A little good is good enough: Ethical consumption, cheap excuses, and moral self-licensing.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Engel J
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6961941 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Moral character is widely expected to lead to moral judgements and practices. However, such expectations are often breached, especially when moral character is measured by self-report. We propose that because self-reported moral character partly reflects a desire to appear good, people who self-report a strong moral character will show moral harshness towards others and downplay their own transgressions-that is, they will show greater moral hypocrisy. This self-other discrepancy in moral judgements should be pronounced among individuals who are particularly motivated by reputation. Employing diverse methods including large-scale multination panel data (N = 34,323), and vignette and behavioural experiments (N = 700), four studies supported our proposition, showing that various indicators of moral character (Benevolence and Universalism values, justice sensitivity, and moral identity) predicted harsher judgements of others' more than own transgressions. Moreover, these double standards emerged particularly among individuals possessing strong reputation management motives. The findings highlight how reputational concerns moderate the link between moral character and moral judgement.
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Project description:Moral observer-licensing happens when observers condone actors' morally questionable conduct due to the actors' history of moral behaviors. In four studies (N = 808), we investigated this phenomenon in the context of cyberspace and its contributing factors and boundary conditions. The pilot study determined what participants perceived as typically moral and immoral behaviors in cyberspace. Then, in Study 1, participants condemned a story character's online immoral behavior less often when they were informed of the character's prior online moral behavior than when they were not, which indicates moral observer-licensing in cyberspace. Study 2 confirmed the presence of moral observer-licensing in cyberspace and further demonstrated that a character's prior moral or immoral behavior online respectively reduces or intensifies the perceived negativity of the character's subsequent immoral behavior. Finally, Study 3 showed that participants who identified with the victim in a hypothetical scenario showed less forgiveness and more condemnation of a character's immoral behavior than those who identified with the perpetrator or the bystander. These findings are of theoretical and practical significance for our understanding of cyber ethics.
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Project description:To examine the informed consent process when trained language interpreters are unavailable.Ensuring sufficient patient understanding for informed consent is especially challenging for patients with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). While US law requires provision of competent translation for LEP patients, such services are commonly unavailable.Qualitative data was collected in 8 prenatal genetics clinics in Texas, including interviews and observations with 16 clinicians, and 30 Latina patients. Using content analysis techniques, we examined whether the basic criteria for informed consent (voluntariness, discussion of alternatives, adequate information, and competence) were evident for each of these patients, contrasting LEP patients with patients not needing an interpreter. We present case examples of difficulties related to each of these criteria, and compare informed consent scores for consultations requiring interpretation and those which did not.We describe multiple communication problems related to the use of untrained interpreters, or reliance on clinicians' own limited Spanish. These LEP patients appear to be consistently disadvantaged in each of the criteria we examined, and informed consent scores were notably lower for consultations which occurred across a language barrier.In the absence of adequate Spanish interpretation, it was uncertain whether these LEP patients were provided the quality and content of information needed to assure that they are genuinely informed. We offer some low-cost practice suggestions that might mitigate these problems, and improve the quality of language interpretation, which is essential to assuring informed choice in health care for LEP patients.
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Project description:BackgroundAs 'disease detectives' and directors of public health programs, field epidemiologists play essential roles in protecting public health. Although ethical issues receive considerable attention in medical and research settings, less is known about ethical challenges faced by field epidemiologists in public health programs. Similarly, little is known about moral distress among field epidemiologists, i.e., situations in which they are constrained from acting on what they know to be morally right. Moral distress is strongly associated with empathy fatigue, burnout, reduced job retention, and disengagement. To better understand ethics training needs for field epidemiologists, in February 2019, members of TEPHIConnect, an online and mobile networking platform for Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP) alumni, were invited to participate in an anonymous survey about ethical challenges and moral distress.ResultsAmong 126 respondents from 54 countries, leading causes of ethical dilemmas included inadequate informed consent (61%), inequitable allocation of resources (49%), and conflicts of interest (43%). These occur primarily in settings of disease outbreaks (60%); research (55%); and public health programs at the state, province, or national level (45%) or community level (43%). Work-related moral distress was reported by 91% of respondents, including 26% who experience it "frequently" or "almost always." Field epidemiologists working in low- and low-middle income countries were more likely to report moral distress "frequently" or "almost always" than those in higher-income countries (33.0% vs 9.1%, P = 0.006). The most common perceived contributors to moral distress included excessive stress and work demands (30%) and inadequate support from leaders (25%).ConclusionsField epidemiologists face significant work-related ethical challenges, which are endemic to public health and political systems. A substantial proportion of field epidemiologists also experience some degree of moral distress, often in association with these challenges. These findings indicate an unmet need among field epidemiologists for support in navigating ethical challenges, as well as for resources to address the human and professional consequences of moral distress.
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Project description:When making consumption choices, people often fail to meet their own standards of both ethics and frugality. People also generally tend to demand more of others than they do of themselves. But little is known about how these different types of hypocrisy interact, particularly in relation to attitudes toward ethical consumption. In three experiments, we integrate research methods using anchoring and hypocrisy within the context of ethical consumption. Across three experiments, we find a default expectation that people (particularly people other than ourselves) should spend less on consumer items than they actually do. This default position can be inverted by making the ethical context of consumption salient, whereby the expectation is then that people (particularly other people) should spend more on consumer items than they actually do. Experiments 2 and 3 show that a moderate price anchor for ethical consumption is sufficient to shift expected standards for other people, but a higher price anchor is required to shift expected standards in personal behaviour. We discuss the countervailing roles of frugality and ethical consumption in understanding hypocrisy and ethical decision-making.
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Project description:Despite the repeatedly raised criticism that findings in economic games are specific to situations involving trivial incentives, most studies that have examined the stake-size effect have failed to find a strong effect. Using three prisoner's dilemma experiments, involving 479 non-student residents of suburban Tokyo and 162 students, we show here that stake size strongly affects a player's cooperation choices in prisoner's dilemma games when stake size is manipulated within each individual such that each player faces different stake sizes. Participants cooperated at a higher rate when stakes were lower than when they were higher, regardless of the absolute stake size. These findings suggest that participants were 'moral bargain hunters' who purchased moral righteousness at a low price when they were provided with a 'price list' of prosocial behaviours. In addition, the moral bargain hunters who cooperated at a lower stake but not at a higher stake did not cooperate in a single-stake one-shot game.
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Project description:Consumers frequently encounter moral violations in everyday life. They watch movies and television shows about crime and deception, hear news reports of corporate fraud and tax evasion, and hear gossip about cheaters and thieves. How does exposure to moral violations influence consumption? Because moral violations arouse disgust and because disgust is an evolutionarily important signal of contamination that should provoke a multi-modal response, we hypothesize that moral violations affect a key behavioral response to disgust: reduced oral consumption. In three experiments, compared with those in control conditions, people drank less water and chocolate milk while (a) watching a film portraying the moral violations of incest, (b) writing about moral violations of cheating or theft, and (c) listening to a report about fraud and manipulation. These findings imply that "moral disgust" influences consumption in ways similar to core disgust, and thus provide evidence for the associations between moral violations, emotions, and consumer behavior.
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Project description:BackgroundThe debate on the ethical aspects of moral bioenhancement focuses on the desirability of using biomedical as opposed to traditional means to achieve moral betterment. The aim of this paper is to systematically review the ethical reasons presented in the literature for and against moral bioenhancement.DiscussionA review was performed and resulted in the inclusion of 85 articles. We classified the arguments used in those articles in the following six clusters: (1) why we (don't) need moral bioenhancement, (2) it will (not) be possible to reach consensus on what moral bioenhancement should involve, (3) the feasibility of moral bioenhancement and the status of current scientific research, (4) means and processes of arriving at moral improvement matter ethically, (5) arguments related to the freedom, identity and autonomy of the individual, and (6) arguments related to social/group effects and dynamics. We discuss each argument separately, and assess the debate as a whole. First, there is little discussion on what distinguishes moral bioenhancement from treatment of pathological deficiencies in morality. Furthermore, remarkably little attention has been paid so far to the safety, risks and side-effects of moral enhancement, including the risk of identity changes. Finally, many authors overestimate the scientific as well as the practical feasibility of the interventions they discuss, rendering the debate too speculative.SummaryBased on our discussion of the arguments used in the debate on moral enhancement, and our assessment of this debate, we advocate a shift in focus. Instead of speculating about non-realistic hypothetical scenarios such as the genetic engineering of morality, or morally enhancing 'the whole of humanity', we call for a more focused debate on realistic options of biomedical treatment of moral pathologies and the concrete moral questions these treatments raise.
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Project description:Individuals often face dilemmas in which non-cooperation serves their self-interest and cooperation favors society at large. Cooperation is often considered the moral choice because it creates equality and fairness among citizens. Accordingly, individuals whose political ideology attaches greater value to equality than to agency and self-reliance should not only cooperate on more rather than less efficient public goods, but also more on public goods from which individuals benefit equally rather than unequally. We examine this possibility by comparing ideologically left-leaning and right-leaning individuals' cooperation on multiple public goods that varied in efficiency and (in)equality in returns. We find that left-leaning individuals cooperate more than right-leaning ones, but only on public goods that benefit everyone equally, and not more on public goods that generate inequalities. Left-leaning individuals also trust and expect others to cooperate more on equal- versus unequal-returns public goods, while self-identified right-leaning individuals do not differentiate between these. Interestingly, ideology does not predict which public good is deemed more morally appropriate to cooperate on. Results combined specify when and why self-identified leftists can(not) be expected to cooperate more than rightists and reveal how moral decision-making depends on structural elements of the public good provision problems that citizens face.
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