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Individuals are inclined to have very sturdy views on controversial points resembling whether or not vaccines ought to be necessary, or whether or not abortion ought to be legally permissible. A typical declare in ethical philosophy is that our views on these points can change on account of our reflecting on their penalties. Notably, two frequent views on the impact of outcome-based, or consequentialist, reflection on folks’s ethical attitudes is that these may shift in direction of extra progressive stances (e.g. Singer, 1981), or in direction of extra consensus (e.g., Greene, 2014). However does reflecting on the implications of real-world controversies truly shift ethical opinions?
Testing the Energy of Reflection
The impact of consequentialist reflection on folks’s ethical views has been examined in ethical psychology utilizing hypothetical situations. As an illustration, some researchers (Hannikainen & Rosas 2019) requested their contributors to mirror on the implications of hypothetical circumstances of ethical transgressions, resembling meals hoarding. Fascinated about the dangerous penalties brought on by hoarding elevated ethical condemnation in each Colombian and British contributors. However what occurs when the difficulty is a real-life moral controversy quite than a hypothetical state of affairs? Political psychologists have discovered that after reflecting on details about controversial political points in American politics, resembling tax cuts, contributors tended to strengthen their views about such points (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). This raises an attention-grabbing query: can outcome-based reflection shift views on bioethical points in a significant manner?
In our two research, we addressed this query by evaluating the ethical views of our contributors on seven bioethical controversies earlier than and after experimentally inducing a quick outcome-based reflection. First, we requested contributors to precise their ethical views on statements associated to those controversies. Per week later, we requested them to mirror on the implications of considered one of these points, and to precise their ethical views about that problem (goal merchandise) and the remaining six (management gadgets) once more. As an illustration, within the case of the permissibility of abortion, contributors have been requested to mirror on the merchandise “At what stage of human being pregnant is the fetus able to experiencing ache?”. This query prompted contributors to mirror on the potential harm-related penalties of the observe by reflecting on medical and psychological analysis regarding fetal ache. After this necessary and transient consequentialist reflection, they have been requested to share their ethical views on the difficulty once more. We then checked whether or not the consequentialist reflection had modified their ethical views, in comparison with their responses per week earlier.
Determine 1. Imply change in attitudes towards the seven normative statements throughout the 2 classes of Experiments 1 and a pair of, evaluating goal (mirrored) and management (unreflected) gadgets.
What We Discovered
Opposite to our expectations, a quick outcome-based reflection didn’t considerably shift contributors’ views in direction of progressive stances, nor did it improve consensus amongst them. Though our outcomes from Experiment 1 recommend that briefly reflecting on the implications of real-world moral controversies shifted our contributors’ views in direction of progressive stances on the goal points (people who they have been requested to mirror about), this sample was not replicated in Experiment 2 with a bigger pattern dimension (see Determine 1). As an alternative, contributors’ views shifted equally in direction of progressive and conservative stances.These outcomes align with current analysis exhibiting that reflection doesn’t at all times have a transparent or constant impact on ethical judgment, even in hypothetical situations (Herec et al., 2022). Alternatively, our outcomes may recommend elementary variations in how we motive about hypothetical versus real-world ethical dilemmas.
Total, these findings spotlight the complexity of ethical reasoning in real-world controversies and the necessity for a nuanced understanding of how outcome-based, or consequentialist, reflection influences ethical attitudes about real-world moral controversies.
Carme Isern-Mas is an assistant professor on the College of the Balearic Islands, specializing in ethical psychology and utilized ethics. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Human Evolution and Cognition from the College of the Balearic Islands, and an M.A. in Philosophy from Florida State College. Her analysis pursuits embody matters resembling blame, empathy, ethical motivation, and self-deception. She can also be focused on psychological well being ethics, notably in relation to epistemic and affective injustice.
References
Greene, J. (2014). Ethical tribes: Emotion, motive, and the hole between us and them. Penguin.
Hannikainen, I. R., & Rosas, A. (2019). Rationalization and reflection differentially modulate prior attitudes towards the purity area. Cognitive Science, 43(6), e12747. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12747
Herec, J., Sykora, J., Brahmi, Okay., Vondracek, D., Dobesova, O., Smelik, M., … & Prochazka, J. (2022). Reflection and reasoning in ethical judgment: Two preregistered replications of Paxton, Ungar, and Greene (2012). Cognitive Science, 46(7), e13168. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13168
Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. Political Conduct, 32(2), 303-330. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2
Singer, P. (1981). The increasing circle. Clarendon Press.
