e alguns filósofos que estudam o tema - têm revelado que, quando um indivíduo avalia a felicidade de outro, são tipicamente levados em consideração tanto elementos descritivos (e.g. se o sujeito apresenta emoções positivas e satisfação com sua vida) quanto normativos (e.g. se o sujeito leva uma vida moralmente boa). No presente artigo, apresentamos os resultados de dois experimentos que investigam se o conceito de "felicidade" e, por extensão, o "direito à felicidade", também dependem de valorações descritivas e normativas. Por fim, discutimos algumas implicações e riscos advindos do uso de um conceito moralmente carregado, como é a felicidade, na prática judicial.