“It’s wrong but I can’t explain why!” Moral dumbfounding and moral judgement: how failure to justify moral judgements can inform our understanding of how they are made
Year: 2024
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Moral dumbfounding occurs when people fail to justify a strongly held moral \njudgement with supporting reasons. The discovery of moral dumbfounding coincided \nwith a growth in intuitionist and dual-process theories of moral judgement over \nrationalist theories, and its existence has directly informed their development (e.g., \nHaidt, 2001; Prinz, 2005; Bucciarelli, Khemlani, & Johnson-Laird 2008; Dwyer, 2009; \nCushman, Young, & Greene 2010). Despite the influence of moral dumbfounding on \nthe morality literature, the phenomenon is poorly understood. Direct evidence in \nsupport of dumbfounding is limited to a single study (Haidt, Björklund, & Murphy, \n2000), which had a final sample of 30 participants and was never published in peerreviewed \nform. The aim of the current project is to examine the phenomenon of moral \ndumbfounding directly, firstly, to test if it is a real phenomenon, and secondly to \nevaluate how the existence (or absence) of moral dumbfounding can inform theories of \nmoral judgement. Three studies demonstrate that dumbfounding is a genuine \nphenomenon that can be reliably elicited in a laboratory setting, and develop methods \nfor studying dumbfounding. Two studies address specific challenges to dumbfounding, \nand demonstrate that (a) people do not reliably articulate reasons that may be governing \ntheir judgement, and (b) moral principles are not consistently applied across differing \ncontexts. A final set of studies tested two hypothesised explanations of moral \ndumbfounding associated with dual-process theory (e.g., Cushman, 2013; Crockett, \n2013), and model theory (Bucciarelli et al., 2008). Using a range of manipulations \nacross seven studies, the observed evidence for these explanations is weak. That \ndumbfounding is poorly explained by existing theories of moral judgement presents a \nsignificant limitation of current theories of moral judgement. To address this limitation, \na possible alternative theoretical approach that provides an explanation for moral \ndumbfounding is explored.
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7020226654