The morality of harm

Sousa, Paulo and Holbrook, Colin and Piazza, Jared (2009) The morality of harm. Cognition, 113 (1). pp. 80-92. ISSN 0010-0277

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Abstract

In this article, we discuss the range of concerns people weigh when evaluating the acceptability of harmful actions and propose a new perspective on the relationship between harm and morality. With this aim, we examine Kelly, Stich, Haley, Eng and Fessler’s [Kelly, D., Stich, S., Haley, K., Eng, S., & Fessler, D. (2007). Harm, affect, and the moral/conventional distinction. Mind and Language, 22, 117–131] recent claim that, contrary to Turiel and associates, people do not judge harm to be authority independent and general in scope in the context of complex harmful scenarios (e.g., prisoner interrogation, military training). In a modified replication of their study, we examined participants’ judgments of harmful actions in these contexts by taking into account their explanations for their judgments. We claim that both in terms of participants’ judgments and rationales, the results largely confirm our hypothesis that actions involving harm andinjustice or rights violation are judged to be authority independent and general in scope, which is a modification of Turiel’s traditional hypothesis.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Cognition
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3310
Subjects:
?? moralityharm transgression deontic reasoning social cognitionlinguistics and languagecognitive neuroscienceexperimental and cognitive psychologylanguage and linguistics ??
ID Code:
71082
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
02 Oct 2014 15:38
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
17 Sep 2024 10:41