Tuesday, May 12, 2009

More on the Science of Morality

There have been lots of articles reporting recent work in the science of moral judgments and most of them use a catchy headline based on an intuition that finding out about why we act morally will mean the end of morality. Lots of people have that intuition apparently, but is the claim true? Please talk about it in the comments.

Anyway, here's another article on the science of morality and its title is "So Much For Morality". But of course nothing in the article suggests that the research reported therein spells the end of morality.
When we think of temporally distant events, we think more abstractly, which makes us focus on superordinate aspects and the main purport of the event. But if we think of events that are close to us in time, we think more concretely, which means that subordinate, peripheral aspects take on more importance. For example, if we imagine that we will be asked to donate blood in the future, what dominates is the superordinate moral value of helping other people, but if the time perspective is telescoped, concrete subordinate selfish motives take over, such as the fact that it will be unpleasant to be stuck by a needle.

The article ought to have been headlined with a remark about temporal distance or abstraction in relation to moral judgments, right?

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