The ADC of Moral Judgment

Research team

Veljko Dubljević, PhD (North Carolina State University, Pragmatic Health Ethics Research Unit); Sebastian Sattler, PhD (University of Cologne); Eric Racine, PhD (Pragmatic Health Ethics Research Unit, Université de Montréal, McGill University)

Funding

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)

Moral judgment and decision-making tackle difficult situations involving conflicting ethical principles and social values. In order to define and test moral judgments, researchers have generated different hypothetical cases to evoke moral intuitions which would support or disprove conclusions stemming from competing moral theories. This project starts from the assumption that there are three kinds of moral intuitions stemming from three kinds of heuristic processes that simultaneously modulate moral judgments. They also form the basis of three distinct moral theories by substituting the global attribute of moral praiseworthiness or blameworthiness with the simpler attributes of virtue/vice of the agent (A), right/wrong deed (D) and good/bad consequences (C),which should be seen as testable sources of moral insight.

Publications

Dubljević, V., & Racine, E. (2014). The ADC of moral judgment: Opening the black box of moral intuitions with heuristics about agents, deeds, and consequences. AJOB Neuroscience, 5(4), 3-20.

Dubljević, V., & Racine, E. (2013). Judging deeds, not psychopaths. AJOB Neuroscience, 4(2), 33-34.