Moral agency is the capacity to do right or wrong, whereas moral patiency is the capacity to be a target of right or wrong. Through 7 studies, the authors explored moral typecasting-an inverse relation between perceptions of moral agency and moral patiency. Across a range of targets and situations, good- and evil-doers (moral agents) were perceived to be less vulnerable to having good and evil ...

Previous studies of moral reasoning have treated moral reasoning as a product of the individual. This article extends the study of moral reasoning by analyzing its use in strategic interaction. I analyze how participants in a naturally occurring situation of conflict use moral arguments strategically and negotiate over the types of arguments that are acceptable. Gilligan’s Care and Justice mode...

Moral agency is the capacity to do right or wrong, whereas moral patiency is the capacity to be a target of right or wrong. Through 7 studies, the authors explored moral typecasting—an inverse relation between perceptions of moral agency and moral patiency. Across a range of targets and situations, goodand evil-doers (moral agents) were perceived to be less vulnerable to having good and evil do...

In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard argues that in order to avoid the threat of moral skepticism, our moral theories must show how the claims they make about the nature of our actions obligate us to act morally. A theory that can justify the normativity of morality in this way answers what Korsgaard calls “the normative question.” Although Korsgaard claims that only Kantian theor...

Leaders must choose how to justify their organization's actions to stakeholders. We differentiate moral frames, or justifications based on moral values, from pragmatic frames, or justifications based on practical costs and benefits. In Experiments 1a and 1b, we found that moral policy frames elicited more support than pragmatic frames across a variety of scenarios. This effect was mediated by t...

Moral evaluations constitute a fundamental aspect of human psychology. How does moral competence develop? For decades, this question has been addressed within cognitive-developmental frameworks (e.g., Killen & Smetana, in press; Kohlberg, 1971; Piaget, 1932), and the general answer has been that moral development is a constructivist process: children develop the ability to make increasingly sop...

Previous studies have demonstrated the key role of emotion in moral judgment, and explored the relationship between emotion regulation and moral judgment. The present study investigated the influence of individual differences in emotion regulation difficulties on moral judgment. Study 1 examined whether individuals with high emotion regulation difficulties made a more deontological judgment. St...

In this paper, I develop an objection to agent-based accounts of right action. Agent-based accounts of right action attempt to derive moral judgment of actions from judgment of the inner quality of virtuous agents and virtuous agency. A moral theory ought to be something that moral agents can permissibly use in moral deliberation. I argue for a principle that captures this intuition and show th...

The 19th-century practices of moral treatment and phrenology serve as historical examples of a narrowing focus in health care and reveal the manner in which theories can shape practice. The story of moral treatment, as it is told in connection with phrenology, emphasizes the push for success and right solutions. The push followed several shifts in the conceptualization of mental illness, the la...