The attribution cube and moral evaluations

Attribution, Socialization, and Moral Decision Making

The Attribution Cube and Reactions to Educational Outcomes

Hypotheses derived from Kelley's cube model of causal inferences were tested in an educational setting by relating high and low students' attributions to reported affect and expectations. In general, low and high scoring students clustered in different cells of the cube, with high scoring students claiming their scores were nondistinctive, but low scorers emphasizing (a) distinctiveness, (b) hi...

Causal deviance and the attribution of moral responsibility

Are current theories of moral responsibility missing a factor in the attribution of blame and praise? Four studies demonstrated that even when cause, intention, and outcome (factors generally assumed to be sufficient for the ascription of moral responsibility) are all present, blame and praise are discounted when the factors are not linked together in the usual manner (i.e., cases of ‘‘causal d...

Against Moral Character Evaluations: the Undetectability of Virtue and Vice

I defend the epistemic thesis that evaluations of people in terms of their moral character as good, bad, or intermediate are almost always epistemically unjustified. (1) Because most people are fragmented (they would behave deplorably in many and admirably in many other situations), one’s prior probability that any given person is fragmented should be high. (2) Because one’s information about s...

Using Qualitative Reasoning for the Attribution of Moral Responsibility

We present a computational model, based on Attribution theory, of responsibility judgment for negative events. Our model uses Qualitative Process theory to reason over the continuous parameters involved in attribution, avoiding the need for ad-hoc assignment of quantitative values. Qualitative reasoning allows our model to infer relative amounts of responsibility for a situation in a manner tha...