How to Write Counter Argument of Moral Dilemma

Moral Reasoning

Moral dilemmas are challenging because there are often good reasons for and against both choices. For instance, one could argue that it is okay to kill one person if it would save five, because more people would be saved, but killing itself is immoral.

Moral judgments and decisions are often driven by automatic, affective responses, rather than explicit reasoning. However, it remains unclear whether subsequent reasoning can lead people to change their initial decision.

In their study, Stanley and colleagues (2018, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General) had participants make an initial decision in a moral dilemma. Next, participants were presented with reasons affirming or opposing their original choice, or reasons for both options, and asked to rate how compelling each reason was. Finally, they were again asked to make a decision on the same moral dilemma.

Overall, few participants changed their initial decision, and they rated reasons supporting their initial decision more highly than those supporting the alternative decision. These results held across moral dilemmas that were extreme and sacrificial (e.g., killing a crying baby to prevent detection by enemy soldiers) and commonplace (e.g., keeping incorrect extra change), and did not depend on whether the reasons presented were novel to participants or whether there was a longer delay (one day) between the initial and final decision.

These results suggest that moral decisions are resistant to revision because people engage in biased, motivated evaluation of the available reasons to affirm their initial affective reaction.

Stanley and colleagues examined whether subsequent reasoning would influence an individual's own moral judgments. However, explicit moral reasoning is also required when moral judgments must be explained to others.

Mammen and colleagues (2018, Developmental Psychology) examined the reasons children provide when justifying a punishment to their peers. The target child heard a story about a transgressor character violating either a moral norm (e.g., stealing a toy car) or a context-specific social rule (e.g., putting a yellow car in a green box when the class rule is to sort toys by color). The neutral child heard a story about a neutral character.

Next, target and neutral children were brought together and had to decide as a pair whether the transgressor or neutral character should be given a reward. Because each child only heard one story, the children had to explain to each other why their character did or did not deserve the reward to reach a decision.

Five-year-old target children produced more relevant justifications than three-year-old target children when explaining why the transgressor character should be punished. However, in both age groups target children in the social rule condition tended to give justifications that explained the rule using normative language (e.g., "She should not put the yellow car in the green box"). In contrast, target children in the moral norm condition generally provided justifications that simply stated the facts ("She stole"), but not the rule (e.g., "She should not steal").

The authors interpret these results to suggest that preschool-age children assume that they share common moral values with their peers that do not have to be explicitly stated when explaining their moral judgments.

Citations

• Stanley, M. L., Dougherty, A. M., Yang, B. W., Henne, P., & De Brigard, F. (2018). Reasons probably won't change your mind: The role of reasons in revising moral decisions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(7), 962–987. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000368
• Mammen, M., Köymen, B., & Tomasello, M. (2018). The reasons young children give to peers when explaining their judgments of moral and conventional rules. Developmental Psychology, 54(2), 254–262. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000424

Author Commentary

We are frequently confronted with decisions that require moral considerations. For instance, should I return the extra change that the cashier mistakenly gave me, or should I just pocket the extra change? Should I tell my friend that his wife might be cheating on him, or should I mind my own business?

Philosophers have long argued that people ought to deliberate over reasons and evidence to make their moral decisions. Our research indicates that reasons play a surprisingly inconsequential role in guiding moral decisions. Instead, people tend to stick with their initial moral decisions, no matter the reasons.

Mini-Biographies

• Matthew Stanley is a graduate student in psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. His research is at the intersection of memory, morality, knowledge, and practical reasoning, and he adopts methods from neuroimaging, behavioral science, and philosophy to answer these questions.
• Felipe De Brigard, PhD, is assistant professor of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, and core faculty in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. He's principal investigator of the Imagination and Modal Cognition Laboratory at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. He conducts research on memory and imagination, and their impact of counterfactual and moral cognition.

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Young children can keep track of who should know which rules:

• moral rules (e.g., one should not steal) are known to everyone.
• context-specific rules (e.g., one should place yellow toys in the yellow box) are not known to everyone but to a select group of children in a kindergarten.

When justifying their moral judgments to their peers (e.g., This person should be punished), 3- and 5-year-olds assume that they have to explain the violated rule if the transgressor breaks a context-specific rule, whereas they don't have to explain moral rules, as they are already known to their peers.

Mini-Biography

• Maria Mammen was a postgraduate researcher the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and received her PhD from the University of Manchester in 2018.

How to Write Counter Argument of Moral Dilemma

Source: https://www.apa.org/pubs/highlights/peeps/issue-110

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