Judgment of Moral Blame and Punishment
Moral flexibility plays a role in even apparently simple moral judgments we make in our everyday lives (e.g., Scott stole the money, he should be fired; Christine lied about breaking the vase, she should be grounded.). The blame attribution and punishment determination processes are rife with conflicts and compromises between competing moral principles. Even minor infractions require the assigning of responsibility, blame, and punishment.
The conditions necessary for arriving at a moral judgment that someone in blameworthy are outlined in our normative philosophical and legal traditions (Shaver,1985; Weiner, 1995; Alicke, 2000; Malle, Guglielmo & Monroe, 2012). People normally ask themselves, consciously or unconsciously, a series of …show more content…
This question, posed by Williams (1981), is a battle field for moral judgments in daily life. Circumstantial factors may influence the moral judgement of a situation in several ways, one of which is the mismatch between the intentions behind an action and the consequences of that action. This is the core difference between negligent or reckless behaviors and tortious behaviors in the common law.
Nagel (1979) posed a dilemma in which two equally intoxicated people both decided to drive home. A pedestrian walked out in front of one driver and a collision occurred. The other driver drove home safely without causing any harm to anybody. The former was unlucky, and the latter was lucky. Should the unlucky homicidal driver be charged with only “driving under the influence?” Should the lucky driver be punished as if he had caused the death of another person? The answers to these questions seem to suggest that the two drivers, who engaged in identical conducts, deserve different punishments. We refer to this problem of moral judgment as moral luck, a situation in which the basis of moral judgment is the lucky or unlucky timing of another
Moral flexibility plays a role in even apparently simple moral judgments we make in our everyday lives (e.g., Scott stole the money, he should be fired; Christine lied about breaking the vase, she should be grounded.). The blame attribution and punishment determination processes are rife with conflicts and compromises between competing moral principles. Even minor infractions require the assigning of responsibility, blame, and punishment.
The conditions necessary for arriving at a moral judgment that someone in blameworthy are outlined in our normative philosophical and legal traditions (Shaver,1985; Weiner, 1995; Alicke, 2000; Malle, Guglielmo & Monroe, 2012). People normally ask themselves, consciously or unconsciously, a series of …show more content…
This question, posed by Williams (1981), is a battle field for moral judgments in daily life. Circumstantial factors may influence the moral judgement of a situation in several ways, one of which is the mismatch between the intentions behind an action and the consequences of that action. This is the core difference between negligent or reckless behaviors and tortious behaviors in the common law.
Nagel (1979) posed a dilemma in which two equally intoxicated people both decided to drive home. A pedestrian walked out in front of one driver and a collision occurred. The other driver drove home safely without causing any harm to anybody. The former was unlucky, and the latter was lucky. Should the unlucky homicidal driver be charged with only “driving under the influence?” Should the lucky driver be punished as if he had caused the death of another person? The answers to these questions seem to suggest that the two drivers, who engaged in identical conducts, deserve different punishments. We refer to this problem of moral judgment as moral luck, a situation in which the basis of moral judgment is the lucky or unlucky timing of another