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"Judgment - ethics"
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German validation of three ethics questionnaires: Consequentialist scale, ethical standards of judgment questionnaire, and revised ethics position questionnaire
The Consequentialist Scale (CS) and the Ethical Standards of Judgment Questionnaire (ESJQ) are instruments developed to evaluate the extent of moral reasoning in relation to the two pivotal factors that appear to influence moral decision-making: the degree of harm or benefit produced by the action in question and the consistency of the action with moral norms. In other words, they assess the propensity to utilitarian versus deontological moral reasoning. In contrast, the Ethical Position Questionnaire (EPQ-5) conceptualizes ethical idealism and ethical relativism as meaning-independent, orthogonal dimensions. This study aimed to assess the psychometric properties of German versions of the three mentioned scales in a sample of native German speakers.
A convenience sample of 263 participants completed the online survey. Analyses included internal consistency, structural validity, construct validity through the known-groups method, retest-reliability with a subgroup of n = 102, and floor and ceiling effects. This study used the STROBE checklist.
The CS and EPQ-5 showed strong psychometric properties without any noticeable weaknesses. In contrast, the ESJQ displayed significant shortcomings across all analyses, with low internal consistency and poor results in both item analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The results indicated that deontology, formalism, and idealism were positively correlated with age, while only idealism correlated significantly with gender, with females scoring higher on the idealism scale. A positive correlation was observed between deontology and formalism with religiosity. With regard to personality, deontology and idealism demonstrated a positive correlation with conscientiousness, whereas utilitarianism exhibited a negative correlation with conscientiousness. A positive correlation between consequentialism and openness was also identified, while a negative correlation between formalism and agreeableness was evident.
The German versions of the CS and EPQ-5 are reliable and valid instruments for measuring the propensity toward utilitarian and deontological approaches, as well as ethical idealism and relativism. The scales, therefore, serve as invaluable tools for research, training, and professional practice, facilitating comprehension of the aspects of conscious reflection on ethical dilemmas in practice and of responsible action. The ESJQ, however, did not perform well psychometrically in the German translation, as its internal consistency is questionable.
Journal Article
The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic
Taking as its point of departure recent insights about the performative nature of genre, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic challenges the critical tendency to accept at face value that gothic literature is mainly about fear. Instead, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general, is also about judgment: how to judge and what happens when judgment is confronted with situations that defy its limits. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James all shared a concern with the political and ideological debates of their time, but tended to approach these debates indirectly. Thus, Monnet suggests, while slavery and race are not the explicit subject matter of antebellum works by Poe and Hawthorne, they nevertheless permeate it through suggestive analogies and tacit references. Similarly, Melville, Gilman, and James use the gothic to explore the categories of gender and sexuality that were being renegotiated during the latter half of the century. Focusing on \"The Fall of the House of Usher,\" The Marble Faun, Pierre, The Turn of the Screw, and \"The Yellow Wallpaper,\" Monnet brings to bear minor texts by the same authors that further enrich her innovative readings of these canonical works. At the same time, her study persuasively argues that the Gothic's endurance and ubiquity are in large part related to its being uniquely adapted to rehearse questions about judgment and justice that continue to fascinate and disturb.
Contents: Introduction; Unreliable narrators and 'unnatural sensations': irony and conscience in Edgar Allan Poe; 'Everywhere ... a cross - and nastiness at the foot of it': history, ethics, and slavery in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun; 'Thy catching nobleness unsexes me, my brother': queer knowledge in Herman Melville's Pierre; 'I was queer company enough - quite as queer as the company I received': the queer Gothic of Henry James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Bibliography; Index.
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
eBook
Blind spots : why we fail to do what's right and what to do about it
When confronted with an ethical dilemma, most of us like to think we would stand up for our principles. But we are not as ethical as we think we are. In 'Blind Spots', the authors examine the ways we overestimate our ability to do what is right and how we act unethically without meaning to.
Book
Your Morals Depend on Language
Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the question in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently reducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.
Journal Article
Large-scale moral machine experiment on large language models
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their potential integration into autonomous driving systems necessitates understanding their moral decision-making capabilities. While our previous study examined four prominent LLMs using the Moral Machine experimental framework, the dynamic landscape of LLM development demands a more comprehensive analysis. Here, we evaluate moral judgments across 52 different LLMs, including multiple versions of proprietary models (GPT, Claude, Gemini) and open-source alternatives (Llama, Gemma), to assess their alignment with human moral preferences in autonomous driving scenarios. Using a conjoint analysis framework, we evaluated how closely LLM responses aligned with human preferences in ethical dilemmas and examined the effects of model size, updates, and architecture. Results showed that proprietary models and open-source models exceeding 10 billion parameters demonstrated relatively close alignment with human judgments, with a significant negative correlation between model size and distance from human judgments in open-source models. However, model updates did not consistently improve alignment with human preferences, and many LLMs showed excessive emphasis on specific ethical principles. These findings suggest that while increasing model size may naturally lead to more human-like moral judgments, practical implementation in autonomous driving systems requires careful consideration of the trade-off between judgment quality and computational efficiency. Our comprehensive analysis provides crucial insights for the ethical design of autonomous systems and highlights the importance of considering cultural contexts in AI moral decision-making.
Journal Article
Person as scientist, person as moralist
It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people's moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people's moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. I argue that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.
Journal Article
Small means immoral? The impact of spatial size metaphor on moral judgment
This study aims to explore the unconscious relationship between moral concepts and the spatial dimension of size, as well as to examine whether the unknown size of a room influences participants’ moral cognitive judgments within the framework of embodied cognition. Study 1 and Study 2 investigate participants’ unconscious biases. Specifically, participants exhibited faster response times when judging moral concepts presented in large fonts and sizes and immoral concepts presented in small fonts and sizes, compared to when moral concepts were presented in small fonts and sizes and immoral concepts in large fonts and sizes. Study 3 employed a moral dilemma task, revealing that participants placed in a large room evaluated characters in a story more morally under the embodiment effect than those in a small room. Collectively, these three studies demonstrate that the unconscious psychological relationship between moral concepts and the spatial dimension of size influences individuals’ abstract moral judgments under embodied cognition.
Journal Article