Testing Three Principles of Harm
| Abstract | ��Is moral judgment accomplished by intuition or conscious reasoning? An answer demands a detailed account of the moral principles in question. We investigated three principles that guide moral judgments: (a) Harm caused by action is worse than harm caused by omission, (b) harm intended as the means to a goal is worse than harm foreseen as the side effect of a goal, and (c) harm involving physical contact with the victim is worse than harm involving no physical contact. Asking whether these principles are invoked to explain moral judgments, we found that subjects generally appealed to the first and third principles in their justifications, but not to the second. This finding has significance for methods and theories of moral psychology: The moral principles used in judgment must be directly compared with those articulated in justification, and doing so shows that some moral principles are available to conscious reasoning whereas others are not. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | No categories specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,701 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Only published papers are available at libraries |
Similar books and articlesFiery Cushman & Liane Young (2011). Patterns of Moral Judgment Derive From Nonmoral Psychological Representations. Cognitive Science 35 (6):1052-1075.
Lisa Campo-Engelstein (forthcoming). Paternal-Fetal Harm and Men's Moral Duty to Use Contraception: Applying the Principles of Nonmaleficence and Beneficence to Men's Reproductive Responsibility. Medicine Studies:1-13.
Samuel C. Rickless (2011). The Moral Status of Enabling Harm. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (1):66-86.
Barbara H. Fried (2012). Can Contractualism Save Us From Aggregation? Journal of Ethics 16 (1):39-66.
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (2010). Scanlon on the Doctrine of Double Effect. Social Theory and Practice 36 (4):541-564.
Marc Hauser, Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, J. I. N. Kang-xing & John Mikhail (2007). A Dissociation Between Moral Judgments and Justifications. Mind and Language 22 (1):1–21.
Joel Feinberg (1984). The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. Oxford University Press.
Evan Fox-Decent (1998). Why Self-Ownership is Prescriptively Impotent. Journal of Value Inquiry 32 (4):489-506.
Pekka Väyrynen (2008). Usable Moral Principles. In Vojko Strahovnik, Matjaz Potrc & Mark Norris Lance (eds.), Challenging Moral Particularism. Routledge.
Luke Robinson (2008). Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 2 (3):1-22.
André Krom (2011). The Harm Principle as a Mid-Level Principle? Three Problems From the Context of Infectious Disease Control. Bioethics 25 (8):437-444.
Nils Holtug (2002). The Harm Principle. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 5 (4):357-389.
Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons (2007). Morphological Rationalism and the Psychology of Moral Judgment. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (3):279 - 295.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2010-12-22Total downloads23 ( #53,879 of 549,124 )Recent downloads (6 months)3 ( #25,740 of 549,124 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
