Moral learning: Psychological and philosophical perspectives

Cushman, Fiery; Kumar, Victor; Railton, Peter

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.06.008

Cited by 36 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 143 publications

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“…At one level, our results might seem to support the interpretation of Cushman and colleagues (2013) that a child's moral development involves the maturation and articulation of two separate processes, one responding more to intentions and influencing abstract judgements, the other responding more to outcomes and influencing behavioral reactions (see also Cushman et al, 2017). Like them, we found that young children took more account of outcomes for the more practical measure, while always paying more attention to intentions in the more abstract measures.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…development have often focused on the role of intention evaluation, as has been described for the outcome-to-intent shift. However, it is important to examine how the development of other capacities contributes to moral learning (Cushman, Kumar, & Railton, 2017). Recent studies have related moral judgment with the capacity to engage in mental state reasoning (Young & Tsoi, 2013), and investigated how by applying mental concepts in different situations, children make judgments about the goodness or badness of their own and others' actions (Chakroff & Young, 2015).…”

Section: Investigations Of the Relationship Between Mental State Compmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Children consider both outcome and intent in moral judgements, punishment recommendations, and reward allocations

Ingram¹,

Co²

2019

Preprint

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In early-to-middle childhood children are thought to move from judging actions based solely on outcomes to also taking actors’ intentions into account. There is little research on how particular cognitive capabilities contribute to this breakthrough, or whether it occurs in children outside Europe and North America. We addressed both issues in a study of 174 children (94 girls, 80 boys), aged between 3-4, 5-6 and 7-8 years old, from low-income backgrounds in Bogotá, Colombia. Participants were presented with 4 vignettes in which an action’s outcome and the agent’s intention were systematically varied. Children were asked how good/bad each agent was, how much punishment they deserved, and how many reward points (linked to prizes) they would receive. They also completed a standard false-belief task. Both outcome and intention affected decisions in all 3 age groups, and indeed there was a much stronger effect of intention on all three measures. There was evidence of an outcome-to-intent shift only in behavioral rewards: 3–4 and 5–6-year-old children treated accidental transgressions as equivalent to intentional transgressions or failed attempts to do harm, while 7–8-year-old children assigned more points to accidental than intentional transgressors. Performance on the false-belief task was linked more with abstract judgements than with behavioral rewards. These results add to evidence that even young children consider agents’ intentions when making moral judgements. However, outcomes also mattered for all age groups, since accidents were never judged to be as acceptable as actions with both positive outcomes and positive intentions.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Investigations Of the Relationship Between Mental State Compmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children consider both outcome and intent in moral judgements, punishment recommendations, and reward allocations

Ingram¹,

Co²

2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In SAT, individuals are characterized with respect to attachment, obligations, belief in conventional values, self-control and (the last addition) morality. There has been a massive increase in moral cognition studies in the last few years, for good reasons [24,25]. Empirical findings in recent criminological research suggest that morality is perhaps the strongest individual factor of all determining if a person will commit a crime or not [26,27].…”

Section: Crimson Publishersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clinical Risk Assessment-Organizing Information Using Criminological Theory Seems to Work

Levander¹

2018

FSAR

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“…Moral psychology -a field in which philosophers are at least as prominent as psychologists -is growing exponentially (Priva and Austerweil 2015). Some would say it is blossoming, others that it is spreading like a weed, but even detractors must admit that, since it emerged 15-20 years ago, moral psychology has told us a great deal about what people consider to be wrong, the types of psychological and neurobiological mechanisms involved in making moral judgements, and where those mechanisms come from (Cushman, Kumar & Railton 2017). This article focusses on the last of these issues, on questions about moral development.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Maybe I've been obtuse or looking in the 5 wrong places, but I suspect there are (also) three more interesting reasons: 1) Moral psychology has a nativist bias. In spite of a recent surge of interest in 'moral learning' (Cushman, Kumar & Railton 2017;, most moral psychologists continue to be preoccupied by nature's contributions to the development of morality. 2) When one is trying to trace sources of information about the social environment it is difficult to distinguish nurture from culture; to keep apart cases in which the child learns about other people and cases in which she learns from other people.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Is morality a gadget? Nature, nurture and culture in moral development

Heyes

2019

Synthese

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Research on 'moral learning' examines the roles of domain-general processes, such as Bayesian inference and reinforcement learning, in the development of moral beliefs and values. Alert to the power of these processes and equipped with both the analytic resources of philosophy and the empirical methods of psychology, 'moral learners' are ideally placed to discover the contributions of nature, nurture and culture to moral development. However, I argue that to achieve these objectives research on moral learning needs to 1) overcome nativist bias, and 2) distinguish two kinds of social learning: learning from and learning about. An agent learns from others when there is transfer of competence-what the learner learns is similar to, and causally dependent on, what the model knows. When an agent learns about the social world there is no transfer of competenceobservable features of other agents are just the content of what-is-learned. Learning from does not require explicit instruction. A novice can learn from an expert who is 'leaking' her morality in the form of emotionally charged behaviour or involuntary use of vocabulary. To the extent that moral development depends on learning from other agents, there is the potential for cultural selection of moral beliefs and values.

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Moral learning: Psychological and philosophical perspectives

Cited by 36 publications

References 143 publications

Children consider both outcome and intent in moral judgements, punishment recommendations, and reward allocations

Children consider both outcome and intent in moral judgements, punishment recommendations, and reward allocations

Clinical Risk Assessment-Organizing Information Using Criminological Theory Seems to Work

Is morality a gadget? Nature, nurture and culture in moral development

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