Humans have a unique ability to generate novel norms. Faced with the knowledge that there are hungry children in Somalia, we easily and naturally infer that we ought to donate to famine relief charities. Although a contentious and lively issue in metaethics, such inference from "is" to "ought" has not been systematically studied in the psychology of reasoning. We propose that deontic introduction is the result of a rich chain of pragmatic inference, most of it implicit; specifically, when an action is causally linked to a valenced goal, valence transfers to the action and bridges into a deontic conclusion. Participants in 5 experiments were presented with utility conditionals in which an action results in a benefit, a cost, or neutral outcome (e.g., "If Lisa buys the booklet, she will pass the exam") and asked to evaluate how strongly deontic conclusions (e.g., "Lisa should buy the booklet") follow from the premises. Findings show that the direction of the conclusions was determined by outcome valence (Experiments 1a and 1b), whereas their strength was determined by the strength of the causal link between action and outcome (Experiments 1, 2a, and 2b). We also found that deontic introduction is defeasible and can be suppressed by additional premises that interfere with any of the links in the implicit chain of inference (Experiments 2a, 2b, and 3). We propose that deontic introduction is a species-specific generative capacity whose function is to regulate future behavior.
Faced with moral choice, people either judge according to pre-existing obligations (deontological judgment), or by taking into account the consequences of their actions (utilitarian judgment). We propose that the latter coheres with a more general cognitive mechanism – deontic introduction, the tendency to infer normative (‘deontic’) conclusions from descriptive premises (is-ought inference). Participants were presented with vignettes that allowed either deontological or utilitarian choice, and asked to draw a range of deontic conclusions, as well as judge the overall moral rightness of each choice separately. We predicted and found a selective defeasibility pattern, in which manipulations that suppressed deontic introduction also suppressed utilitarian moral judgment, but had little effect on deontological moral judgment. Thus, deontic introduction coheres with utilitarian moral judgment almost exclusively. We suggest a family of norm-generating informal inferences, in which normative conclusions are drawn from descriptive (although value-laden) premises. This family includes deontic introduction and utilitarian moral judgment as well as other informal inferences. We conclude with a call for greater integration of research in moral judgment and research into deontic reasoning and informal inference.
We report a study that examined the modulating impact of
contingent self-esteem on regret intensity for regretted
outcomes associated with controllable versus uncontrollable events. The
Contingent Self-Esteem Scale (e.g., Kernis &
Goldman, 2006) was used to assess the extent to which a person’s
sense of self-worth is based on self and others’ expectations. We found that
there was an influence of self-esteem contingency for controllable but not for
uncontrollable regret types. For controllable regret types individuals with a
high contingent (i.e., unstable) self-esteem reported greater regret intensity
than those with a low contingent (i.e., stable) self-esteem. We interpret this
finding as reflecting a functional and adaptive role of high contingent
self-esteem in terms of mobilizing the application of counterfactual reasoning
and planning mechanisms that can enable personal expectations to be achieved in
the future.
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