Decisional Bias as Implicit Moral Judgment

Disgust as embodied moral judgment.

How, and for whom, does disgust influence moral judgment? In four experiments participants made moral judgments while experiencing extraneous feelings of disgust. Disgust was induced in Experiment 1 by exposure to a bad smell, in Experiment 2 by working in a disgusting room, in Experiment 3 by recalling a physically disgusting experience, and in Experiment 4 through a video induction. In each c...

Attributionism and Moral Responsibility for Implicit Bias

Maldynia as a moral judgment?

Lippe rejected out of hand the idea advanced by Morris [5] that pain was a pluralistic concept. Rather, he asserted “the biomedical basis of maldynia.” In Lippe’s medicocentric view of pain, “maldynia” was neither a symptom nor a syndrome but an “illness with endogenous and exogenous components.” Thus defined, “eudynia” becomes a teleologically beneficial mechanism, whereas “maldynia” is “usele...

1.2 Implicit Bias, Reinforcement Learning, and Scaffolded Moral Cognition

Recent data from the cognitive and behavioral sciences suggest that irrelevant features of our environment can often play a role in shaping our morally significant decisions. This isn’t always a bad thing. But our inability to suppress or moderate our reflexive reactions can lead us to behave in ways that diverge from our reflectively held ideals, and to pursue worse options while knowing there...

Do Theories of Implicit Race Bias Change Moral Judgments?

Recent research in social psychology suggests that people harbor ‘‘implicit race biases,’’ biases which can be unconscious or uncontrollable. Because awareness and control have traditionally been deemed necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility, implicit biases present a unique challenge: do we pardon discrimination based on implicit biases because of its unintentional nature, or do ...