Moral cognition survey

I hate these sort of questionnaires that don't let one be a moral relativist. It depends IS a valid answer.

Was his whipping of the sailor good or bad? Neither. However it was justified and the sailor probably believed that he deserved it. Was it an effective punishment in that it resulted in changed behaviour? Who knows. Would it be acceptable today? Not in our navy, but quite possibly in those of countries where whipping is still used as a form of punishment.

So I won't go any further with the questionnaire - Despite not being a philosopher I've probably been contaminated by association with you John.

Nah, that's just garden variety social relativism, in which the practice is licensed by the social mores. Moral relativism is the claim that socially sanctioned acts are all that there is to moral virtue or vice. You have to say "In the 17thC navy it was good to whip sailors, and in the 21stC navy it is not" to be a moral relativist.

Am I right, Neil?

The cannibalism questions were interesting: I assumed the relatives were ok with being eaten, but if they weren't then that makes it, IMO, a different issue.

Can someone explain moral relativism to me? I read the wikipedia article, but it didn't help much. The main problem is, that as far as I can see, moral relativism would have me accept that others (mainly religious fundamentalists) views that I should be put to death are as right as my view that I should live. I'm sure you can see why this is a scary proposition.

Warning: spoilers follow (don't read this until after you have done the survey).

Relativism is the issue. Here's the background. In the 1970s and beyond, some psychologists developed what they called domain theory. Details don't matter here; what is important is that they found that across all cultures, almost everyone is able reliably to categorize (what they call) moral transgressions, as opposed to conventional transgressions. By around 36 months, children are able to perform the task. They do it in terms of the authority dependence of the norms: moral transgressions are those to which are not authority dependent. The children are asked 'would it be okay if the teacher/the law (or whatever) said it was okay'? For conventional transgressions (eg, talking in class) children say yes, for moral transgressions (eg punching someone) they say no. The only people who fail at the task are psychopaths.

Very recently, Stephen Stich and Daniel Kelly have questioned these results. They argue that if domain theory is right, then whenever there is a harm, people will categorize an action as wrong. But using questions like 'Whips', they apparently showed that people's judgments of whether an action are wrong are sensitive to lots of parameters besides harm. Stich thinks that this supports his view of norm acquistion, where our norm acquisition machinery is sensitive only to whether a prohibition has the hallmarks of a norm, not to its content.

I wondered whether Stich's experimental results were the consequence of a failure to distinguish whether an action was wrong from whether it was blameworthy. Stich asked "was it okay for Mr Williams to whip the sailor'? Now that might mean many things: was the action right? Was it mandated? Was the agent blameworthy for doing it? I wanted to see if we couldn't pull these things apart. Hence the stilted wording of my question (is it good that...). BTW, suggestions for better wording welcome. My hypothesis is that many people will think that an action is wrong but not blameworthy, and that belief explains their responses to Stich.

If you think that the action is neither good nor bad (but culture makes it so) I thought you could indicate that by picking the mid point on the Lickert scale.

Hope this helps. If I'm confused, let me know. The study is a pilot, so suggestions will help improve the study design.

Neil,

I'll note that my responses to the cannibolism (sp?) probably reflected a variable you didn't anticipate: I said it was bad, because there are some nasty diseases that are passed that way, but not blameworthy. My view is that if its culturally acceptable, why not? [No person eaten by another has ever complained after the fact.]

That question is there to pick up on another variable. Nichols predicts that if an action causes negative emotion, people are likely to treat it is quasi-moral.

I didn't like the questions, especially the canniabalism one (that's as far as I went). I don't think that it's good that they eat their dead relatives, but I also don't think it's not good. My view is more like "It isn't harming anyone, so I don't care what they do about that." I did find the whip questions interesting though.

Ok, so I'm more your garden gnome variety of relativist, and I will fight to the death to defend my position that "it depends" is a valid answer.

I made a mistake at the end that I would like to comment on here. The questions on whipping were no real problem for me, in my opinion the action is totally wrong in all three cases however the blameworthiness varies with time. The closer one gets to the present the more blameworthy the act becomes. My problem was the two questions on burial rituals they are not yes/no questions. I simply did not answer the first one, which the system allowed however as I tried this tactic on the last question the system 'demanded' an answer. Very reluctantly I gave one and finished the survey. Immediately afterwards I regretted my decision and wished that I had refused to finish the survey instead.

I started the survey, but then had a thought -- the repetitiveness suggested that this could go on forever. I suggest that in surveys, always tell how many questions there will be, otherwise you will have people dropping out when they start thinking they're wasting their time.

i dropped out very soon also, partly because the exercise could have gone on forever, but mostly because i too am convinced that "it depends" is a valid answer. the scenarios were insufficiently detailed and insufficiently constrained. the whipping ones, for instance, outlined power and command structures between the players that were left too vague for me to judge the players' acts.

To Gork:

The best survey I ever did was an intelligence test consisting of an infinite number of pages, each with 10 questions randomly selected from a large bank.

The test graded your intelligence based on how long it took you to realise you were being had and stop doing the test.

The most stupid person on record kept going for about 20,000 questions...

Thanks - I will alter the study in several respects. I will tell people how long the survey is (very short, actually). And I will alter the yes/no responses to allow for 'don't know', and 'neither' responses.

Neil, one other thing you should fix is that in scaling the modern cannibalism question's degree of "badness" I could only guess which end was "bad" and which was "not at all bad" because it wasn't labelled. I use the Sea Monkey browser, but I am not sure if that has anything to do with it.