How Does Reasoning (Fail to) Contribute to Moral Judgment? Dumbfounding and Disengagement (original) (raw)

Recent experiments in moral psychology have been taken to imply that moral reasoning only serves to reaffirm prior moral intuitions. More specifically, Jonathan Haidt concludes from his moral dumbfounding experiments, in which people condemn other people's behavior, that moral reasoning is biased and ineffective, as it rarely makes people change their mind. I present complementary evidence pertaining to self-directed reasoning about what to do. More specifically, Albert Bandura's experiments concerning moral disengagement reveal that moral reasoning often does contribute effectively to the formation of moral judgments. And such reasoning need not be biased. Once this evidence is taken into account, it becomes clear that both cognition and affect can play a destructive as well as a constructive role in the formation of moral judgments. Keywords Moral reasoning. Moral dumbfounding. Moral disengagement. Cognitive dissonance. Reason. Emotion Folk wisdom has it that you should think before you act. The underlying idea is that people often come to regret acting on impulse. The folk wisdom seems to be inspired at least in part by moral concerns. People might end up doing the wrong thing when they act in a rash manner. On a pre-reflective or common sense picture of morality, then, it is a good idea to consider moral matters explicitly and think about them carefully. This picture, however, has come under substantial pressure. A lot of research in psychology suggests that conscious reasoning as such is of limited use and merely serves to confirm beliefs we already have