ADDIS ABABA SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF SOCIAL AND NATURAL SCIENCE

Name of students ID Number

1. Natnael temesegen 1240/14

2. Natnael Fisha

3. Natnael Endalkachew

4. Natnael Aleme

5. Nathaniem H/meskel

6. Natnael Asaye

Instructor :
Submission date:

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 Moral reasoning
Moral reasoning is the study of how people think about right and wrong and how they acquire and apply
moral rules. It is a subdiscipline of moral psychology that overlaps with moral philosophy, and is the
foundation of descriptive ethics.

Description

Starting from a young age, people can make moral decisions about what is right and wrong. Moral
reasoning, however, is a part of morality that occurs both within and between individuals. Prominent
contributors to this theory include Lawrence Kohlberg and Elliot Turiel. The term is sometimes used in a
different sense: reasoning under conditions of uncertainty, such as those commonly obtained in a court
of law. It is this sense that gave rise to the phrase, "To a moral certainty;" however, this idea is now
seldom used outside of charges to juries.

Moral reasoning is an important and often daily process that people use when trying to do the right
thing. For instance, every day people are faced with the dilemma of whether to lie in a given situation or
not. People make this decision by reasoning the morality of their potential actions, and through
weighing their actions against potential consequences.

A moral choice can be a personal, economic, or ethical one; as described by some ethical code, or
regulated by ethical relationships with others. This branch of psychology is concerned with how these
issues are perceived by ordinary people, and so is the foundation of descriptive ethics. There are many
different forms of moral reasoning which often are dictated by culture. Cultural differences in the high-
levels of cognitive function associated with moral reasoning can be observed through the association of
brain networks from various cultures and their moral decision making.

These cultural differences demonstrate the neural basis that cultural influences can have on an
individual's moral reasoning and decision making.Distinctions between theories of moral reasoning can
be accounted for by evaluating inferences (which tend to be either deductive or inductive) based on a
given set of premises.

Deductive inference reaches a conclusion that is true based on whether a given set of premises
preceding the conclusion are also true, whereas, inductive inference goes beyond information given in a
set of premises to base the conclusion on provoked reflection.

There are different types of views and perspectives of moral reasoning, some of them are listed and
discussed below.

In philosophy

Philosopher David Hume claims that morality is based more on perceptions than on logical reasoning.
This means that people's morality is based more on their emotions and feelings than on a logical analysis
of any given situation. Hume regards morals as linked to passion, love, happiness, and other emotions
and therefore not based on reason.

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Jonathan Haidt agrees, arguing in his social intuitionist model that reasoning concerning a moral
situation or idea follows an initial intuition. Haidt's fundamental stance on moral reasoning is that
"moral intuitions (including moral emotions) come first and directly cause moral judgments"; he
characterizes moral intuition as "the sudden appearance in consciousness of a moral judgment,
including an affective valence (good-bad, like-dislike), without any conscious awareness of having gone
through steps of searching, weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion".

Immanuel Kant had a radically different view of morality. He proposes a four-step system to determine
whether or not a given action was moral based on logic and reason. This overarching maxim must be
considered when applying the four aforementioned steps.Reasoning based on analogy is one form of
moral reasoning. When using this form of moral reasoning the morality of one situation can be applied
to another based on whether this situation is relevantly similar: similar enough that the same moral
reasoning applies.

In developmental psychology

Moral reasoning first attracted a broad attention from developmental psychologists in the mid-to-late
20th century. Their main theorization involved elucidating the stages of development of moral reasoning
capacity.

Jean Piaget developed two phases of moral development, one common among children and the other
common among adults. This phase, more common among children, is characterized by the idea that
rules come from authority figures in one's life such as parents, teachers, and God.

Thirdly, this phase of moral development includes the belief that "naughty" behavior must always be
punished and that the punishment will be proportional.The second phase in Piaget's theory of moral
development is referred to as the Autonomous Phase. In this phase people begin to view the intentions
behind actions as more important than their consequences.

This phase also includes the idea that people have different morals and that morality is not necessarily
universal. People in the Autonomous Phase also believe rules may be broken under certain
circumstances. For instance, Rosa Parks broke the law by refusing to give up her seat on a bus, which
was against the law but something many people consider moral nonetheless. In this phase people also
stop believing in the idea of immanent justice.

Lawrence Kohlberg

Inspired by Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg made significant contributions to the field of moral reasoning by
creating a theory of moral development. He believed that the objective of moral education is the
reinforcement of children to grow from one stage to an upper stage.

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 According to his theory, people pass through three main stages of moral development as they grow
from early childhood to adulthood. The second stage in the pre-conventional level is called individualism
and exchange: in this stage people make moral decisions based on what best serves their needs.

The third stage is part of the conventional morality level and is called interpersonal relationships. The
fourth stage is also in the conventional morality level and is called maintaining social order. This stage
focuses on a view of society as a whole and following the laws and rules of that society.

The fifth stage is a part of the post-conventional level and is called social contract and individual rights.
In this stage people begin to consider differing ideas about morality in other people and feel that rules
and laws should be agreed on by the members of a society. The sixth and final stage of moral
development, the second in the post-conventional level, is called universal principles. At this stage
people begin to develop their ideas of universal moral principles and will consider them the right thing
to do regardless of what the laws of a society are.

James Rest

In 1983, James Rest developed the four component Model of Morality, which addresses the ways that
moral motivation and behavior occurs.

The first of these is moral sensitivity, which is "the ability to see an ethical dilemma, including how our
actions will affect others".

The second is moral judgment, which is "the ability to reason correctly about what 'ought' to be done in
a specific situation".

The third is moral motivation, which is "a personal commitment to moral action, accepting responsibility
for the outcome".

The fourth and final component of moral behavior is moral character, which is a "courageous
persistence in spite of fatigue or temptations to take the easy way out".

In social cognition

Based on empirical results from behavioral and neuroscientific studies, social and cognitive psychologists
attempted to develop a more accurate descriptive (rather than normative) theory of moral reasoning.
That is, the emphasis of research was on how real-world individuals made moral judgments, inferences,
decisions, and actions, rather than what should be considered as moral.

Dual-process theory and social intuitionism

Developmental theories of moral reasoning were critiqued as prioritizing on the maturation of cognitive
aspect of moral reasoning. From Kohlberg's perspective, one is considered as more advanced in moral
reasoning as she is more efficient in using deductive reasoning and abstract moral principles to make
moral judgments about particular instances. For instance, an advanced reasoner may reason
syllogistically with the Kantian principle of 'treat individuals as ends and never merely as means' and a

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situation where kidnappers are demanding a ransom for a hostage, to conclude that the kidnappers
have violated a moral principle and should be condemned.

In this process, reasoners are assumed to be rational and have conscious control over how they arrive
at judgments and decisions.In contrast with such view, however, Joshua Greene and colleagues argued
that laypeople's moral judgments are significantly influenced, if not shaped, by intuition and emotion as
opposed to rational application of rules.

In their fMRI studies in the early 2000s, participants were shown three types of decision scenarios: one
type included moral dilemmas that elicited emotional reaction (moral-personal condition), the second
type included moral dilemmas that did not elicit emotional reaction (moral-impersonal condition), and
the third type had no moral content (non-moral condition). Focusing on participants who judged the
sacrifice in trolley dilemma as permissible but the sacrifice in footbridge dilemma as impermissible, the
majority of them failed to provide a plausible justification for their differing judgments.

Based on these results, social psychologists proposed the dual process theory of morality. They
suggested that our emotional intuition and deliberate reasoning are not only qualitatively distinctive,
but they also compete in making moral judgments and decisions. When making an emotionally-salient
moral judgment, automatic, unconscious, and immediate response is produced by our intuition first.
More careful, deliberate, and formal reasoning then follows to produce a response that is either
consistent or inconsistent with the earlier response produced by intuition, in parallel with more general
form of dual process theory of thinking. But in contrast with the previous rational view on moral
reasoning, the dominance of the emotional process over the rational process was proposed.

Haidt highlighted the aspect of morality not directly accessible by our conscious search in memory,
weighing of evidence, or inference. He describes moral judgment as akin to aesthetic judgment, where
an instant approval or disapproval of an event or object is produced upon perception. According to
Haidt's moral foundations theory, political liberals rely on two dimensions (harm/care and
fairness/reciprocity) of evaluation to make moral judgments, but conservatives utilize three additional
dimensions (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity).

Among these, studies have revealed the link between moral evaluations based on purity/sanctity
dimension and reasoner's experience of disgust. Augusto Blasi also rebuts the theories of Jonathan Haidt
on moral intuition and reasoning. He agrees with Haidt that moral intuition plays a significant role in the
way humans operate. However, Blasi suggests that people use moral reasoning more than Haidt and
other cognitive scientists claim.

Blasi advocates moral reasoning and reflection as the foundation of moral functioning. Reasoning and
reflection play a key role in the growth of an individual and the progress of societies.Alternatives to
these dual-process/intuitionist models have been proposed, with several theorists proposing that moral
judgment and moral reasoning involves domain general cognitive processes, e.g., mental models, social
learning or categorization processes.

Motivated reasoning

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A theorization of moral reasoning similar to dual-process theory was put forward with emphasis on our
motivations to arrive at certain conclusions. Ditto and colleagues likened moral reasoners in everyday
situations to lay attorneys than lay judges; people do not reason in the direction from assessment of
individual evidence to moral conclusion (bottom-up), but from a preferred moral conclusion to
assessment of evidence (top-down). the latter resembles that of an attorney whose goal is to win a
dispute using partial and selective arguments.

Kunda proposed motivated reasoning as a general framework for understanding human reasoning.
Importantly, biases in memory search, hypothesis formation and evaluation result in confirmation bias,
making it difficult for reasoners to critically assess their beliefs and conclusions. It is reasonable to state
that individuals and groups will manipulate and confuse reasoning for belief depending on the lack of
self control to allow for their confirmation bias to be the driving force of their reasoning. A student
named Debbie had been accused of cheating in an exam, but the overall situation of the incident was
kept ambiguous to allow participants to reason in a desired direction.

In these reasoning processes, situational ambiguity was shown to be critical for reasoners to arrive at
their preferred conclusion.From a broader perspective, Holyoak and Powell interpreted motivated
reasoning in the moral domain as a special pattern of reasoning predicted by coherence-based
reasoning framework.

Coherence-based reasoning framework draws symmetrical links between consistent (things that co-
occur) and inconsistent (things that do not co-occur) psychological representations and use them as
constraints, thereby providing a natural way to represent conflicts between irreconcilable motivations,
observations, behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes, as well as moral obligations. Importantly, Thagard's
framework was highly comprehensive in that it provided a computational basis for modeling reasoning
processes using moral and non-moral facts and beliefs as well as variables related to both 'hot' and 'cold'
cognitions.

Causality and intentionality

In later studies, psychologists discovered that moral judgment toward an action or actor is critically
linked with these causal understanding and knowledge about the mental state of the actor.

Bertram Malle and Joshua Knobe conducted survey studies to investigate laypeople's understanding and
use (the folk concept) of the word 'intentionality' and its relation to action. His data suggested that
people think of intentionality of an action in terms of several psychological constituents: desire for
outcome, belief about the expected outcome, intention to act (combination of desire and belief), skill to
bring about the outcome, and awareness of action while performing that action.

Consistent with this view as well as with our moral intuitions, studies found significant effects of the
agent's intention, desire, and beliefs on various types of moral judgments, Using factorial designs to
manipulate the content in the scenarios, Cushman showed that the agent's belief and desire regarding a
harmful action significantly influenced judgments of wrongness, permissibility, punishment, and blame.

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 Another study also provided neuroscientific evidence for the interplay between theory of mind and
moral judgment.Through another set of studies, Knobe showed a significant effect in the opposite
direction: Intentionality judgments are significantly affected by the reasoner's moral evaluation of the
actor and action. Their model formally postulates that character of agent is a cause for the agent's
desire for outcome and belief that action will result in consequence, desire and belief are causes for
intention toward action, and the agent's action is caused by both that intention and the skill to produce
consequence.

Combining computational modeling with the ideas from theory of mind research, this model can
provide predictions for inferences in bottom-up direction (from action to intentionality, desire, and
character) as well as in top-down direction (from character, desire, and intentionality to action).

Gender difference

At one time psychologists believed that men and women have different moral values and reasoning.
However, some also knew that men and women simply face different moral dilemmas on a day-to-day
basis and that might be the reason for the perceived difference in their moral reasoning.

The research showed that women and men use the same form of moral reasoning as one another and
the only difference is the moral dilemmas they find themselves in on a day-to-day basis. When it came
to moral decisions both men and women would be faced with, they often chose the same solution as
being the moral choice. At least this research shows that a division in terms of morality does not actually
exist, and that reasoning between genders is the same in moral decisions.