moral judgement essay

Moral judgment as a natural kind

• Published: 05 February 2015
• Volume 172 , pages 2887–2910, ( 2015 )

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• Victor Kumar 1  

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In this essay I argue that moral judgment is a natural kind by developing an empirically grounded theory of the distinctive conceptual content of moral judgments. Psychological research on the moral/conventional distinction suggests that in moral judgments right and wrong, good and bad, praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, etc. are conceptualized as (1) serious, (2) general, (3) authority-independent, and (4) objective. After laying out the theory and the empirical evidence that supports it, I address recent empirical and conceptual objections. Finally, I suggest that the theory uniquely accounts for the possibility of genuine moral agreement and disagreement.

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For evidence that moral judgment explains reasoning in other domains see Knobe ( 2003a , b ), Nadelhoffer ( 2005 ), Knobe and Burra ( 2006 ), Leslie et al. ( 2006 ), Cushman and Mele ( 2008 ), Knobe ( 2010a ), Pettit and Knobe ( 2009 ), Beebe and Buckwalter ( 2010 ), Alicke ( 2000 ), Cushman et al. ( 2005 ), Knobe and Fraser ( 2008 ), Hitchcock and Knobe ( 2009 ), Knobe ( 2010a , b ). For evidence that moral judgment explains cooperative, uncooperative, and punitive behavior see; Fischbacher et al. ( 2001 ), Keser and van Winden ( 2000 ), Brandts and Schram ( 2001 ), Fehr and Gachter ( 2000 ), Turillo et al. ( 2002 ), Fehr and Fischbacher ( 2004a , b) , Pillutla and Murnighan ( 1996 ).

Cognitivists tend to pay more attention to the conceptual content of moral judgment than non-cognitivists. The reason, perhaps, is that cognitivists tend to locate the normativity of moral judgment in the content of the judgment rather than the attitude. For cognitivists, after all, moral judgment is just an ordinary belief. Non-cognitivists, by contrast, tend to locate the normativity of moral judgment in attitude rather than content; the content is just the natural property toward which one has a non-cognitive state. However, non-cognitivists who accept this line of thought are misled. Even if moral judgment is a non-cognitive state, one must still identify the moral concepts through which non-cognitive attitudes apprehend their objects, concepts that distinguish moral attitudes from other non-cognitive attitudes of approval and disapproval.

Michael Bukoski objects to my argument here as follows. He agrees, at least for the sake of argument, that one does not generally have moral duties to oneself, but argues that this is a substantive claim, rather than a definitional claim. For example, although I am morally obliged not to kill others, I lack a moral duty not to commit suicide just because the correct norms of morality permit suicide and not because there is some kind of incoherence in the idea of such a duty. The problem with this objection is that it is difficult to make sense of self/other asymmetries on many normative ethical theories. Suppose that we agree that suicide is not morally wrong, you as a substantive matter and I as a definitional matter. The problem is that on many ethical theories, it's difficult to see why killing one's (healthy) self is not morally wrong. It does not maximize utility, it causes harm, it violates Kantian duties to oneself, etc. So, because for many ethical theories there is no substantive basis for permitting suicide, the best explanation is that a prohibition on suicide is invalid on definitional grounds. Although some ethical theories entail self/other asymmetries, this won't explain why many Utilitarians, Kantians and others hold, apparently without blatant inconsistency, that suicide is not morally wrong.

The distinction at play here is roughly between analytic and synthetic truths and while I assume that some version of the distinction obtains, I do not assume that it is sharp. There may be borderline cases of truths that are not clearly analytic or synthetic. Famously, naturalists tend to reject the analytic/synthetic distinction. However, following Harman ( 1967 ), Campbell ( 1998 : 145–149), and others, I interpret Quine’s most persuasive arguments in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” ( 1951 ) as showing not there are no analytic truths, but that there are no analytic truths knowable a priori—in the sense that there are no truths about meaning knowable independent of experience, that cannot be revised on the basis of experience. (I do not reject weaker conceptions of the a priori.) Consistent with this interpretation, my Quinean approach in the essay is to empirically investigate analytic truths associated with the concept of morality.

It is worth noting that in Goodwin and Darley’s study subjects exhibited variation depending on the moral statement they were asked to evaluate. For example, subjects tended to think that disagreement entails error with respect to whether cheating is wrong and whether robbery is wrong, but not with respect to whether euthanasia and abortion are wrong. One possible explanation for this difference is that subjects think some moral norms are objective, whereas others are not. If so, then objectivity is not a defining feature of morality. However, since subjects were mainly objectivists in their responses, it is more likely that their other responses reflected not a perceived lack of objectivity, but doubt about the likelihood of rationally adjudicating disagreement about certain moral matters. This is the salient difference between the two classes of moral statements at issue. It is beyond dispute that cheating and robbery are wrong, but highly controversial whether euthanasia and abortion are. Subjects should be expected to recognize this difference about the way in which these actions are generally regarded, even if their own moral opinions are firm.

Copp ( 1995 ) and Campbell ( 2009 ) defend views that are similar but also specify further distinguishing features of morality. It would be worthwhile to experimentally test these views, using methods of the sort described above. In this way philosophical theorizing might inform and guide further psychological research.

Notice that some of these features are less precise than what one might expect from a typical philosophical analysis. This lack of precision is in fact a strength of the view. I have identified what is in the ordinary person’s mind when they make a moral judgment. We shouldn’t expect a definition that is any more precise, for that can be constructed only through explication of the ordinary concept of morality.

Standard research on the moral/conventional distinction does not examine the feature of objectivity. So, although we know from Blair’s work that psychopaths tend not to distinguish moral and conventional violations with respect to seriousness, generality, and authority-independence, we do not yet know whether they tend not to with respect to objectivity. See (Kumar 2015b ) for further discussion, including objections that arise from Aharoni et al. ( 2012 ).

Kelly et al. also tested whether subjects would judge that certain actions would still be judged wrong if relevant authorities condoned them. However, their findings with respect to authority independence are much less powerful. With respect to many of the scenarios, subjects judged that wrongness of harmful actions is authority independent (Kelly et al. 2007 : 127–128).

Kelly and Stich offer another, similar objection that does not in fact apply to MCT. Their target view states that transgressions that involve harm, injustice or rights-violations elicit moral judgments; transgressions that do not involve harm, injustice or rights-violations elicit conventional normative judgments. Kelly and Stich argue persuasively that both generalizations are false. However, MCT does not have any substantive implications about what sorts of violations are moral. MCT is a view about how we conceive of violations that are moral, whatever those violations happen to be. Kelly and Stich build harm/injustice/rights into their target theory of moral judgment. But which properties elicit moral judgments varies significantly across cultures. Whatever people regard as morally relevant, though, MCT entails that these factors elicit judgments that conceptualize morality in terms of the four features.

Another type of counterexample is normative judgments in which all four features are present, but that are intuitively classified as non-moral. These are more difficult to produce.

It may seem as if further counterexamples can be drawn from metaethical theories that reject one or another of the four features. Extreme relativists deny that morality is any more general than convention. Extreme subjectivists deny that morality is any more objective than convention. However, neither metaethical theory generates intuitive counterexamples—neither view yields concrete cases of judgments that are intuitively classified as moral. It may be true that, intuitively, some moral issues are not completely general: they generalize only across some cultures, rather than across the entire spectrum of human societies (see Sarkissian et al. 2011 ). But that still allows for a difference between morality and convention, which is thought to generalize only across local communities. Extreme forms of relativism and subjectivism are revisionary theories. Unlike, say, moral realism, these views revise our pre-theoretical concept of morality. Norms that lack all generality or objectivity are not intuitively classified as moral, and therefore are not candidate counterexamples.

Subjectivism is not the expressivist view that moral judgments express one’s preferences, of course. See Stevenson’s ( 1942 ) reply to Moore.

What about people who make atypical moral judgments? (Thanks to Bryan Chambliss for raising this question.) MCT entails vagueness not just about whether people make moral judgments but also about whether people are disagreeing. When one or more parties in a moral discussion are making an atypical moral judgment they are “more or less” disagreeing, just as two people who have distinct but overlapping concepts of “game” may more or less disagree about whether something counts as a game. In a few such cases, the disagreement is not genuine because one person is concerned especially with whether an action has one of the features that is not tokened in the other person’s judgment.

Some readers may balk at this argument, insisting that they have no intuitions about moral twin Earth and that what must be accounted for is agreement and disagreement in the real world. I am sympathetic to this reaction. However, the basic point does not require any such esoteric thought experiment. In one essay, Horgan and Timmons ( 2000 : 150) deploy a similar though less clean objection using Hare’s ( 1952 : 148–149) classic case of the missionaries and the cannibals. Suppose that each group uses moral terms that refer directly to different properties. Then, when the missionaries and cannibals disagree about the morality of eating human flesh, they are not really disagreeing. But, intuitively, they are. And once again, we have a reason to reject semantic externalism about moral terms.

Externalist theories of moral content have a certain broad affinity with my approach in this essay. Externalists often hold that moral properties are natural kind properties that can be investigated empirically. But the view that moral judgment is a natural kind does not entail that the objects of moral judgment, moral properties, are natural kinds.

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Acknowledgments

For helpful feedback I am grateful to an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies , Alex Barber, Michael Buksoski, Richmond Campbell, Bryan Chambliss, John Doris, Terence Horgan, Ben Kearns, Ron Mallon, Peter Railton, Stephen Stich, Mark Timmons, and especially Shaun Nichols. Thanks also to audiences at an annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association, the Moral Psychology Research Group, and the University of Arizona for stimulating discussion.

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Kumar, V. Moral judgment as a natural kind. Philos Stud 172 , 2887–2910 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0448-7

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Moral Judgement Essay

Show More Moral judgement is a process which defines what is wrong, right, ethical, unethical, moral, or immoral. Moral judgement can also be defined as an expression of preference, opinion, will and command of individuals (383). Tom Regan and Mary Midgley both discuss the importance of moral theory and their different ways one can or can’t answer moral questions. Tom Regan focuses on the relativism point of view by expressing four different ways on how not to answer moral questions. Moral relativism depends on culture, legality, religion, and historical symbolism. While Mary Midgley focuses on the moral isolationism point of view and its used by people to understand the ways of any culture. Moral isolationism is the separation of society one makes when …show more content… The first statement presented above, that mentions morality is not a matter of what one believes, feels or think can be interpreted differently between people. While people think some of their ideas have the right or wrong purpose, it does not mean that it is in fact a right or wrong decision. Everyone has the opportunity of taking the responsibility of having their own opinion and to have different sayings about a topic. However, moral judgement comes into play, people can’t affirm something different that is being denied by other individuals as a set-in stone statement (384). The second statement presented, mentions that morality is not a matter of public opinion or statistics, it is in fact, questions of moral right or wrong which cannot be answered just by a vote, and expecting to see the majority favors. This second way of not answering moral questions brings up the interrogation about if one decided something was right or wrong because of the public eye point of view or because one thinks is the right or wrong thing to do at that moment. This way differs from the first one due to the interpretation of other people’s views about it and not own point of view. Public opinion, or statistics can be interpreted as a method for answering questions about right and wrong just to find out what most people or all people think or feel about a topic

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1a. Cultural relativism is the view that no culture is superior to any other culture when comparing systems of morality, law, politics, etc. (AllAboutPhilosophy.org, n.d.) It does not offer a universal right and wrong, but rather offers the notion of morals based on the cultural environment. This diverges from the traditional ethical theories of doing what is right and adopts the ethical theories that are the “lay of the land” as they relate to the local culture in which the dilemma takes place.…

Cultural Relativism: James Rachels And Ruth Benedict

Cultural Relativism Cultural Relativism is a prevalent theory that is used to explain the variety of differences within cultures and their morals. In this paper I will address the claims of James Rachels and Ruth Benedict, and their opposing views on cultural relativism. The authors have their own theories, against and for cultural relativism. Benedict illustrates that diversity is apparent even on the topics of morality where we would expect to agree.…

Morality In Phillip Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep

The interesting aspect of morality is how universally unbiased it is supposed to be, but yet, is still met with a debate towards what is morally correct and morally wrong. While morality is supposed to be objective, there is a subjectivity to whom those morals apply to and to whom they benefit or harm. In Chelsea Schein and Kurt Gray’s "The Theory of Dyadic Morality: Reinventing Moral Judgment by Redefining Harm,” they discussed the evolution of morality and how difficult it is to establish a clear answer on what morality is. Schein and Gray wrote, “[one] definition of moral judgment is ‘evaluations (good vs. bad) of the actions or character of a person that are made with respect to a set of virtues held to be obligatory by a culture or subculture’ (Haidt, 2001, p. 817)” (Schein and Gray 35).…

Kant's Moral Explanations

a person’s standards of behavior or beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable for them to do. This essay intends point out the relevant aspects of moral theologians, Kant, Mill, Aristotle and Held and to answer the question of the best suited approach in resolving ethical problems and dilemmas. Kant I have found that Kant’s theory is the most complicated and confusing of the four. It was only made somewhat clear by the explanation in O’Neill’s reading.…

Moral Relativism In American Culture

Moral relativism is a view that moral or ethical standards are different for each person and that no one’s opinion of right and wrong is better than another. Moral relativism is said to be “the view that ethical standards, morality, and positions of right or wrong are culturally based and therefore subject to a person's individual choice” (moral-relativism.com). What is right for them is what they believe to be ethical. Since moral relativism is culturally based, different cultures will have different ideas of what is ethical by their environment and standards. “These are all based on the idea that there is no ultimate standard of good or evil, so every judgment about right and wrong is purely a product of a person’s preferences and environment” (allaboutphilosophy.org).…

Satisfactory Moral Theory Analysis

In the last Chapter, Rachels discusses the creation of a "Satisfactory Moral Theory”, in this paper I will discuss my own creation of the Satisfactory Moral Theory. The moral theories are supposed to help us decide what are the right and wrong actions, but, not all the moral theories are perfect. We may feel that a certain conclusion to a problem is fair or unfair, but what theory do we use to make judgments?. I will start with the cultural relativism theory, to understand different cultures, There is a need to know that one community’s beliefs and practices are not usually the same as the other community. In fact, cultural relativism seems the most applicable approach to be taken on for communications purposes.…

Moral Isolationism Analysis

There are many cultures all over the world; each culture has their own societies and people to take care of. Each culture has their own set of laws that need to follow, but some could be offensive to what we think is morally right. Which is why Mary Midgley, who was a Senior lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University in England, argues that moral reasoning requires the possibility of judging the practices of other cultures. If moral isolationism is the world is sharply divided into separate societies, each with it’s own system of thought, then we ought to respect and tolerate these systems and are therefore forbidden to criticize them. Moral isolationism is the world is sharply divided into separate societies, each with it’s own system…

Tom Regan And Tom Regan's Theory Of Morality

Tom Regan discusses four different ways for how not to answer moral questions and he argues that none of the ways that he discusses is an appropriate way of doing so. While Mary Midgley argues that moral reasoning requires the possibility of judging the customs of other cultures. Tom Regan and Mary Midgley both discusses the importance of morality and the different ways one can or can’t answer moral questions. On page 384, Regan identifies some ways on how not to answer moral questions, such as, not to answer in a matter of personal preference, in a matter of what one believes, in a matter of statistics, and lastly in a matter of moral authority. One of the ways that Regan identifies, talks about how morality is not a matter of personal preference.…

Moral Relativism Essay

Although this concept isn’t great for our society, it has a greater success outcome compared to absolutism. In Mary Midgley’s article, she discusses the issues with moral relativism. She claims that although moral relativism doesn’t have the greatest outcome, it is a way to view different cultures. Every culture does something based on their religion and or…

Relativism And Culture

“Different cultures have different moral codes”, James Rachels discusses in his article Why Morality Is Not Relative? (160). Moral codes differ from culture to culture and each culture tends to have their own individual standards. Cultural relativism is said to be “moral rules differ from society to society” (18). Cultural relativism can be looked at as a theory based on nature of morality. Each culture has their own moral codes, typically created by their ancestors.…

James Rachels's Theory Of Cultural Relativism

Cultural relativism may be defined as a theory that advocates the idea of subjective morality. To extrapolate, this theory entails that “different cultures have differing moral codes” and these variances are merely arbitrary. Although this is a seemingly sufficient theory, there are key issues with this school of thought. James Rachels suggests several issues with accepting cultural relativism. He criticizes cultural relativism by stating that the theory is absurd as it entails severe consequences if practiced.…

Conclusion Of Cultural Relativism

Moral relativists such as David Wong and Gilbert Harman have provided a more sophisticated version of moral relativism which mitigated some flaws of the inaugural and naïve form which Rachel argued against. Cultural relativism is also a relevant theory to explain the extreme cases of disagreements in our world. However, there is still invalidity and shortcomings of the cultural relativism argument that hinders moral progress, or deteriorate the view about morality into nihilistic grounds. Hence it is still essential to maintain some moral truths as objective instead of accepting the theory in…

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Moral Judgment Essay

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Moral Reasoning And Moral Judgments

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Cognitive Development Theory Of Moral Judgment

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Ruggiero Moral Judgments

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Professional Ethics: Moral Judgments Essay

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Although there is no complete list of adequacy criteria for moral judgments, moral judgments have certain requirements that should be followed

First and foremost, moral judgments should be logical. Hence, there should be a logical connection between the established standard and the conduct. The formation of a moral judgment should be essentially supported by the relevant reasons and evidence. It is crucial to ensure that the judgment is consistent and can be compared to other logical judgments. It is likewise critical to avoid making exceptions for oneself.

Secondly, a moral judgment should have a factual basis. Thus, it cannot be formed irrelevantly to the existing environment. Hence, forming a moral judgment requires possessing reliable and inclusive data that refers directly to the judgment’s content. The accuracy of the information used while forming a moral judgment is equally important as its credibility.

Finally, moral judgments should rely on common moral principles. Hence, every moral judgment is based on some standards. The latter generally reflect the moral principles. Credible moral judgments should be based on the so-called sound moral principles – in other words, those principles that cannot be shattered by skepticism or criticism. A reliable moral judgment can also be based on considered moral beliefs that are formulated upon the relevant reflection.

Before evaluating utilitarianism, one should understand some points that might lead to confusion and misapplication

First, every action should be regarded from at least two perspectives. Hence, for instance, there are two possible ways of acting, and it is required to choose only one. Therefore, it is essential to evaluate potential outcomes from both negative and positive standpoints. Let us assume that the first act is likely to make ten people happy. At this point, it is vital to consider how many people will become unhappy. Let us suppose that there will be one unhappy person as the outcome of the proposed act. As a result, the net value of the positive impact for this act is four. Another act, in its turn, is apt to make five people happy and three people unhappy.

Its net value of the positive impact, in this case, is two. While making a decision, it will most rational to choose the first alternative as it has a higher net value. Otherwise stated, the decision-making process should not base entirely on the positive prospects – it is essential to evaluate every decision from both positive and negative sides.

Secondly, every decision making should base on the careful evaluation of the impact’s degree. Otherwise stated, it is critical to foresee how largely this or another act might influence another person.

Thirdly, it should be realized that every action might be morally justified under certain conditions. Hence, while making decisions, it is crucial to consider the given circumstances critically and evaluate the outcomes by them.

Explain the differences between the two approaches: Utilitarian and Libertarian?

Utilitarian approach advocates for social welfare. It claims that social well-being is of primary moral value. The Libertarian approach, in its turn, focuses on advocating for the right to property only. This approach bases on the promotion of the so-called negative rights. In other words, it puts a particular emphasis on such rights as “being alone” and “not doing something.” From this perspective, it has more negative connotations than the Utilitarian approach.

The latter proclaims the overall right to property, social welfare, and education. This approach turns social welfare into a common obligation. In other words, this targeted objective is supposed to be achieved even if it requires neglecting the rights of particular individuals.

Hence, it might be concluded that the Utilitarian approach advocates for a community, whereas the Libertarian approach advocates for an individual.

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The Fundamental Arguments for Moral Judgement in History: An Overview

2020, Philosophical Reflections: A Collection

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HISTORY AND MORALITY Values and time. Subjective factor in history. Abstract. The content and meaning of history as a process, its descriptions and researches are considered on the basis of the notion of subjectivity as synonymous with evaluation and goal-setting. As applied to human society, these phenomena, essential for all living nature, are described through the concept of "morality", which in its broad sense covers the whole sphere of choices, determinable by reason and value. The approach to history as a process of development, in which external factors and cognizing subject interact, is shown through characteristics of separate aspects of human activity, through the idea of economic, social, political, cultural (spiritual) evolution of society. "Morality" ultimately serves as a mechanism of species adaptation and co-improvement of man, the embodiment and field of which is history.

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In this paper I distinguish two different senses in which philosophers speak of moral verdicts, senses that in turn invite two different senses of moral overridingness. Although one of these senses of moral verdict currently dominates the moral overridingness debate, I focus primarily on the other, and on the importance of disambiguating the two. In section II I show that it is this other sense that offers the most straightforward explanation of the apparent conceptual connections between moral verdicts and both reasons and reactive attitudes. I demonstrate in section III that it is also the central sense deployed by moral theories that recognize distinctively moral reasons, but that need not appeal to distinctive moral verdicts from a distinctively moral point of view. In section IV I show that as more sophisticated variants have been developed within the dominant sense of moral verdict they have come to deploy central elements of this alternative sense, bringing the two closer together. I suggest along the way that the recent tendency to emphasize the dominant sense to the exclusion of the alternative, coupled with the failure to properly disambiguate the two, has fundamentally skewed central debates in moral theory. Finally, in section V I sketch a proposal for understanding the relationship between these two distinct senses.

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The practice of moral judgement in historiography is a topic in critical philosophy of history. In general, there are two opinions on the practice of moral judgement in history: firstly, those who are against it, such as Croce, Bloch and Butterfield; secondly, those who are in support of it, such as Lord Acton, Ibn Khaldun and al-Biruni. Understanding the practice is crucial in facilitating "intellectual serenity" among historians in deciding on their research method. This article discusses al-Biruni's position and epistemic justification on the issue of moral judgement in research in history. The analysis of al-Biruni's perspective, based on his book, al-Athar al-Baqiyah 'an al-Qurun al-Khaliyah, shows that his epistemic justification on moral judgement in history was influenced by his religious tradition.

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Recent contributions in moral philosophy have raised questions concerning the prevalent assumption that moral judgments are typologically discrete, and thereby distinct from ordinary and/or other types of judgments. This paper adds to this discourse, surveying how attempts at defining what makes moral judgments distinct have serious shortcomings, and it is argued that any typological definition is likely to fail due to certain questionable assumptions about the nature of judgment itself. The paper concludes by raising questions for future investigations into the nature of moral judgment.

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April 10, 2017

Are Moral Judgments Good or Bad Things?

Depends on who's asking—but recent research shows they're an essential part of the social fabric

By Robb Willer & Brent Simpson

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

We often view moral judgments with suspicion and fear. And perhaps it’s little wonder. Every day our social media feeds overflow with criticism and condemnation. Workplace gossip threatens people’s careers and psychological well-being. At times it seems that our national politics has devolved into little more than a war of ad hominem attacks.

Beyond the harms, there is also hypocrisy. It is not uncommon to discover that those who make moral judgments—public evaluations of the rightness or wrongness of others’ behavior—do not themselves conform to the moral norms they eagerly enforce. Think, for instance, of politicians or religious leaders who oppose gay rights but are later discovered soliciting sex from other men. These examples and others seem to make it clear: moral judgments are antisocial, a bug in the code of society.

But recent research challenges this view, suggesting that moral judgments are a critical part of the social fabric, a force that encourages people to consider the welfare of others. Our work, and that of others, implies that—while sometimes disadvantageous—moral judgments have important, positive effects for individuals and the groups they inhabit.

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For example, in an experiment recently published in Scientific Reports , we had groups of unacquainted people take part in a “public goods” game. In the game, all group members were given a personal allocation of money that they could either keep or contribute to a public fund. Moneys contributed to the public fund were doubled and split equally among group members. The structure of the game means that everyone profits more individually by “free-riding,” keeping—rather than contributing—their own money, while also taking their share of the public fund. If everyone free-rides, however, there is no public fund and the group as a whole does worse than if it had overcome the temptation to free-ride.

It’s game that has been studied thousands of times, with the typical result that groups contribute at relatively high levels early on, before steadily reduce their giving in subsequent rounds. We observed this same pattern in the groups of our experiment that played the standard game. However, we added a twist, allowing some groups to communicate moral judgments about one another’s behavior between rounds. These moral judgments were simple ratings of each group member’s play in the game on a scale from “very immoral” to “very moral” (participants could also choose to submit “no judgment”).  After submitting their ratings, group members’ computers displayed all the group members’ ratings before continuing to the next round of contributions.

Interestingly, groups who could submit moral judgments of one another sustained high levels of contribution to the public fund across all rounds of the study. Merely having the ability to submit evaluations of one another’s morality was enough to solve the cooperation problem in this classic game. This was despite the fact that group members were strangers, isolated in separate rooms, identified to one another only by their assigned participant numbers.

To understand the power of moral judgments, we also looked at the behavior of groups that were allowed to administer costly monetary fines or rewards to one another. The effects of these rewards and punishments on contributions was roughly the same as the effect of moral judgments. In other words, people were just as motivated when their moral reputations were on the line as when their study pay was.

But perhaps more important for understanding the power of moral judgments in group life is what happened after these rounds of the public goods game. Group members were paired with one another in a series of decisions in which we measured various forms of prosocial behavior, including measures of generosity, trust, and trustworthiness that all had real money stakes. Members of the moral judgment groups showed higher levels of generosity, trust, and trustworthiness than all other groups in the study, including those who had been allowed to use material rewards and punishments to maintain contributions.

So what went on here? Why were these costless moral judgments as effective as material rewards and punishments in the short run, and more effective at promoting generosity, trust, and trustworthiness over the longer run? The skeptical view of moral judgments would lead us to expect little impact of costless interpersonal criticism or praise from strangers. In this view, interpersonal judgments are little more than “cheap talk,” especially as compared with rewards and punishments that have real money stakes.

But this narrow, economic view overlooks the depth of individuals’ concerns for maintaining reputations as decent people. The fear of condemnation—and the desire for moral praise—are deeply motivating to most people. Indeed, we found that members of moral judgment groups contributed at higher levels than control groups even in the first round of the game, before group members had any chance to communicate judgments.

Thus, even the anticipation of moral praise or condemnation was sufficient to motivate group members to contribute at high levels. Because people generally made large contributions to the group from the first round on, most of the moral ratings participants submitted were very positive, praising one another for putting the group’s interests above their own. The few who decided to free-ride, giving below the group’s normative levels, were quickly criticized by their fellow group members. This criticism tended to bring these wayward group members back in line. Thus, while most moral judgments were positive, condemnation—and perhaps more importantly, the threat of moral condemnation—was important as well.

But why did moral judgment groups feature high levels of generosity, trust, and trustworthiness in these later interactions, while other groups generally did not? One answer may be that, where moral judgments are often viewed negatively in popular culture, studies find that those who make moral judgments of unambiguously selfish or antisocial behavior are generally viewed very positively. For example, in other research we have found that moral judges of unethical behavior are trusted more and more often selected as interaction partners (a finding shown in other research as well). We even found that moral judgments can be ennobling for those who make them. For example, people who were randomly assigned to make moral judgments of another person’s unfair actions identified more strongly as a moral person and acted in a more trustworthy way in subsequent interactions with strangers.

To summarize, we find that moral judgments of unethical behavior are generally viewed as a legitimate means for maintaining group-beneficial norms of conduct. Those who use them are generally seen as moral and trustworthy, and individuals typically act more morally after communicating judgments of others. 

So what then can explain the tension between our findings—which suggest the prospect of moral praise and criticism is fundamental to the maintenance of social order—and the often very negative view people hold of moral judgments? One answer is that moral judgments are sometimes viewed negatively by observers with different principles or information.

Where our work focused on moral domains where there is moderate to high consensus about right and wrong, in other settings dissensus often reigns. In particular, politicized issues often feature sharply divergent intuitions about right and wrong. Morally judging a woman who has an abortion might seem like a sign of character to a Republican, but disdainful to a Democrat.

Additionally, people often have very different knowledge of and interpretations of everyday events. For example, you may be accused of slacking at work, but feel that you did the best you could while caring for a sick relative.

There are other exceptions as well, such as situations where moral opprobrium appears disproportionate and unforgiving, that help clarify why we often view moral judgments with suspicion. And of course our own personal concern that we may be targeted—justly or not—with moral scorn may color our own judgments of judgments. But our recent research on behavior in settings where moral judgments are possible and not possible shines a light on their important effects. Interpersonal moral judgments serve to connect our abstract moral values to everyday events.

Where we all may agree that fairness is important, it is unclear how it relates to our decisions to divide a check, share responsibility for a collaborative project, or choose a school for our child. The application of principle to these situations is negotiated, clarified, and—finally—enforced through a process in which specific acts are praised, criticized, or merely accepted.

Though it is a collective negotiation that is challenged by powerful forces—imperfect information, self-interest, divided values—it is nonetheless fundamental to our social lives. And while we may fear the judgments of our peers, we should fear more an anonymized world where they were impossible, as this would be a social reality where cooperation is tentative, trust rarely extended, and acts of benevolence harder to find.

Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development: Understanding Ethical Growth in Individuals

This essay about Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development explores the stages of ethical maturation. It begins with the “Preconventional Level” in childhood, where moral understanding is based on self-interest and authority. It moves through the “Conventional Level” of adolescence, dominated by social conformity, and reaches the “Postconventional Level,” where personal principles and justice guide moral reasoning. The essay also critiques the theory’s cultural limitations and emphasizes the diversity of moral growth.

How it works

Embarking on an odyssey through the intricate labyrinth of ethical maturation, we delve into the profound insights unveiled by Lawrence Kohlberg’s pioneering exploration of moral development. With each twist and turn of the human psyche, Kohlberg’s theory unfurls a rich tapestry woven from the intricate interplay of cognition, societal dynamics, and individual moral compass.

Our journey begins in the innocent realms of childhood, where moral reasoning takes its fledgling steps within the “Preconventional Level.” Here, the moral landscape is painted with broad strokes of self-interest and deference to authority, as young minds grapple with the rudimentary concepts of right and wrong.

Fear of reprisal and the allure of rewards serve as guiding stars in this nascent stage of moral cognition.

As our voyage progresses, we navigate the turbulent waters of adolescence, where the “Conventional Level” casts its imposing shadow. Amidst the swirling currents of societal expectations, moral judgments are shaped by the gravitational pull of conformity and social acceptance. Peer influence whispers its seductive melodies, steering the moral compass toward the shores of amiable relationships and the preservation of social order.

Yet, beyond the confines of convention lies the uncharted expanse of the “Postconventional Level,” where individual principles emerge as guiding constellations in the moral firmament. Here, the moral landscape undergoes a transformative shift, revealing the nuanced contours of social contracts and individual rights. Against the backdrop of shifting societal values, individuals grapple with the delicate equilibrium between personal liberties and the common good, guided by the luminous beacons of justice, equity, and human rights.

At the zenith of moral ascent stands Stage 6, where universal principles cast their radiant glow upon the path ahead. In this rarified realm, individuals transcend the constraints of societal norms, embracing self-fashioned ethical precepts imbued with the eternal resonance of truth. With hearts ablaze with conviction, they confront the bastions of injustice and oppression, heralding a new epoch of compassion and human dignity.

Yet, amidst the brilliance of Kohlberg’s theory, shadows linger, casting doubt upon its universal validity. Critics raise their voices, highlighting the theory’s cultural blind spots and its reliance on hypothetical moral quandaries. They caution against the temptation to oversimplify the complex tapestry of moral development, urging a nuanced appreciation of the kaleidoscopic diversity of human experience.

And so, as we embark on this voyage through the labyrinth of ethical growth, let us navigate with humility and open-mindedness, mindful of the intricate mosaic of human morality. For in the crucible of moral evolution, diversity flourishes, enriching the fabric of human existence with its multifaceted hues. And though the journey may be fraught with challenges and uncertainties, let us embrace it with courage and conviction, guided by the timeless wisdom distilled within the pages of Kohlberg’s magnum opus.

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• Published: 11 May 2023

Moral judgement and decision-making: theoretical predictions and null results

• Uri Hertz 1 ,
• Fanli Jia 2 &
• Kathryn B. Francis   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3875-8904 3  

Scientific Reports volume  13 , Article number:  7688 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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• Human behaviour

The study of moral judgement and decision making examines the way predictions made by moral and ethical theories fare in real world settings. Such investigations are carried out using a variety of approaches and methods, such as experiments, modeling, and observational and field studies, in a variety of populations. The current Collection on moral judgments and decision making includes works that represent this variety, while focusing on some common themes, including group morality and the role of affect in moral judgment. The Collection also includes a significant number of studies that made theoretically driven predictions and failed to find support for them. We highlight the importance of such null-results papers, especially in fields that are traditionally governed by theoretical frameworks.

Introduction

The study of moral judgement and decision making examines the way people behave and react to social and moral dilemmas. Moral and ethical theories usually provide the foundation for such efforts, providing important constructs and definitions, and even suggesting hypothetical experimental designs. A good example is the differentiation between deontological and utilitarian basis of moral action selection. Characteristically utilitarian approaches look at the overall benefit of each action, while characteristically deontological approaches set principles, prohibiting some actions regardless of their ultimate outcome. Both approaches provide predictions for moral decisions and use hypothetical scenarios such as personal versus impersonal trolley-type problems to illustrate the different predictions. In recent years researchers have been putting such theories to the test in a variety of experimental designs and populations. Translating theoretical hypotheses and constructs to an experimental paradigm or an operational prediction is not trivial. Participants’ individual traits and their cultural and societal context introduces variability and nuances to ethical theories. In addition, the technical need to build a robust and reliable experimental design, which can be evaluated using statistical tools, leads researchers to adopt experimental designs from different fields, such as economics and cognitive psychology.

Common themes in the collection

The current Collection invited works that employ a variety of paradigms and analyses tools to experimentally test predictions of moral judgement and decision-making. At the time this Editorial is written, the Collection covers several themes in moral judgment and decision making with the research included using different experimental approaches.

One common theme regards the deontological-utilitarian response differences mentioned above, studied from different approaches. One study examined whether people tend to trust deontological decision makers more than utilitarians 1 , another looked at the persuasive effect of deontological and utilitarian messages 2 , and yet another examined the way depression affected utilitarian and deontological aspects of moral decisions 3 . Like other works in this Collection, these include experimental designs that relied on vignettes, describing such moral dilemmas as the footbridge problem. To study how trust inference of moral decision-makers is moderated by several contextual factors , Bostyn et al. 1 used a behavioral game theory task, the trust game, where participants endow some of their money to a trustee in the hope that they will reciprocate, and the amount indicates their level of trust. Other studies in this Collection used monetary transactions as a proxy for cooperation and trust, using trust games 4 , the common-goods game 5 , 6 , decisions under risk 7 , variations of the dictator game where participants split money with others 8 , 9 and paradigms in which participants gain money from harm to others 10 , 11 . The use of such different approaches in the study of the same topic is important, as it allows evidence to converge across different studies, each with its own weaknesses and strengths.

Another common theme is the move beyond the single decision maker to examine group and collective effects on moral judgement and decisions. Two studies examined the effect of diffusion of moral responsibility and causality. Hansson et al. 9 studied the hypothesis that voting may lead to diffused responsibility, and through it to more selfish and immoral behavior. Keshmirian et al. 12 studied the moral judgment of individuals that performed moral transgressions against their own or in group, where causal responsibility may appear to be diffused. Interestingly, no evidence was found for diffusion of responsibility on moral behavior, while diffusion was found to affect moral judgment and punishment. In another study, norms and knowledge of other people’s actions were found to affect risk-based decisions concerning others’ wellbeing 7 .

At the time of writing this editorial, the Collection included studies that examine other aspects of model decisions. Hoeing et al. 5 examined whether political ideology affects moral decisions regarding money allocations, and Holbrook et al. 13 examined cultural differences in moral parochialism judgments. Moreover, Krupp and Maciejewski 14 discussed the evolutionary aspects of self-sacrifice in the context of interactions between sedentary actors and kinship, and Atari et al. 15 examined corpora of everyday discussions and evaluated how many of these are devoted to morality. These works indicate that moral judgment and behavior should be studied not only at the individual level, but also as a collective phenomenon; an emerging property of groups of interacting individuals. Others examined the effects of individual traits and emotions on moral decisions. Yin et al. 3 examined the levels of emotional and cognitive processes of depression on moral judgement. Du et al. 11 demonstrated mindfulness training could prevent moral preference decline over time without changing emotional regulation strategies. Diaz and Prinz 16 found that level of emotional awareness (such as alexithymia) played an important role in moral evaluation while controlling reasoning.

The rise of null-results in experimentation of moral theories

An important common characteristic in this Collection is the report of null-results. A number of studies took up an important theoretical question, used pre-registered experimental designs and sample sizes to tackle it, and reported no evidence supporting their initial hypothesis. For example, Hansson et al. 9 examined whether responsibility diffusion lead voting crowds to behave more selfishly than individuals in two preregistered experiments and found no evidence for such an effect. Bahník and Vranka 8 studied the effect of moral licensing on bribe taking in a preregistered study, hypothesizing that avoiding a small bribe may lead to increased likelihood to take a larger bribe later, and did not find evidence for such moral licensing effect. Cabrales et al. 4 hypothesized that in a trust game, time constraints may push trustees to be more generous, and therefore that knowledge about trustee’s time constraints may make participants more likely to trust them. In three experiments, they found no evidence for this effect. Hoenig et al. 5 examined the cooperation levels of left-leaning and right-leaning individuals and found that left-leaning individuals tended to cooperate more only on decisions that involved equality and did not differ from right-leaning individuals on decisions where outcomes were non-equally dispersed. Bocian et al. 17 manipulated when moral information should be presented, expecting that the manipulation would moderate the impact of liking bias on moral judgment. However, the results of their preregistered study 2 did not support this hypothesis. Finally, in a registered report, Bostyn et al. 1 tested the way contextual features affect trust in deontological and utilitarian decision makers, following Everett et al. 18 . They found no evidence of an overall effect that people trust deontological decision makers more than utilitarian ones.

These results, obtained by studying thousands of participants on multiple platforms and using multiple experimental designs, pose an important contribution to the literature on moral judgement and decision making. While all studies relied on sound theoretical principles, their null results help delineate the limits of these theories’ predictive power. As we argued above, carrying out experiments involves making practical decisions about populations, experimental designs and manipulations, and statistical analyses. This means that experimenters must deal with more nuanced, complex, and context-dependent effects than the more abstract and context-independent settings in which theoretical predictions are made. Experimental evidence, both in support of and against theoretical predictions, is important in the process of refining key moral theories; enabling researchers to investigate under which circumstances they operate as well as their limits.

Traditionally, null-results are less likely to be published, either due to the editing and review process, but also because of the self-censoring processes by which authors are less likely to finalize and submit for publication these projects 19 . As demonstrated here, the process of preregistration, and especially registered reports, ensures that these projects are published and shared with the relevant academic communities. This is important, as null-results are informative and can greatly contribute to the literature and theoretical development of the field. It is also important to highlight these results and encourage other researchers to experimentally test their theoretical predictions without fearing the lost cost of obtaining no evidence to support them. This is especially important in the field of moral decision making, which heavily relies on moral and ethical theory, and where experimentation can greatly inform broad societal problems.

Bostyn, D. H., Chandrashekar, S. P. & Roets, A. Deontologists are not always trusted over utilitarians: Revisiting inferences of trustworthiness from moral judgments. Sci. Rep. 13 , 1665 (2023).

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Balafoutas, L. & Rezaei, S. Moral suasion and charitable giving. Sci. Rep. 12 , 20780 (2022).

Yin, X., Hong, Z., Zheng, Y. & Ni, Y. Effect of subclinical depression on moral judgment dilemmas: A process dissociation approach. Sci. Rep. 12 , 20065 (2022).

Cabrales, A., Espín, A. M., Kujal, P. & Rassenti, S. Trustors’ disregard for trustees deciding quickly or slowly in three experiments with time constraints. Sci. Rep. 12 , 12120 (2022).

Hoenig, L. C., Pliskin, R. & De Dreu, C. K. W. Political ideology and moral dilemmas in public good provision. Sci. Rep. 13 , 2519 (2023).

Miranda-Rodríguez, R. A., Leenen, I., Han, H., Palafox-Palafox, G. & García-Rodríguez, G. Moral reasoning and moral competence as predictors of cooperative behavior in a social dilemma. Sci. Rep. 13 , 3724 (2023).

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Bahník, Š & Vranka, M. No evidence of moral licensing in a laboratory bribe-taking task. Sci. Rep. 12 , 13860 (2022).

Hansson, K., Persson, E. & Tinghög, G. Voting and (im)moral behavior. Sci. Rep. 12 , 22643 (2022).

Siegel, J. Z., van der Plas, E., Heise, F., Clithero, J. A. & Crockett, M. J. A computational account of how individuals resolve the dilemma of dirty money. Sci. Rep. 12 , 18638 (2022).

Du, W., Yu, H., Liu, X. & Zhou, X. Mindfulness training reduces slippery slope effects in moral decision-making and moral judgment. Sci. Rep. 13 , 2967 (2023).

Keshmirian, A., Hemmatian, B., Bahrami, B., Deroy, O. & Cushman, F. Diffusion of punishment in collective norm violations. Sci. Rep. 12 , 15318 (2022).

Holbrook, C. et al. Moral parochialism and causal appraisal of transgressive harm in Seoul and Los Angeles. Sci. Rep. 12 , 14227 (2022).

Krupp, D. B. & Maciejewski, W. The evolution of extraordinary self-sacrifice. Sci. Rep. 12 , 90 (2022).

Atari, M. et al. The paucity of morality in everyday talk. Sci. Rep. 13 , 5967 (2023).

Díaz, R. & Prinz, J. The role of emotional awareness in evaluative judgment: Evidence from alexithymia. Sci. Rep. 13 , 5183 (2023).

Bocian, K., Szarek, K. M., Miazek, K., Baryla, W. & Wojciszke, B. The boundary conditions of the liking bias in moral character judgments. Sci. Rep. 12 , 17217 (2022).

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Hertz, U., Jia, F. & Francis, K.B. Moral judgement and decision-making: theoretical predictions and null results. Sci Rep 13 , 7688 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-34899-x

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12 Moral Judgments

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• Published: February 2005
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This chapter examines several linguistic theories of moral judgments, and shows that none of them is able to distinguish between moral judgments and non-moral judgments. It uses the distinction between moral standards and responsibility standards to clarify the difference between praise and condemnation, which are related to the former, and blame and credit, which are related to the latter. It shows that the phrases, morally good, morally bad, morally right, morally wrong, and morally ought are not redundant, and differ in meaning from good, bad, right, wrong, and ought.

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Journal of Practical Ethics

A journal of philosophy, applied to the real world.

The Morality of Reputation and the Judgment of Others

David S. Oderberg

Department of Philosophy, University of Reading

There is a tension between the reasonable desire not to be judgmental of other people’s behaviour or character, and the moral necessity of making negative judgments in some cases. I sketch a way in which we might accommodate both, via an evaluation of the good of reputation and the ethics of judgment of other people’s character and behaviour. I argue that a good reputation is a highly valuable good for its bearer, akin to a property right, and not to be damaged without serious reason deriving from the demands of justice and the common welfare. Rash judgment wrongfully damages reputation and is sometimes a seriously immoral act. Rashness is not merely about lack of evidence, but involves lack of charity and is to be avoided even in some cases where the evidence of bad character or action is epistemically sufficient for judgment. I argue that the desirability of a good name for its holder, whether the reputation is deserved or not, means that in all but a relatively narrow range of cases it is always wrong to think badly of someone, even if they are bad.

Introduction

We in the liberal, democratic West live in a society with a split personality, deriving from our own individual dissociative traits. On one hand, we spend much of our time—far more than we would imagine—morally judging the character and behaviour of others. On the other, we are also generally loath to make moral judgments about other people. Very often we are unsure of whether to judge. We do not want to appear (or even to be) judgmental, but we also know that we do judge our fellows continuously, and believe this is often justified. To judge or not to judge? Here is an area of practical ethics that receives little contemporary attention, yet it is as central to morality as judging the state of the weather is to the question of how one should dress.

Fleshing this out a little, consider first the way in which moral judgment about others is manifested in outward behaviour. The thought is the father to the deed where deeds include words. So the ubiquity of judgments about others is manifest in two of society’s greatest preoccupations, gossip and defamation (the two overlapping significantly). By gossip I loosely mean idle banter about people behind their backs, where although the content is explicitly only factual (‘I heard Alan is having an affair’, ‘You have no idea how drunk Brenda got the other night’, and so on), there is almost always an implicit, negative moral judgment. Although paradigmatic gossip is about people we know personally, gossip about ‘celebrities’ is a monstrous outgrowth, now at a level of popularity and refinement unmatched in human history. Perhaps some would count it as a central case precisely because those who gossip about celebrities (by ‘those who gossip’ I mean to include both producers and willing consumers) feel somehow close enough to the celebrity to think it’s ‘as if’ they know them. (Wrongheaded this might be, but that is not the point. If you think you know someone as virtually a personal acquaintance—even if it is through the fantasy of a media glut of personal information—you can gossip about them.)

By defamation I do not mean only—or always—the activity that is contrary to law and must satisfy certain strict legal criteria. In most cases legal defamation involves publically imputing some fault of which the victim is innocent. But defamation as a moral category involves imputations of fault or bad character both true and false. Although not all defamation involves a moral judgment on the part of the defamer, explicit or implicit, what’s more important is that defamers generally are quite aware that the hearers (or readers) of their words will make moral judgments based on what they think they have learned. Moreover, the ease with which willing audiences are found for defamation shows how common it is for us to pass judgments upon the acts of others. The motives are not hard to find, including: a sense of superiority (‘at least I don’t do what he does’); a feeling of being ‘in the know’ (‘if only she knew what I know about Fred’s behaviour!’); the sense of intimacy that comes from sharing tidbits of information about third parties; the pleasure of filling time with idle and relatively cost-free chit-chat.

Judgmentalism is rife, yet so is the reluctance to judge, or at least to be seen as judgmental. Consider that this unwillingness cuts across both objectivism and subjectivism about morality. The objectivist believes in objectively true moral principles and prescriptions, holding for all people at all times and places. But not every objectivist, especially in a liberal society, wants to be thought of as imposing an objective moral code on others given the prevailing consensus in favour of tolerance, ‘live and let live’, and the like. For an objectivist not to want to insist on such an imposition might be irrational, but succumbing to peer pressure is not. By contrast the subjectivist, for whom what is morally true is a matter of opinion, believes that judging others must entail evaluating them by a standard that may well not apply to them. For the subjectivist, passing moral judgment reeks of what she sees as objectivist tyranny: if she is true to her subjectivism, she will try to train her mind not to judge; at the very least, she will not want anyone to think that her moral opinions are intended to apply of necessity to others.

My interest here is not defamation or gossip but their primary cause. They are but outward manifestations of an internal state of mind. Most moral philosophers have come to take it as axiomatic that when they evaluate human acts they are evaluating external, observable physical movements. Far less has there been work on the morality of mental acts, in particular moral judgments about others’ deeds or traits. Why might that be? First, like everyone else, most philosophers probably think there is something unseemly about subjecting people’s personal judgments to ethical assessment: it smells Orwellian, for if some judgments can be morally bad why shouldn’t a subset of those, if bad enough, be made illegal—‘thought crimes’? In reply, there are too many implausible steps between the antecedent and consequent to make this a reasonable objection. The law does not punish states of mind; even the vilest of intentions are immune unless they eventuate in some sort of outward act, if only an attempt. So just as with many other kinds of act, both mental and bodily, we can subject moral judgments about others to their own moral assessment without requiring a legal sanction for any of them, no matter how wrong they may be. (I will from now, for brevity, call moral judgments simply ‘judgments’ without qualification, and later I will further restrict the term ‘judgment’ to ‘negative or unfavourable judgment’. Context will make this clear.)

Secondly, it might be objected that we cannot know with certainty the judgments that people make, mental contents being notoriously elusive, so we risk doing ourselves what we might end up imputing to others—making wrongful moral judgments about third parties. In reply, if there is a viable set of principles for assessing judgments, they will apply equally to second-order judgments, i.e. our own judgments about others’ judgments. Any person knows with relative certainty, and in general, the contents of their own mental states, so they ought to be able to know with relative certainty the judgments they make about others’ judgments. (I leave aside particular issues to do with self-deception, Freudian theories, and the like; for the sorts of cases I have in focus, the generalization applies.) So a person can apply the principles of judgment to their own judgments and if, for example, those principles dictate caution in judging the judgments of others, given certain circumstances, they will also dictate caution in respect of the first-order judgments those others make. Moreover, if we cannot know the judgments others make with the same certainty with which we can know our own, then those principles will dictate even greater caution when judging the judgments of others. So we ought not to fear an inordinate risk of making wrongful judgments about the judgments of others, as long as the principles are correct and we apply them well.

That slightly arcane point aside, all we need note is that we do not even need certainty in assessing others’ judgments, and though we cannot always be certain of the judgment another makes, often we can. We know it precisely from outward behaviour, both word and deed. If I see you check the weather forecast and then fetch an umbrella before going outside, I can be certain you judge it to be raining or about to rain. Similarly, if I tell you that I’m no longer having anything to do with that so-and-so Bob after what he just did to me, you can be certain I judge Bob to have acted very badly. Words and deeds are how we know about any mental states, whether beliefs, opinions, judgments, hopes, fears, and so on. And if certainty means some sort of metaphysical guarantee, why do we need it? If that is the kind of certainty we need, then all human commerce should grind to a halt immediately—not a thought that need detain us.

A third reason for reluctance to entertain an ethic of moral judgment on the behaviour of others is the fear that it will lead us into censoriousness or judgmentalism. But there is a difference between making a judgment and being judgmental. Presumably, given that we pass judgment on others all the time yet generally deplore judgmentalism, most of us think that we can pass judgments without being judgmental (cases of weakness or hypocrisy aside). Rightly so, for judgmentalism is an attitude or disposition that favours making negative judgments about people even when clearly unjustified. If we thought that by making judgments we were ipso facto being judgmental, we would tend not to make them. But we know that judgments about others can be favourable, or neutral, and if negative can be slight, or less critical than they might be.

More importantly, if judgmentalism is a vice, then presumably an ethic of judgment would rule it out! In other words, such an ethic is precisely what we need in order to have a rational basis for avoiding judgmentalism or censoriousness. If we refrain from judging because we don’t want to be judgmental, then in reality we are already operating with an ethic of judgment, albeit inchoate. Spelling it out in more detail simply systematises and adds to whatever is intuitively plausible about judging others. Indeed, while it may be—and I think it is—plausible to hold judgmentalism a vice, it might also be that judgmentalism is a virtue. That is, we should not prejudge the results of working out an ethic of judgment by assuming that one of the things it might condone is something we think we should avoid.

Reputation, defined neutrally, is simply the general consensus of judgment about a person’s character. Depending on how far knowledge—or presumed knowledge— of a person’s life and actions extends, the general consensus could be as small as that of a village or as large as that of the world. Often, though, we talk about reputation normatively, as in ‘I have a reputation to protect’, or ‘Emma’s reputation is the one thing she holds dear’. Here we mean ‘good reputation’, the general consensus that a person is of good (reputable) character. Hence reputations can also be bad. But they can also be true or false—true if the consensus agrees with the facts about a person’s character, false if not. (I will also, quite plausibly apart from highly non-standard cases, call true reputations deserved and false reputations undeserved , and vice versa.) If Fred is reputed honest and he is honest, his reputation is true; it is false if he is dishonest; similarly if he is reputed dishonest and he is in fact dishonest (true reputation) or is in fact honest (false reputation). So we have four possible combinations: (i) a good, true reputation; (ii) a good, false reputation; (iii) a bad, true reputation; (iv) a bad, false reputation. We all hold reputation to be of moral importance, but how should we rank these four? Somewhat surprisingly to many, I am going to argue that the desirability of a good name for its holder, whether the reputation is deserved or not, means that in all but a relatively narrow range of cases it is always wrong to think badly of someone, even if they are bad. The wrongful act of what has traditionally been called ‘rash judgment’, I will argue, is not about lacking enough evidence to think ill of another person; it is about thinking badly of them even when you have enough evidence, with relatively few exceptions. To see how important a good name is, whether deserved or not, and to make my case plausible, we now need to examine the value of a good name in some depth.

To begin, it is clear that having a good, true reputation is the most prized possession. We want both to be good and to be reputed good. I claim also that having an undeserved, bad reputation is in general the worst of the four. Why should that be? A person with a bad but unmerited reputation might appreciate the chance to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, seeing it as an opportunity to grow in steadfastness and overall virtue. So how can we be sure it ranks, in terms of what is bad for the individual, below having a bad but deserved reputation? My reply is that although there are some people for whom a bad but false reputation affords the chance to grow in virtue, they are relatively few in number. By contrast, there are considerably more people for whom a bad but true reputation is for them a mark of honour, especially the honour that exists proverbially among thieves. Far more important, though, is that any person with a bad but undeserved reputation suffers a serious injustice, whereas no one with a true, bad reputation suffers any injustice on that score. So the former is, because of this fact alone, worse than the latter, and in fact worst of all.

To take this a little further, there is a contrary line of reasoning that might suggest the bad, true reputation is after all worst for its holder, and this focuses on the extra power that the pressure to conform to expectation exerts in the case of a reputation that is bad and true. In that of the bad, false reputation the pressure to conform to low expectations has to overcome the opposite force of a character that is genuinely upright. When the reputation is bad and true, by contrast, the pressure to conform needs only to push on an open door: if people expect you to be X, and you are in fact X, you may well confuse cause and effect, fulfilling their expectations as a supposed inevitable result of how they see you. It is simply easier to continue to be bad than to become bad, as Aristotle famously taught. And if the desirability of a certain kind of reputation is about more than what people happen to want for themselves, we might plausibly hold that a bad, true reputation is in fact worse than a bad, false one. Overall, though, as I see it a significant conformity effect coupled with being a victim of serious injustice makes the unmerited bad reputation least desirable of all, even though the merited bad reputation has a stronger conformity effect considered on its own.

Let’s now examine the fourfold ranking in more depth. I claim that a good and true reputation is best of all for its holder, and have argued that a bad, false reputation is worst of all. But what about the other two—a good, false reputation and a bad, true reputation? Would you rather be reputed good even though you are bad, or if you are bad would you rather be thought to be bad? Here the comparison is difficult, since there are considerations for and against the relative desirability of both. Further, we have to distinguish between what many or at least some people might want—because, say, there is some limited self-interest served by having that thing—and what is really good for them. It helps to look again in more depth at the first- and last-ranked reputations to make the point. The most desirable reputation—good and true—clearly serves a person’s self-interest in the narrow sense of benefits received, since others will act positively toward the person because they judge the person good, and since the person is good their reciprocally virtuous behaviour toward others will only reinforce the already good reputation, leading to a positive feedback loop of mutual beneficence. What is more important, however, is that having a good reputation in addition to the reputation’s being true makes it more probable that a person will not only continue to be good but become better , given the simple psychological force of other people’s expectations—the well-verified phenomenon of conformity, to which I have already referred. So having a good and true reputation serves a person’s self-interest in the narrow sense but also promotes and enhances their own good character, which is more important than the benefits they happen to receive from others.

Now consider a bad, false reputation, the worst of all. No one of sound mind would want this (even though a saintly person might welcome its arrival). From the viewpoint of narrow self-interest—how someone is personally treated, the benefits or harms he receives—things will likely not go well for him if he has a name that is undeservedly bad. If people think you are bad, they are generally not going to treat you well—not in the sense of going out of their way to hurt you, but they are likely to avoid association with you, distrust you, not give you the benefit of the doubt, and so on. But might it still be really good for you to have such a reputation? Here I think the force of conformity probably overwhelms the promotion of good character in the vast majority of cases. For a small, highly motivated minority, being good but thought bad will be a spur to acting even better so as to convince others of their wrongful assessment. (Note, however, the threat posed by vainglory and posturing, which can nullify the enhancements to character coming from such behaviour.) Such a person might be encouraged to carry out highly visible acts of magnanimity so as to counteract the false judgment, good not just for others but for their own virtue. For another, even smaller saintly minority, being good yet thought bad would be a cross to bear, a mortifying and purifying experience tending to deepen their own humility and resignation. Yet for the great bulk of mankind, the power of a collective judgment against them is likely to weaken their own virtuous foundations, shaking their resolve to stay good: it is doubtful that most people feel a pressing need to exceed the expectations of others. So it does seem correct to place the good, true reputation at the top of the scale of desirability, and the bad, false reputation at the bottom—for the vast majority of people in most situations.

Returning now to our two hard cases—the good, false name and the bad, true name—we can apply similar considerations. Some small number of people probably like the idea of being both bad and thought bad— ‘tough guys’, gangsters with a ‘reputation’ to protect, certain kinds of pathological personalities. Some very narrow forms of self-interest might be served for these people by a bad, true reputation: they might enjoy the distorted admiration of like-minded individuals or of others whose approval they seek; they may get intense pleasure from being of ill repute among what they see to be a dull, conformist majority; they may receive limited, albeit highly contingent, benefits from those with whom they fraternise.

Again, though, we are not talking about the mass of mankind, for whom a bad reputation is a highly distasteful thing whether the subject of the reputation really is of good or bad character. It poisons a person’s relationships with others in all the same ways, the only consolation when the reputation is bad and true being that at least it is deserved, so the subject does not experience the added bitterness of a reputation wholly unmerited. (This consolation is one of the factors that makes the bad, true reputation slightly more desirable—rather, less undesirable—than the bad, false one.) It is hard to see, then, how—all things considered—a bad, true reputation can be more desirable than a good but false one. In both cases the subject is bad, yet in one case he is thought good and in another not. What’s not to like about being thought good if you’re bad? You can have all the interpersonal benefits of being good without the cost of actually being good. Think of an unmerited good reputation as a kind of protective field, a bit like the famous Ring of Gyges in Plato’s Republic . Just as the magic ring allowed its wearer to do bad things yet escape detection, so a good but false reputation might allow its holder, perhaps literally, to get away with murder.

It would be perverse, however, to rest the superior value of a good, false name over a bad, true one on the ground that the former can allow its holder to exploit it for nefarious ends. Perhaps this should count for nothing, but even if it counts for something it cannot be decisive. More important is what benefits a person consistently with living a moral life—even more, what might encourage them to do so. Again, it may be that a well-reputed bad person is of a brazen and non-conformist character, bridling at the very idea of being thought good and doing everything in her power to disabuse people of the illusion. In this non-standard case, a good but false reputation would seem to be of less value to the holder than a bad and true one. But we cannot use it to generalize over the bulk of humanity. I think we can safely say that, for the ordinary run of mankind, conformity effects again play a significant role: conformity will generally prolong and/or increase an ill-reputed bad person’s badness while shortening/decreasing a well-reputed bad person’s badness. Even bad characters want to please others. Now it is true that you can please others either by meeting their expectations or by overturning them and giving them a pleasant surprise (‘see, I’m not the liar you thought I was’). A bad person with a bad reputation experiences the stick of others’ negative treatment, but this stick also runs up against the pressure to conform to expectations. By contrast, the bad person with a good reputation experiences the carrot of others’ favourable treatment. (I assume the subject understands that the favourable treatment is because she is judged good, and so is not thought to be a spur to continued bad behaviour!) And that carrot does not fight against the pressure to conform, but works with it to increase the prospects of a reduction in badness or at least a shortening of its duration. For this reason, I conclude that overall, and insofar as one can make general observations about what is likely to hold in most cases, the good, false reputation—the good reputation of a bad person—is indeed better for its holder than one that is bad and true, that is, the bad reputation of a bad person.

The value of a good name

If what I have said so far is plausible, then the result is that a good reputation is better than a bad one, whether that good reputation is merited or not. How valuable is it? I would argue that it is in fact more valuable than many material goods such as property, money, and health. True, I would rather lose my good name than my leg; you would probably rather be deprived of your fine reputation than your spouse, your house and all your savings. But many of the lesser material harms of life seem far easier to bear than the loss of a good name. Consider in particular how much easier it is generally to recover a material loss than to recover one’s reputation. Once a good name has been lost, the victim has to overcome a wall of scepticism and mistrust to earn it back; and this requires much labour in the teeth of discouragement and demotivation. Again, some people would be fired up at the prospect of earning back their good name, but even the most righteously indignant among us would feel flattened by the task of whitening a generally black reputation as opposed to the lesser (though still often daunting) job of clearing one’s generally good name of certain specific and relatively minor charges.

What we should be aiming at is to earn and maintain a good name, that is, to have a good name that is true. But for it to be true, we have to be good. This certainly does not mean we should be glory-seekers or see moral goodness as a means to the final end of a spotless reputation (even as an unattainable ideal). Nor, for that matter, should we seek a good name as the means to some further end of material benefit from our fellow human beings. We should seek goodness for itself, as the final end of all our acts, but goodness is a complex thing with various constituents, some of which are good in themselves and others good as means to more ultimate ends. Here we naturally think of such things as life, health, property, knowledge and friendship, beauty, work and play. If, as I contend, a good name is one of the more specific goods at which we should aim, in what broad category of good should it be located? The most likely seems to be that of property, which Aristotle identified as an ‘external good’ that contributes to overall happiness. Property is not an end in itself, but a means to an overall good life—facilitating not just one’s own physical and mental health, but the sorts of virtuous behaviour, such as generosity, kindness, thoughtfulness, material aid to those in need, and so on, that are characteristic of good people. Similarly, a good name is a means to the end of overall goodness of character. This time, however, the means are not material but psychic or spiritual: a good reputation is a spur to continued good behaviour, setting a standard that most people are naturally motivated to meet and adhere to. Just as ownership of physical property is a sine qua non of free commerce in lesser goods among individuals and societies, so good reputations are the condition, to speak a little crudely, of the free commerce in good deeds among people. A good reputation—merited, needless to say—is like a licence or letter of credit smoothing the way for mutually beneficial exchanges among people. If the reputation is false, it is like a fraudulent roadworthiness certificate for a damaged and dangerous vehicle, or a cheque written on an overdrawn account—useful, at least for a while, to the possessor, and hence a good for them, but also highly imperfect and something they are obliged to correct as soon as they can, before others do it for them.

A right to a good name?

It is tempting now to think that, like the right to property, there is a right to a good name: within certain limits involving injustices to other people (maybe self-harm as well), everyone has a right not to have their good reputation impugned, whether they deserve that reputation or not. As we value the right to property, so we should value reputation—something that negative judgments can only damage, being a kind of theft of what rightfully belongs to a person. The issue is, however, more vexed than I have just made it seem, and a good case can be made on either side of the issue whether there is a right to a good name that is as strong as the right to property. For a start, we should be careful about just such an analogy between a good name and one’s own property. If I have a true, good reputation, I have a right to it —but how much is it like a property right? I can sell my property, but can I sell my good name? It seems I cannot unless I can also sell the identity that goes with it, because a good name is essentially that of a specific individual. The online world we inhabit so much of the time notoriously makes it easy for identities to be stolen, and what can be stolen can be bought and sold. People can and do sell their identities (if only for limited periods), though it is hard to see how the purpose could be anything other than fraudulent (e.g. to obtain some benefit through the agency of another when the seller is physically unable to get it themselves, or to help another obtain something which they could not do under their own name).

Selling your identity, however, is not the same as selling your reputation. At best, we can say that reputation is like a quality that rides on identity: if I sell you my car when you don’t already have one, you get as a benefit the ability to take a country vacation you wouldn’t otherwise be able to take. But I can’t sell you that ability; for all I know you still won’t be able to take the trip. Similarly, the possessor of a good, true name has quite a bit of control over their reputation, but it is nowhere near complete: people’s judgments are fickle and can change for reasons having little to do with the subject’s own behaviour. When a reputation is good but unmerited, moreover, the subject’s control of it is greatly diminished: one false move and they will be caught out, as it were. It is the highly contingent element in reputations that prevents us from saying that one’s right to a good name is like a property right, where the possessor exercises a near-complete dominion. (The usual qualification, very loosely, is that you can do what you like with your own property as long as you don’t hurt others — or yourself, I would argue. You can also hurt others with your good reputation, especially if it is unmerited, since they will mistakenly trust you; so hurting others cancels out on both sides, and what is left is near-total dominion over property but very imperfect control over reputation. Whether this is a difference of degree or kind does not seem to me a matter of importance.)

The question of whether the right to a good name is like a property right becomes acute when we consider a good, false name. One might argue as follows: if a bad person somehow has or gets a good name, he possesses something to which he has no right. It is like theft, or at least handling stolen property. Therefore, you don’t do anything wrong by depriving him of his reputation, say by declaring his faults to the world (assuming you know them). Where is the injustice in that? On the other side—in favour of a person’s right to their good name whether it be deserved or not —one might argue this way: possession, as they say, is nine tenths of the law. So one might think any person can keep their good reputation as long as others are willing to let them have it. No one person has the right to deprive another of his reputation: there has to be a general change of mind. Who is harmed by someone else’s good name? Where’s the injustice in that? If I lend you £100 and don’t ask for it back, then it’s yours; isn’t it the same if I lend you my favourable judgment?

Note that a bad person might not get a good reputation by false pretences: he might simply be the sort of bad character whose misdeeds are generally secretive, or whose transactions with the outside world are fairly limited. In such a case he has his good reputation by default, as a general presumption that most people make about each other. If he gets it by false pretences, though—through studied hypocrisy, deliberately whitening his name so as to deceive others—then he seems more like a thief than in the first case. Still, even in the first case the subject appears like a handler of stolen goods who knows they are stolen but does not take them to the police. If he does nothing to correct his false reputation (assuming he knows about it), is he not at fault as much the hypocrite? Furthermore, it’s all very well to say that if I lend you £100 and don’t ask for it back, it’s yours. But what if you intend to use the money to harm an innocent person? If I know about it, am I not required to ask for the money back forthwith, as a matter of justice to the intended victim? In addition, it is simplistic to require that there be a general change of mind for a person to be deprived of their good name, once we begin wondering how that is supposed to come about without some individual’s breaking ranks. If Charlie is a vicious person, and I know it but no one else does, then how can I comfortably sit back and think, ‘I’d better not warn anyone else; who am I to take away his good name if everyone else thinks he’s a good bloke?’ How is a general change of mind supposed to happen unless someone plays the role of Paul Revere? Again, if an individual finds out that someone has a good but false reputation, does he not owe it in justice to everyone else in the community to alert them to the risk of entering into transactions with the bad person? (‘I wouldn’t trust Charlie if I were you’, ‘There’s something you ought to know—Charlie isn’t what he seems’, etc.). All in all, we have what looks like a powerful case for depriving a bad person of a good name.

The question is not so easily settled, however. There is, quite simply, something odious in the idea that one person can set themselves up as the rightful arbiter of another’s reputation before the world at large. There are two kinds of case to examine.

A. Consider the accidental case first, where Delia acquires her good reputation, despite her vicious character, simply through luck—by which I mean, without any conscious reputation management on her part. She goes about her daily life, perhaps her exchanges with others are fairly few, her vices tend to be secret or for whatever reason do not manifest themselves to many other people, and so on. Who am I to disabuse the world at large of the illusion it is under? It is as if someone accidentally dropped £100 in the street and Delia picked it up. If she can easily— and with no serious inconvenience to herself — ascertain the rightful owner and return the money, she should do so. Should she take extra steps to do this, leaving no stone unturned to get the money back where it belongs, we would applaud her heroic behaviour but recognize it as just that—above and beyond the call of duty. In the case of Delia’s accidentally good reputation, what is she obliged to do—put out scores of internet posts warning people she is not as good as she seems? Take out newspaper advertisements? Apart from the absurdity of the thought (why would a bad person have the inclination to rectify the misapprehension anyway?), she simply cannot do any of this without causing herself immense damage, and were she to do the twenty-first-century equivalent of placing a massive dunce’s hat on her head, we might applaud her noble self-sacrifice but we would not, and ought not, think Delia had done what she was purely and simply required to do as a matter of justice.

She may not be so required; but mightn’t someone else? Perhaps you or I are required in justice, or at the very least allowed, to tear down Delia’s reputation? Well, it could not be because of the universal truth of a moral principle to the effect that a person is either permitted or obliged to do for another what that other is not permitted or obliged to do for themselves. There is no such principle. (I am not allowed to steal, and no one is allowed to steal for me; I am not obliged to go shopping every day, nor is anyone obliged to go shopping for me). There are specific cases in which such a principle may apply, however, but they involve some sort of higher obligation involving control or authority, or a duty to protect the common welfare. Obviously parents lawfully and dutifully do things for their children (organizing their lives in various minute ways) that their children may not do for themselves (deciding freely how to spend their money, what to wear, what to read…). So do governments: I may not build a road for my own convenience wherever I like, but the government may build roads for me. I may not take the law into my own hands: the police do it for me.

So, am I in a position of authority either over Delia or the general community? If I am not the duly constituted authority, and I am not Delia’s parent or guardian, who am I to destroy her reputation, no matter how at odds it is with the truth about her character? The government should warn people about individuals of bad character where the common welfare is at stake (dangerous criminals on the loose, rogue traders, etc.). Parents might choose to warn others about their own child’s vices where there is a danger of harm to those others or purely and simply for the child’s own correction. But neither you nor I are in a position that requires us to correct Delia by blackening her name, and if there is no manifest danger of a significant injustice to specific others (it is hard to be more precise but we must remember that, as Aristotle insisted, ethics is not mathematics), how can we justify taking away from her a possession, namely her reputation, that is more valuable than money or other wealth?

As far as the general welfare goes, in many cases causing damage to reputation is not merely a governmental obligation but one that devolves on us all as common citizens. Both the media and individuals broadcast reputation-destroying information about shoddy tradesmen, and they do us a service. If you suspect the likelihood of a specific injustice against someone due to a person’s unmerited good reputation, you are right to warn the potential victim. (‘You shouldn’t ask Fred to house-sit for you—he breaks promises like pie crusts’, and the like). Needless to say, if you are the potential victim of injustice, you might report your suspicions to someone else (some regulatory body, or to a friend for advice on whether you should transact further with the person concerned).

On the matter of correction, note that there are two ways a good, false reputation can be corrected—by correcting the reputation or by correcting the character. As I suggested, a person with some sort of lawful authority over another might choose, without wrong, to harm their reputation for the subject’s own benefit, i.e. to encourage them to earn it back. Without the relevant authority, however, and given the high value of a good name, in all other cases a person of bad character should be corrected privately : their reputation is not something over which another person has lawful dominion, so the only route left open is to try to get the person to change their behaviour to meet the reputation, not to lower the reputation to meet the behaviour.

B. Yet even if what I have said about an accidental good reputation is plausible, what about the case of reputation management, where by hypocrisy and other devious means a person engineers a fine reputation that does not correspond to reality? What makes this a more galling situation than that of a reputation got by luck is the added unfairness: not only does the subject have a vicious character but she has exploited one of her vices, namely hypocrisy, to ensure that her other vices remain generally unknown! She has filched her reputation as surely as a burglar. And what she has filched, we might think, is ours to snatch as we see fit, in order to restore the justice harmed by her deception.

My question, however, is: by what right does anyone else take it upon themselves to remedy the admittedly unfair state of things? There is no general obligation of the part of anyone—not even the government or the public as a whole—to rectify every injustice. If Gregory sees Helen trespassing on Ian’s land, absent some special situation Gregory has no obligation to evict Helen. A special situation might be family ties, friendship, a promise or contract, guardianship of the land, Gregory’s position as a law enforcement officer, and the like. But in general, not only is there no obligation to interfere, but there might even be a duty to refrain for fear of causing more harm than that done by the original trespass. The maxim of minding one’s own business does not really capture what is at issue here. In the case of reputation, a person’s hypocritical massaging of their good name might well be my business, especially if I have been a victim of their deceitfulness. It still does not follow that my duty is to warn others, and given the status of a good name as the valuable possession it is, I am not even permitted to do so, again absent some special situation. Consider again the property analogy: in the case of theft, I am morally entitled to deprive the thief of his ill-gotten goods and hand them over to the police or their rightful owner to remedy a specific injustice against the owner. If I see the thief on the verge of stealing your wallet, I am at the very least permitted to take the wallet first and hide it. Similarly, if I am in the position where I know of an actual or likely specific injustice against an individual resulting from dealing with some person of bad character, I am at least entitled, and may be obliged, to warn the potential victim. But all I am allowed to do is warn them , and only about those aspects of the subject of the reputation that affect the transaction at hand. For instance, if Mike knows that Nancy is about to invite her friend Olivia over for dinner, and that Olivia is secretly having an affair with Nancy’s husband, Mike is entitled (perhaps obliged as a trusted confidant) to warn Nancy. But even here, I submit, he would not be permitted morally just to tell Nancy about the affair; there would have to be the likelihood of Nancy’s being further wronged by Olivia, say because Mike knows Olivia is only looking for an excuse to find out more about her husband’s personal life so as to determine whether the affair can safely be continued. Moreover, even if Mike is allowed to tell Nancy (perhaps obliquely, so as to lessen the shock), he is not thereby permitted also to indicate that Olivia is, say, an alcoholic, or a shoplifter, or reveal some other vice that blackens her name more than the revelation of adultery will already harm it. Further, he most certainly is not entitled to tell the world at large about the affair or about any other of Olivia’s misdeeds. No private individual is entitled indiscriminately to correct false reputations any more than to return all the world’s stolen goods, even if he is capable of doing so.

Again, reference to the common welfare is a significant qualification of the general rule. This comes into play most often when the subject is a public official, whose character is rightly held to a higher standard than private citizens, especially in matters of trust and decency, given the proportionately greater influence he has over the fate of the populace. It is one thing to tread carefully in private matters between private citizens, and another when a public official relies on deceit and hypocrisy to whiten a disreputable character. Assuming that matters involving trustworthiness (fidelity, loyalty, the keeping of promises, general honesty) are of great importance in government, any private citizen is free to reveal defects of character relating to these matters when the subject is a public official. By contrast, much as it probably galls many people to hear it, it would be unjust to damage the reputation of a celebrity who manipulates the media and deceives the public to preserve an unmerited good name. Where, indeed, is the injustice that needs remedying? What harm is being done? That the celebrity-addicted public thinks it has a ‘right to know’ says more about celebrity-mania than it does about celebrities themselves.

In all of these matters one must also consider the good done by damaging a reputation, however undeserved, versus the harm to the person whose reputation is damaged. The revelation of a major vice, in order to remedy a trifling wrong, can hardly be considered just. (‘He overcharged you by £5? That’s nothing—he’s embezzled millions!’) Broadcasting another’s faults beyond the proper borders is also unjust: why tell the world that Bob is a lying cheat when only a handful of people (e.g. business associates) need to know? Again, declaring someone’s defects with utter certainty when there is room for legitimate doubt shows a lack of respect for one’s neighbour that can only poison social relations. We all want people’s reputations to be in accord with their true characters, as a reliable guide to social exchanges. We also want people to have use and dominion only of what is rightfully theirs. But there are good and bad ways of promoting these desirable states of affairs. Which brings me to the topic of judging others.

Rash judgment

To judge someone rashly is to possess the firm conviction that they are guilty of some morally wrong act, or defect of character, based on insufficient warrant. It is more than a mere suspicion, supposition or the entertaining of a possibility. It is not simply an assumption that you might make for prudential reasons. If I am walking through a large city late at night and a stranger comes up to me asking for directions, I might avoid him on the ground that he may be—or even probably is —a mugger. But I don’t—or at least ought not, if rash judgment is wrong—make a firm judgment that he is; still less do I make a judgment about his true motives or the state of his conscience. This is not to say that there cannot be rash suspicions as well, for example suspecting as a potential thief a friend I have known for years who has a spotless record of honesty. My main concern here, however, is the morality of judgment, characterized as a firm assent of the mind.

If what I have outlined so far is plausible, then we can immediately see why rash judgment should be considered wrong: reputation-destroying behaviour is its natural outward expression. A firm judgment usually translates into external actions proportionate to the judgment. The more certain our judgments of others, the more fixed and overt our behaviour toward them. If harmonious social relations are a prime good, then people’s moderation of their judgments about each other can only serve that good.

Further, one might consider rash judgment as a wrong in and of itself, not just because of its effects. Again, the liberal ear will find this strange if not slightly menacing—how can we condemn anyone’s state of mind? By judging rash judgment, are we not indulging in the very sort of poisonous behaviour we ought to avoid? Leaving aside the earlier discussion about second-order judgments, I want to advance some further considerations. First, to countenance a morality of just judgment is not ipso facto to propose that anyone go about judging the judgments of others. It is simply to enunciate a set of rules that each person ought to apply to themselves in order to judge their own judgments—something they can do using their own reason, and examining their own conscience, even if we suppose that no person has a right in any way to judge any judgment but their own. Secondly, given that what we ought to be avoiding is rashness in our judgments, there is moral space for individuals to judge each others’ judgments, as long as the higher-level judgments are not rash. Thirdly, the application of morality to states of mind is hardly novel. Even liberal-minded people disapprove morally of hatred, spite, jealousy, and other corrosive states of mind—and presumably not just because of their tendencies to outward manifestation. We can make sense of a society of hate-filled people who nevertheless managed to get along well due to certain firmly built-in codes of proper conduct. But would the neutralization of external manifestation equally neutralize the internal states themselves, morally speaking? It might be countered that a person whose internal peace of mind is eaten away by such states is more to be pitied that judged. Yet the pity stems from the psychic damage they inflict on themselves, and no one thinks a person is morally entitled to harm themselves by indulging in such states of mind except insofar as we all agree that a person cannot be coerced into this or that mental state. I am not morally permitted to force you (e.g. with some special drug) not to indulge in hateful emotions—absent some special situation such as my guardianship of you or the risk you will harm others—but that doesn’t mean you are morally entitled to do yourself the psychic harm that hatefulness brings about.

In any case, whether you concur with this latter consideration or not, it remains that every rash judgment puts a dent or hole in someone else’s reputation (given that a reputation just is the sum total of opinions everyone has about an individual), and if reputation is a highly valued good, that good is thereby, however slightly, undermined. So should we not say, with little fuss, that the rules of just judgment do not differ from—in fact are only a specific case of—the general rules for proportioning one’s belief to the evidence? At the most abstract level, if you have sufficient warrant for believing p, then you should believe that p, and if you don’t then you shouldn’t. What’s special about the rules for judgment as I have defined judgment here?

Note first that the high-level rule connecting warrant and belief has familiar counter-examples if it is construed as an unqualified, exceptionless requirement. Fred may have overwhelming evidence, hence overwhelmingly sufficient warrant, for believing he has a terminal illness that will carry him off in a month. But given what we know about the role of the mind in physical healing, it might well be prudent for Fred to believe with all his heart that he will get better, perhaps even suppressing all knowledge of the evidence against. Gina, faced with a torrent of evidence that her vote makes no difference to who ends up governing her, might still permissibly believe that it does, if so believing is a spur to her continued involvement in political activity. People rarely go through a conscious process beginning with the thought that a belief is wholly unjustified and concluding with the resolution to hold it anyway because of its utility. This does not imply that the process is irrational. It can be prudent; it can even be morally respectable. We should, of course, tread very carefully when it comes to these sorts of belief, and in no way think that they are more than an exception to a general rule. Categorising them and providing rules for when epistemically unjustified beliefs might be morally or prudentially justified is an important general exercise which I cannot explore here. Still, by focusing on rules for the judgment of others we can flesh out one class of belief where exceptions to the general rule of proportionality make an appearance.

The heart of the problem in working out rules of judgment is the tension between, on the one hand, the intellectual virtue of judging according to evidence, with all the usefulness that entails, and on the other the moral virtue of being charitable toward other people, with all the usefulness that entails. Note a couple of important points. One: in no way do I mean to reduce either virtue to its utility. Rather, there are two components, on either side of the line of tension, to the overall case for devising the right sorts of rule—something virtuous in itself, and something useful. Two: in no way do I mean to separate moral from non-moral components to the question. I take the provision of rules for judgment to be a moral issue—how we ought to judge, where the ‘ought’ is a moral one. The considerations going to its resolution are themselves moral. Exercising one’s intellect in a rational way, i.e. cultivating an intellectual virtue, is itself a moral activity, just like preserving and promoting one’s health. The utility of doing so, at least for a large part, involves various personal and social goods connected with the harmonious negotiation of the world and peaceful social relations. Exercising charity is a moral activity, and there is a large moral component to the various goods that follow from it as well.

But how is the tension to be resolved? If there is no obligation of charity, then we can just say that everyone is morally bound to judge the character of another according to the evidence: if you are justified in judging Henry to be a scoundrel, then so you should judge. Such a judgment would be rash only insofar as it departed from any evidential justification. This cannot, however, be the end of the story. For charity is an obligation. It is traditionally defined in terms of love of neighbour, but we can equally speak of a general benevolence toward others. Now we cannot read off from this obligation any duty, for example, to hold off on judgment of others, at least in some cases, but we have to admit it as a possibility given that (i) judging another—where I am speaking exclusively of negative judgments—is necessarily damaging to the good of reputation and (ii) judging another can have bad effects on the one judged and/or on others, including the person making the judgment. Can we fill in the gaps enabling us to argue from the general obligation of charity to the specific one of avoiding certain kinds of judgment even when epistemically justified?

Although it is quite true that everyone without exception does morally wrong things at many times in their lives, it is also the case that most people are good—or so I shall argue. It is as well to note first that I have been speaking throughout of good and bad people, virtuous and vicious characters, as though these were uncomplicated, easily graspable matters. Of course they are not. I don’t presuppose that they are essentially sharp phenomena (that is, non-vague), as though there were a precise borderline between good and bad people; many people, both philosophers and others, would vehemently deny it. In fact I believe it, but I do not need to assume it. All I claim is that such people exist, and that a rough characterization is all we need. People who habitually violate many basic moral norms are bad; those who do not are good. We used to have a rich vocabulary for the former, but for cultural reasons that are no doubt fascinating most have faded away: ‘scoundrel’; ‘blackguard’; ‘knave’; ‘miscreant’; ‘rascal’; ‘reprobate’; ‘villain’; ‘ne’er-do-well’; and others. The vocabulary for good people was always thinner. (Try to think of some single terms to stand in for rather dull compounds like ‘good bloke’, ‘terrific chap’, ‘ a true gentleman’, ‘ a real lady’, and a handful of others.) I submit that the reason for the asymmetry is precisely that—as I have suggested—most people are good. We only devise simple (non-compound) terms for things that are either objectively uncommon relative to the rest of what exists, or are at least uncommon relative to our everyday experience of the world.

I will leave aside for the moment the obvious question that comes to mind: since the multifarious terms for bad people have largely faded from use, can we now still safely assume that most people are good? Let us also set linguistic evidence to one side. I claim that most people are good. If they were not, society could not function. So at least where a society does function, most people have to be good overall. Let’s put it more concretely: for all their vices, most people are still not habitual liars, thieves, cheats, bullies, physical aggressors against others, lazy good-for-nothings, spongers, hypocrites, slanderers…and the list goes on. We need to be clear: all people, without exception, engage in behaviour that comes under these headings, such that if they habitually did the things that come under all of these headings and more, they would be bad. But they do not. Or so I am claiming—for now.

The claim is not that most people are good simpliciter , as though they are, right now, candidates either for Heaven or its secular equivalent (if there is one). My assertion is that they are good overall (which is what I mean by ‘good’)—good characters mixed with a decent, perhaps generous, helping of bad. If this is true, it creates in my view a presumption. We need not be capable of fixing a statistic to the presumption: the moral life does not work like that. All we need to know is that most people are good, and that therefore in any particular case we are bound both rationally and morally to presume that the person under our consideration is good.

How strong is the presumption? Potentially both weak and strong—weak in one respect but strong in another, more important, respect. If everyone were good, we would have an immediate strong presumption. But we know there are many bad people. So suppose that only a slender majority of people are good. That creates a weak presumption of goodness in any particular case. Nevertheless, that weak presumption converts to a strong presumption when we realise that judging a person good or bad does not depend solely on judging external behaviour; it also depends crucially, perhaps most importantly, on judging a host of inner states—motives, beliefs, hopes, fears, anxieties, and many more—along with an array of external circumstances to many of which we are unlikely to have enough epistemic access to be able to factor them into our judgment. All of this complexity, I submit, turns a weak presumption of goodness into a strong one.

Suppose, for analogy’s sake, I have a sack full of two superficially similar kinds of object—bingles and bongles. Fifty-one per cent of the objects are bingles and forty-nine per cent are bongles. I ask you to reach into the sack and hold one, then think about judging whether it’s a bongle. You can’t tell just by touch, and even if you looked at it you couldn’t tell. Suppose it turns out that there is no crucial experiment to determine whether something is a bingle or a bongle—no one fact that settles the matter. Rather, you have to make an overall judgment based on a large range of diverse characteristics. Moreover, it is very difficult to determine for any one characteristic whether the object has it or lacks it. To make the case even more apposite, suppose not even our best technology can determine whether some of the characteristics are present or not, even though there is a fact of the matter in respect of each feature. For you to judge with certainty that the object in your hand is a bongle you have a massive load of work to do. Someone smart enough and resourceful enough could do it, but that person probably isn’t you. Can you presume the object is a bingle? There is a weak presumption because a slender majority are bingles. But that converts into a strong presumption given the monumental task of proving it to be a bongle. For it to be a strong presumption that something is the case is precisely for you to have a lot of work to do proving it to be otherwise.

I think this is roughly where we stand with people. Even if there is only a weak presumption of their goodness based on a slender majority, that converts to a very strong presumption given how hard it would be to prove any individual bad. You might say that we should all be agnostic given that it is equally hard to prove anyone good just as, in my analogy, it was equally hard to judge something to be a bingle or a bongle. But the question at issue is not about the rules for judging people good; it is about the rules for judging people bad. (In the analogy, I asked you whether you were holding a bongle, not a bingle.) If there were a presumption that people were bad, we would need rules for judging them good. We might even need them if the presumption is that people are good, since a presumption is not a judgment. Harmful effects can come from people’s over-zealously judging others to be good, so I don’t want to trivialise the issue. But damaging their reputation is not one of those harmful effects, and I am concerned here with the morality of reputation.

So, if I am right, there is a strong presumption that people are good. I said earlier, however, that we should not have scruples about judging others’ judgments simply because we can’t know their inner states. We can know their judgments by their outward manifestations, just as we know other mental states such as hopes and fears. But I am now making a different point about the difficulty of judging character based partly on a knowledge of others’ internal states. The presumption of goodness does not rely on our never being able to know another person’s motives, reactions to circumstances, hopes, fears, and the like. We can know at least some of these in many cases, by the usual external criteria—not least of which is simple linguistic evidence, i.e. what people tell us about themselves. In particular, cases that are what we might call notorious do not pose a problem. When a person, through their own behaviour, manifests their immorality to the world, they do not have a reputation to lose—hence judging them in accordance with the evidence is unlikely to be rash. A person does not need to display or admit to their vices before a large number of people in order for these to be notorious. If Nancy does not care that a handful of her work colleagues know she is cheating on her husband with her boss, she cannot expect her colleagues to refrain from judging her behaviour (assuming they disapprove, of course). This does not mean they are entitled to gossip about it, but Nancy should expect this, in other words if she finds that friends and neighbours are soon aware of her adultery she cannot legitimately claim that her private behaviour is no one else’s business. Notoriety can be achieved by manifesting one’s vices to a large number of people, or in a public place, or by boasting, or due to a public judgment (by a court or official inquiry). Of course we all think of the media when it comes to making vices notorious, but we must remember that counter-balancing the noise the media make is the fact that their investigations and exposes apply to a very tiny minority of people in any society—nearly all of them celebrities, public officials, and those caught up in the judicial process. Of these cases I would echo fairly widespread views: any celebrity who uses or willingly benefits from positive media reports of their character and behaviour cannot complain of negative reports as long as they are true; the character and behaviour of public officials is a matter of legitimate public interest; and, as long as fairness in procedure is maintained, those caught up in the judicial process cannot complain of unjust notoriety. The vast majority of people, however, are untouched by media intrusion into their lives and can rightly complain if the media, having made their character or behaviour notorious, claim that its notoriety has deprived them of any protection for their reputation.

The presumption of goodness, then, is not based on the impossibility of ever knowing the state of a person’s character, or the nature of their actions in terms of their motives, desires, and so on. We can even know the state of a person’s conscience with some accuracy, especially when we are an intimate of that person. We might be able to judge that a person is so beyond hope, having delivered themselves over to vice, that only a miracle could turn them around. Nevertheless, the difficulty of these sorts of judgment, given that we are dealing with a myriad internal states interacting with complex external circumstances, coupled with the need to preserve goodwill among people for the sake of harmonious social relations, means that we have a large burden to discharge if we are safely to make a judgment — by which, remember, I mean negative judgment—about another person’s character or behaviour.

It should be fairly clear now what it means to call a judgment rash. In moral matters, rashness does not consist in a simple disproportion between judgment and evidence. We cannot say: a person judges another rashly if and only if she lacks enough evidence to warrant her judgment. Certainly, if she lacks enough evidence she will almost always be judging rashly. But she might still judge rashly even when possessing sufficient warrant, if all we mean is epistemic warrant—something like a straight proportion between evidence and judgment. If I have enough evidence to judge with certainty that the post office will be open tomorrow, my judgment that it will be open can hardly be called rash. But when it comes to moral matters, there is a weighty presumption in favour of good character: I cannot rest easy in judging that Bob is a cheat—say, that he plagiarised an essay—solely because I have evidence of the sort that would be commensurate with a closely related non -moral judgment—say, that he worked hard on an essay. In moral matters I must have what used to be called ‘moral certainty’, in other words evidence that conclusively rules out any reasonable, competing explanation that preserves Bob’s good name. Moreover, there is what might be called a ‘double lock’ on such judgments because, unless I am in a specific position that obliges me to inquire into Bob’s behaviour—because, say, I am the person marking his essay—I do not even have any business concerning myself with it. If there was a presumption that people were permitted to inquire willy-nilly into the behaviour of others, this would undermine the very social harmony the original presumption of goodness is designed to protect. It would licence ‘fishing expeditions’ for the sake of blackening others’ reputations, which is directly opposed to charity and goodwill.

At this point the reader will be thinking that what I propose looks very much like the presumption of innocence that exists in the criminal law, requiring ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt’ to defeat it. This is no accident, since the legal presumption of innocence is itself founded on the moral presumption. The legal presumption was a product of the fusion of Roman and canon law in the early Middle Ages, and these were founded on what all jurists recognized as the natural law — universal moral prescriptions that mandated, among other things, how a person accused of some crime was to be treated. Even Adam and Eve, said the medieval lawyers, had their day in court, having pleaded innocence, and God (for whom their crime was in fact notorious!) summoned them to account for their behaviour. From this, concluded the jurists, we were given the model for treating all criminal defendants.

We need to separate two points, however. Having your day in court (the right to a fair trial) and being presumed innocent are not the same. A court might presume a defendant guilty yet still give him a fair trial, with the burden of proof now resting on him to prove his innocence. What the medieval theorists meant with their biblical explanation is that Adam and Eve were naturally to be presumed good, having later been corrupted by the serpent. The model is then supposed to require treating all accused in the same way—innocent until the prosecution can provide specific, incontrovertible evidence to counteract this natural view of the accused’s character or behaviour.

When it comes to reputation and rash judgment, the trial scenario does not apply. So the extra reasons for justifying the legal presumption of innocence are irrelevant, specifically the importance of the presumption in counteracting the power of the state (it being much harder for an individual to prove their innocence than for the state to prove them guilty). What we are left with is the bare presumption, founded in the nature of things, that people, overall, are good, overall.

Specific applications

From the general principles I have laid out, we can draw some more specific applications. Consider the question of what is ‘your business’. To go back to the plagiarism case, it is clear that if you have no need to know whether Bob plagiarised his essay, you have no need to form a judgment. This is just an application of the principle that we are not only not obliged, but are not even permitted, to go about inquiring into other people’s behaviour or character, let alone the state of their conscience, without a sufficiently good reason. Satisfying one’s curiosity is not such a reason; still less is the desire of feeling superior to others. In fact, I can think of only a few classes of sufficiently good reason. One would be a special relation of trust, whereby one person consents to another’s examination of her conscience (priest/penitent, counsellor/patient, intimate friends). Another would be where this sort of close inquiry into another’s behaviour or character was necessary for assessing their suitability for a particular job or role (employer/potential employee, principal/potential agent). Another would be where we have a special position of authority to make such an inquiry. If I am Bob’s lecturer I need to know, for academic reasons, whether he plagiarised his essay. If I am his personal tutor, I need to know for pastoral reasons. A parent has the right and duty to inquire into the state of conscience of their child, assuming first the absolute duty of parents to bring their children up to be good people. In these sorts of cases, the issue is always one of either potentially helping (by correction, admonition, punishment) the person into whose state of character one is inquiring, or else protecting against potential injustice to oneself or third parties.

What if information comes to you about someone’s character or behaviour, even though you have no need to know and would never have been permitted to inquire into it yourself? If a highly reliable witness tells me, without any doubt in her mind, that some bare acquaintance of mine has been stealing from his employer, may I judge that this is so? Strictly, it seems, I may do so without being rash. It would not be wrong of me to do so, but that does not make it a duty for me to form my judgment in this way. Again, from the point of view of social harmony, surely it is better for me only to entertain strong suspicions, raising them perhaps with others but only if they need to be informed. In other words, if I am to take the duty of charity seriously, shouldn’t I bend over backwards to avoid firmly assenting to an unfavourable characterization of someone when it is not a direct concern of mine and there is no concrete interest to be served by such assent?

Notice the point we have reached. What I am now suggesting is that, even if we are permitted in good conscience to form a judgment about another person’s character or behaviour—having overcome the weighty presumption in their favour—it still does not follow that we ought to do so. In fact, in situations where there is no direct need—for the benefit of ourselves or others with whom we have some concern, or for the benefit of the subject of potential judgment—we ought, I submit, to find ways to minimise the behaviour of the person about whom we are considering our judgment, to moderate our judgment so that it is either less than certain, or if certain that its object is less serious. For example, if you can reasonably attribute a less bad motive (say, greed rather than cruelty) or a good motive instead of a bad one (kindness rather than malice), you should. Again, if you have a choice between judging someone guilty of doing something bad or something worse, consistently with the evidence, then you should judge the lesser offence. If all I see is Fred breaking into a house, with no further background knowledge, I may judge that he is intent on burglary but not murder. Circumstances are often capable of multiple interpretations, but even if none are favourable this does not mean we may put the worst interpretation on them.

In so acting to minimise the faults of others, don’t we open ourselves up to a plethora of false beliefs? If true belief were the only value at stake, we ought to be concerned. But the duty of charity or benevolence ranks no less high than that of believing the truth. Indeed, it ranks higher inasmuch as morality is about our character and behaviour, not merely our beliefs. If the perfection of our own character, and indirectly that of social relations, requires making a weighty presumption in favour of the goodness of others, then if we take the presumption seriously we have to accept the perhaps significant risk of false belief. Hence believing well of someone, even falsely, should take precedence over believing ill of them truly. As noted already, however, where another’s vices are manifest or notorious—on display, as it were—we may without further inquiry judge them negatively, and ought to do so since the general rule in favour of believing the truth applies immediately. The reason for the exception, it seems to me, is that when a person’s bad behaviour is so manifest as to make a negative judgment inevitable, it is as though we are not choosing to judge them at all. Rather, their behaviour forces a judgment on us, and if we resist it we ourselves have to do violence to our own rationality—itself a form of self-inflicted harm for which we are morally responsible.

By now, it may seem that the boundaries and presumptions I have erected against negative judgments of others imply that a person who judges rashly always does something seriously wrong. It is one thing for us to remind ourselves of the singular importance of reputation and the need to preserve social harmony, but quite another to elevate rash judgment to the level of a taboo rivalling the many grosser forms of immorality with which we are daily confronted! The worry is justified, which is why we need to dial back a little and put matters in context. Not every wrong that a person does is serious. This does not negate one of the prime moral principles—do no wrong —but it does indicate the need for caution and context. It is one thing to judge rashly in a minor matter—say, that Betsy is thoughtless when it comes to birthdays—and another to judge rashly in a serious matter—say, that she is thoughtless about her children’s welfare. Here, the seriousness of the wrong is measured by the content of the judgment, which itself reflects the damage to reputation. But context and circumstance also matter: it is one thing to judge that a celebrity is wasteful with other people’s money but far worse to judge that a public official is, given the responsibilities of their job. To judge your neighbour a liar is bad; to think the same of a priest or a police officer is far worse, since the more that is expected of someone, the greater the damage to their good name by even a relatively slight discredit. Again, if a person has a good name but many genuine questions have been publicly aired about their character, to judge them negatively would not in general be a serious wrong. The point is that even if rash judgment, which harms both charity and justice, is a form of immorality, sound moral principles cannot entail that we are all guilty of multiple serious wrongs pretty much all of the time, given human weakness and the all-too-familiar temptation to indulge in such judgment. This does not mean we should treat rash judgment lightly, only that assessing its moral gravity requires, as in all things, sensitivity to circumstance.

Looking in the mirror

So far I have not mentioned a separate class of reasons that on their own ought to warn us against being too quick to make judgments about others. These all have to do with the inherent unreliability of such judgments, in other words their very tendency to be judgments that do the most damage—contributing to someone’s having a bad but false reputation. For all that most people are good overall, we each still, without exception, have vices in our character that supply enough material for a lifetime’s meditation. One of the things these vices cause is precisely a weakening of our ability correctly to judge the characters of each other. Probably the meta-vice, as it were—the granddaddy of them all—is pride. By pride I do not mean proper satisfaction and contentment in one’s own (or others’) achievements, but an excessive estimation of one’s own character, behaviour, abilities and capacities—including, of course, the capacity to judge others. We all like to think we are good judges of character, but this is precisely what makes us generally bad judges: we assume first impressions are correct, we think that what we take ourselves to be perceiving is what we are in fact perceiving, we presume that we have enough experience dealing with others to be quite reliable when it comes to summing them up (we are all ‘street wise’, ‘savvy’, ‘in the know’). In fact, this latter presumption can cause havoc. Many people do, unfortunately, have long and bitter experience dealing with their fellows, and it is a truism that the older you get, the more bitter and cynical you tend to become. But it would be a mistake to project that cynicism far and wide, viewing all human behaviour through a bottle of vinegar—as though there had to be a wicked motive behind every deed and every person was simply not to be trusted. The same applies to any individual who has experienced a series of disappointments in life.

Being prone to vice as we all are, we tend to spread it around liberally. If I am vicious, finding pleasure in all sorts of wrongdoing, surely I will be surprised if others don’t find the same enjoyment? And won’t I find it too much of a reproof to think that although I cheated in these circumstances, and someone I know was in the same situation, they did not cheat as well? Many people, for all sorts of reasons, bear within themselves hatred, envy, malice, anger: for them it will take only the slightest provocation, no matter how objectively trivial, to judge someone else guilty of this or that moral outrage. Furthermore, it is likely that people who have a particular character flaw are more prone than those without it to find the same flaw in others. One reason would be the natural tendency we have not to think of ourselves as unusual in some significant respect—abnormal or singular. Another is the barely conscious thought that by taking our vices to be common, we somehow minimise their seriousness. Again, these inclinations can significantly skew our judgment of others.

One of the most promising ways of reversing this imbalance in our attitudes to other people, the strong presumption of innocence aside, is to reflect carefully on our own case. Before making a judgment about someone else, it is useful to ask how we would want to be judged by others in a similar case. If we judge rashly, can we complain if others judge us equally rashly? If we would wither at the self-application of our own standard of judgment, why should we apply it with equal rigour to our fellows? Only special pleading could make for a difference. Perhaps more important, though, is the simple fact that we can on the whole do far more good to ourselves and society by devoting the vast majority of time we currently spend on judging others to meditating on, with a view to correcting, our own faults. Clearly, we are far more likely to succeed in correcting ourselves than in correcting others, except perhaps for those totally under our authority—children, in particular. So if it is good for people to be good, and you can do your part to help make people good, it makes perfect sense to start with yourself. And given that this is a lifetime project for most of us, we are unlikely to have much time left over for reflecting on the faults of others.

Note that this recommendation is not to be construed as an invitation to narcissism. It is not a question of endless self-analysis but of endless self-correction. Psychoanalytic speculations aside, it does not usually take much reflection to work out our faults, vices, and weaknesses. Knowing what they are is not the problem so much as doing something about them. And doing something about them is essentially tied to outward behaviour, involving practical implementation of techniques for improving ourselves and, as a necessary consequence, our actions toward others.

Furthermore, having suggested that we should not be more severe with others than we would be with ourselves, I am still allowing that we might be more severe with ourselves all the same. This is something we ought to consider as a natural consequence of our self-knowledge. True, we might crumple at a level of self-judgment we rightly refrain from applying to others, but it still may be a price worth paying for our own benefit, if it leads to self-improvement rather than self-paralysis.

The days of Noah?

What if I have built all of the foregoing considerations on an overly rosy view of human nature? What if the strong presumption of goodness, on which the right not to be judged rashly depends, is itself an illusion? Most people might have been mostly good once, but maybe now they are mostly bad? (Recall the disappearance of all those wonderful terms for referring to people of bad character.) This is not the place to assess the truth of extreme moral-cultural pessimism. The question here is simply whether it would affect the ethics of judgment.

On this I will make only a couple of brief remarks. First, if things—rather, people —really are that bad, then what would have counted as rash judgment had the situation been as I have outlined above, would no longer do so. Moreover, a situation so dire would involve the notoriety of much vicious behaviour, so both the presumption of goodness and the appeal to non-notoriety would vanish. So much for the principle; but, secondly, would this impose an obligation of judgment? If the situation is as I have suggested earlier, judgment is the exception, not the rule. Its obligatoriness derives not just from the duty of believing what is true, but from the salutary and corrective effects of such judgment—warning potential victims, preventing or reversing injustice, helping the subject of judgment overcome their faults, and so on. But when, due to universal, manifest vice, judgment becomes the rule, not the exception, what interests are served? Would we seriously expect anyone to benefit, except in occasional cases? Would hearts so hardened against virtue be responsive to correction? Is there much to be gained by telling the thief that he is about to be robbed by someone else, while at the same time you expose yourself to being pillaged by both? Does anyone seriously think that by painting over a world of vice with a thin layer of ‘righteous’ judgment mankind could pull itself back from the brink? The reader may not take the story of Noah to be more than that — a story, albeit edifying all the same. She should still, however, take note: Noah did not spend his time judging all the reprobates soon to be swallowed up in a torrent. Instead, he built an ark.

The preceding discussion has undoubtedly raised as many questions as it has attempted to answer. I do not pretend to have said anything close to the last word on a much-neglected topic. On the contrary, that the morality of judging others has been so little discussed, at least among contemporary ethicists, leaves the field open to debate — over both first principles and their application. It will be enough for present purposes to have persuaded some readers that judgment as I have defined it is not a taboo subject for ethical speculation; that, on the contrary, it is important for many reasons; and that it is possible to work out something like a framework of rules for handling the cases that come under it. As practical ethicists we should, I submit, not read the adjective ‘practical’ so narrowly that we confine ourselves, as we nearly always do, to the ethical assessment of outward behaviour only.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to an anonymous referee for many helpful comments that have greatly improved this paper, and to the editors of the Journal of Practical Ethics for their invitation to contribute.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

The effects of social perception on moral judgment.

• 1 School of Psychology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China
• 2 Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior, Ministry of Education, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China

When people express a moral judgment, others make inferences about their personality, such as whether they are warm or competent. People may use this interpersonal process to present themselves in a way that is socially acceptable in the current circumstances. Across four studies, we investigated this hypothesis in Chinese culture and showed that college student participants tended to associate others’ deontological moral judgments with warmth and utilitarian moral judgments with competence (Study 1, M age = 21.1, SD = 2.45; Study 2, M age = 20.53, SD = 1.87). In addition, participants made more deontological judgments after preparing to be interviewed for a job requiring them to be in a warm social role, and more utilitarian judgments after preparing for a job requiring them to be in a competent social role (Study 3, M age = 19.5, SD = 1.63). This effect held true in moral dilemmas involving different degrees of hypothetical personal involvement, and appeared to be mediated by the perception of others’ expectations (Study 4, M age = 19.92, SD = 1.97). The results suggest an important role for social cognition as an influence on moral judgments in Chinese culture.

Introduction

Moral judgment is the evaluation of a certain behavior as good or bad, or as right or wrong. The goal of moral psychology is to clarify why individuals make the judgments they do about moral issues. Research on moral judgments has been especially influenced by the two most important normative ethics theories of the last several centuries, that is deontology and utilitarianism. Both theories prescribe logic for determining the morality of behavior. A deontological perspective is one that evaluates a behavior as right or wrong based on the action itself. A utilitarian perspective is one that evaluates a behavior as right or wrong based on the outcome of the action. In the field of moral psychology, the “moral dilemma” is a classic moral judgment problem that has been used in numerous studies to discover people’s tendency to make moral judgments in various situations.

Theory and Models

Existing models of how people make moral judgments are organized around two basic objectives ( Guglielmo, 2015 ). Information Models have the goal of identifying the specific information content that forms the basis of people’s moral judgments: the various aspects of the behavior, the extent to which the actor’s relevant characteristics lead people to believe that the actor is responsible and reprehensible, such as the causation of agents’ behavior ( Lagnado and Channon, 2008 ), the actor’s degree of intent ( Darley and Shultz, 1990 ; Ohtsubo, 2007 ; Gray et al., 2012 ), and the actor’s reasons, motivations, and beliefs ( Suls and Kalle, 1978 ; Nelson-Le Gall, 1985 ; Zelazo et al., 1996 ; Young and Saxe, 2009 ; Tannenbaum et al., 2011 ; Inbar et al., 2012 ). By contrast, Processing Models have the goal of determining the psychological processes that produce moral judgments, including the extent to which these judgments are driven by intuitive, emotional processing or by thoughtful, rational processing.

These theories on moral judgment focus on the “antecessors” of moral judgment (i.e., the information taken into account and how the information is processed), but they pay little attention to understanding the “consequences” of moral judgment, especially the social consequences ( Rom et al., 2017 ).

Social Perception Based on Other’s Moral Judgments

What are the consequences when people make their moral judgments? One important consequence may be that people’s judgments of moral dilemmas affect how others view them. Haidt (2001) argued that moral judgments are essentially social in nature because they convey important information about the person making the judgment. The assumption is that observers make inferences about a person’s character based on the person’s moral judgments.

Numerous studies have found that people are sensitive to the psychological factors that drive others to make moral decisions ( Weiner, 1985 ; Cushman and Mele, 2008 ; Pizarro and Tannenbaum, 2011 ). Recent works have also shown that bystanders make inferences about others’ personalities based on the moral judgments they make ( Uhlmann et al., 2013 ; Kreps and Monin, 2014 ; Everett et al., 2016 ; Sacco et al., 2017 ). According to research, people who make deontological decisions in moral dilemmas are rated as more empathetic and as having higher moral qualities than those who make utilitarian decisions ( Uhlmann et al., 2013 ), and those who express utilitarian views are considered less moral than those who express deontological views, sometimes even less moral than those who express no clear views at all ( Kreps and Monin, 2014 ). People who make deontological judgments are also more likely to be chosen as social partners and are considered more moral, likeable, and trustworthy ( Everett et al., 2016 ; Sacco et al., 2017 ), including being more trustworthy in economic games than those who make utilitarian judgments ( Everett et al., 2016 ). In several experiments conducted by Rom et al. (2017) , participants made inferences about how emotion and cognition affected the moral decision maker’s judgments, and they used this information to infer whether the decision maker was warm or competent. Specifically, participants rated people who made deontological judgments as relatively warm and enthusiastic, whereas people who made utilitarian judgments were rated as relatively competent.

Some researchers ( Uhlmann et al., 2015 ) have proposed human-centered explanations for moral judgments, which focus on individuals rather than behaviors as the unit of moral evaluation analysis. With regard to moral judgment, people are more like intuitive virtue theorists rather than deontologists or utilitarians, who each describe people in a one-sided way. There is growing evidence that individuals are fundamentally motivated to evaluate others on a moral level—people quickly and easily attribute good or bad moral traits to others at an early stage of interaction, with limited information ( Goodwin et al., 2014 ).

Social Situation Influence Moral Judgments

Rom et al. (2017) also raised questions about whether people who are making moral judgments are aware that others may judge them accordingly, and, if so, whether people strategically shift their solution of the dilemma to create an ideal impression. According to the theoretical framework of social cognition ( Bandura, 2001 ), it is usually the interaction of situational factors and individual characteristics that leads people to engage in certain behaviors and to make certain decisions. Moral judgments should also be influenced by social cognitive factors, but most previous studies ( Guglielmo, 2015 ) have ignored this issue. At the very least, there appears to be a conformity effect in moral judgment making.

That is to say, participants appeared to change their publicly presented moral judgment, suggesting that there can be proactive processing in moral judgment ( Uhlmann et al., 2009 ; Liu and Ditto, 2013 ), and the judgment of moral issues is sensitive to social impact. Similarly, Kundu and Cummins (2013) asked participants to make moral judgments about a range of dilemmas, either alone or in a group that included three confederates. The results showed a significant conformity effect: compared to participants who made moral judgments by themselves, those in a group made more judgments that were consistent with the other group members’ judgments, even though those judgments were contrary to common sense.

Thus, we speculate that when people make moral judgments in real life, they engage in social cognition and will consider and integrate other information from the outside world as needed to adjust their judgments. In fact, if people believe that conformity with others can maximize the expected value of decision-making, conformity can be seen as a rational choice. In social interactions, people no longer think only about the event itself, but also plan and evaluate the consequences of their actions, which can be adaptive. It can be inferred that higher-order social cognitive processes are likely to transcend low-order affective and cognitive processing of dilemma judgments ( Rom et al., 2017 ). Behavior in a social situation has both the significance of fact evaluation and the characteristics of value evaluation. In social behavior, task-oriented motivation (focus on task), and expressive motivation (display of self-related characteristics, impression management) exist simultaneously. Individuals are motivated to engage in active impression management when they realize that their behavior is being or may be evaluated by others. If individuals want to let others know who they are, they need to package information about themselves and present the information in a concise way to make the desired impression on others. According to Leary and Kowalski (1990) , all behaviors can be regarded as self-presentation behaviors. Moral behavior is no exception.

Everyone inevitably plays different social roles at different times and places, each of which has corresponding social expectations ( Callero, 1994 ). In the field of social cognition, numerous studies ( Fiske et al., 2002 ; Abele et al., 2008 ; Cuddy et al., 2008 ) have confirmed the existence of people’s common stereotypes and prejudices toward various groups. As individuals and groups in social situations are evaluated and recognized, they are motivated to convey information to the outside world through their behaviors and decisions (such as decisions regarding moral dilemmas). Especially as a link in the formation of cultural norms, moral judgment not only has important adaptive significance for individuals and groups but also plays an important role in the production of moral ethics and cultural norms in the process of interaction. However, there is still a lack of research on the influence of social cognition and social perceptions on moral judgments. The current study addresses this gap in the literature.

Overview of Studies

As far as we know, only one study had investigated the moral judgments in the presence of situational expectations ( Rom and Conway, 2018 ). They found that American and German participants had accurate meta-insight regarding the inferences of others, which draw about their personality from their dilemma judgments, and participants strategically shifted public dilemma judgments to present themselves as warm or competent in order to present situational favorable impressions.

We are also interested in whether such effects exist in Chinese culture. The moral status of specific social behaviors can vary widely across cultures. Previous studies have also suggested that there may be cultural differences in dilemma judgments. For example, those in collectivist cultures are more likely to consider additional contextual information when forming judgments, such as whether or not it is their place (or duty) to act ( Gold et al., 2014 ). This relational consideration in turn leads to less reprimand of individuals who do not take action, and fewer character attributions of actions made in the absence of their broader contextual meaning ( An and Trafimow, 2013 ). On the other hand, Chinese have more interdependent self-construals, one consequence of which is that they care more about the opinion of others ( Markus and Kitayama, 1991 ), which makes it more likely that the Chinese will do what is expected of them.

Dimensions of basic social perception are culturally consistent. People’s daily lives require a quick and effective impression of most other individuals. In studying how people perceive and understand each other, there appear to be two dimensions that differentiate groups and individuals: warmth and competence ( Rosenberg et al., 1968 ; Wiggins, 1979 ; Peeters and Czapinski, 1990 ; Peeters, 1992, 2008 ; Phalet and Poppe, 1997 ; Paulhus and John, 1998 ; Dubois and Beauvois, 2005 ; Judd et al., 2005 ; Abele and Wojciszke, 2007 ; Fiske et al., 2007 ; Cuddy et al., 2008 ). These studies have consistently shown that people hold significantly different stereotypes regarding the warmth and competence of target groups defined by occupation, ethnicity, nationality, religion, socioeconomic level, and gender. Surveys across different cultures found a stereotype content model with warmth × competence space mapping of social groups ( Cuddy et al., 2007 ; Imhoff et al., 2013 ). We assume that there should be cross-cultural consistency in the social perception of moral judgments too.

When people perceive external expectations or requirements of a certain social role, they are likely to adjust their moral behavior accordingly to meet their needs or achieve goals. In the context of moral dilemmas, the person who makes the judgment and the person who evaluates the decision maker together create a form of social communication. We assumed that when Chinese participants perceive the target characteristics, they will strategically express moral judgments that conform to external expectations, so as to obtain expected results. The following four studies were carried out to test this assumption.

Study 1 examined participants’ inferences about the warmth or competence of an agent who made characteristic deontological or consequentialist judgments. Study 2 looked in the opposite direction to examine participants’ inferences about what kind of judgments would be made by an agent characterized as either warm or competent. In Study 3, we used several moral dilemmas to see if participants strategically shifted their moral judgments in response to perceived social factors (the social role they were striving to fulfill and the expectations of others). Study 4 repeated the steps of Study 3 and increased the measurement of participants’ prediction of external expectations to confirm the mediating effect.

Previous studies in Western countries have found that people evaluate those who make a particular kind of moral judgment as having varying degrees of competence or warmth. The primary concern of Study 1 was to see whether this same pattern of evaluation differentiation would be found in a sample of Chinese college students. We hypothesized that consistent with the results of earlier studies, participants will think that actors who make deontological moral judgments are more likely to be warm and that those who make utilitarian moral judgments are more likely to be competent.

Participants

This and studies to be reported next were carried out in accordance with the ethics principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants signed an informed consent form for the experiment. Sample size in each study was determined before any data analysis.

Two hundred and thirty-two college students were recruited through WJX.cn and were paid¥2.5 for their time. Twenty-two participants’ questionnaires were eliminated from subsequent analyses due to too many blanks. Final N = 210 (118 females, 92 males). Mean age was 21.1 years (SD = 2.45).

Procedure and Materials

Participants were told that they needed to evaluate the different dimensions of a person’s personality in a questionnaire. The online questionnaire was arranged as follows: we firstly introduced an individual LM to participants (“LM is a college student of the same age as you, who has made some kind of judgment or choice in the face of several different situations, please make your evaluation of him/her according to his/her behavior”). Next, we presented three moral dilemmas and LM’s answers to them in a fixed random order. Then, we asked the participant to evaluate LM’s traits in each dilemma.

Three moral dilemmas were used in this study: Trolley, Lifeboat, and Crying baby dilemma.

Study 1 used the items adapted by Fiske et al. (2002) and employed by Rom et al. (2017) as the questionnaire evaluation topic, in which participants needed to rate LM’s warmth, competence, and morality. Participants expressed their evaluation on how well four warmth traits (warm, good-natured, tolerant, and sincere), five competence traits (competent, confident, independent, competitive, and intelligent), and one moral trait (moral) describe LM on seven-point scales anchored at 1 (not at all) and 7 (very much).

There were two kinds of questionnaires, one of which LM makes a biased consequentialist judgment on all dilemmas, and the other of which LM makes a biased deontological judgment. Participants would be randomly assigned to fill in one of the questionnaires.

Results and Discussion

Firstly, questionnaire data were collated and descriptive statistics were conducted. This study concerned the differences in participants’ perception of the target object. Therefore, we averaged judgments into composites of warmth (α = 0.907), competence (α = 0.907), and morality (α = 0.722).

Ratings were submitted to a 2 (target tendency: deontology vs. consequentialism) × 2 (personality evaluation: warmth vs. competence) repeated measures ANOVA with the first factor between-subjects and the last factor within-subjects.

There was no main effect of personality evaluation, F (1, 208) = 0.027, p = 0.87, and η p 2 = 0.0001, but main effect of target tendency was significant, F (1, 208) = 6.54, p = 0.011, and η p 2 = 0.03. For targets who had shown a deontological tendency, the overall evaluation on warmth and competence they received ( M = 4.44, SD = 0.70) is higher than those who hold consequentialist moral judgment tendency ( M = 4.26, SD = 0.82).

The two-way interaction between personality evaluation and target tendency was significant, F (1, 208) = 83.24, p < 0.001, and η p 2 = 0.286. Simple effect analysis demonstrated that targets who had shown a consequentialism tendency were considered more in accord with competence dimension ( M = 4.65, SD = 0.1) rather than warmth dimension ( M = 3.79, SD = 0.1), F (1, 208) = 47.67, p < 0.001, and η p 2 = 0.205. Conversely, targets who had shown a deontological tendency were considered more in accord with warmth dimension ( M = 4.91, SD = 1.0) than with competence dimension ( M = 4.07, SD = 1.0), F (1, 208) = 36.65, p < 0.001, and η p 2 = 0.157 (see Figure 1 ).

Figure 1. Agents who had shown a consequentialism tendency were considered more in accord with competence dimension rather than warmth dimension. Conversely, agents who had shown a deontological tendency were considered more in accord with warmth dimension (Study 1). Error bars reflect standard errors.

In addition, the mean value of three grades on moral dimension items was calculated as a result of evaluation toward target’s moral score. Ratings were submitted to a target’s moral judgment tendency (consequentialism vs. deontology) t test. The results showed that the main effect was significant, t (208) = 6.77, p < 0.001, and Cohen’s d = 0.94; participants rated targets who had shown a deontology tendency ( M = 4.78, SD = 1.30) as more moral than those who had shown consequentialism tendency ( M = 3.57, SD = 1.30).

This study found that participants made more positive evaluations of individuals who held deontological moral judgments, both in the moral dimension and in the warmth and competence dimensions, which indicates that deontological moral judgments contain prosocial information to some extent. This result is consistent with the previous studies ( Uhlmann et al., 2013 ; Kreps and Monin, 2014 ; Everett et al., 2016 ; Sacco et al., 2017 ).

The results of Study 1 also demonstrated that people believe that those who make deontological moral judgments are warmer, whereas those who make utilitarian moral judgments are more competent. This result is also consistent with previous research results ( Rom et al., 2017 ). Based on Study 1, we know that Chinese college students, like participants in research conducted in the west, have a tendency to speculate about the personality characteristics that lead others to make certain moral judgments. However, this pattern has not been explored in the opposite direction to see if people assume that actors with different personalities make different types of moral judgments. This was further explored in Study 2.

The results of Study 1 showed that, as in other studies, Chinese college students made systematic inferences about the personality characteristics associated with deontological and utilitarian moral judgments.

In Study 2, we wanted to see if people with different personalities were seen by others as more or less likely to make different types of moral judgments. It was hypothesized that evaluators will think that a person who conforms to the warmth dimension will be inclined to make deontological moral judgments, whereas they will think that a person who conforms to the competence dimension will be inclined to make consequentialist moral judgments.

Forty-five college students (29 female, 16 males; M age = 20.53, SD = 1.87) were invited into the laboratory to participate in Study 2 and were paid ¥5 for their time.

Participants were first presented with several keywords about one of the basic dimensions of social perception. Then, they were asked to imagine a character X based on these keywords. Finally, they need to speculate on what judgments that character would make in several moral dilemmas.

All the words used in Study 2 were summarized by Cuddy et al. (2008) . The moral dilemmas used are Trolley, Footbridge, and Lifeboat.

The final question of each dilemma was modified to ask participants to speculate to what extent X will think it is appropriate to make a consequentialist choice. They were going to rate the degree on the Likert seven-point scale, from 1 (totally inappropriate) to 7 (totally appropriate), with higher scores being closer to the consequentialist judgment and lower scores being closer to the deontological judgment.

Ratings were submitted to a personality (warmth vs. competence) independent t test and then found a significant main effect, t (43) = 5.15, p < 0.001, and Cohen’s d = 1.54. Compared with a person whose personality conforms to the warmth dimension ( M = 2.99, SD = 0.95), a competence trait possessor ( M = 4.58, SD = 1.12) was regarded as more likely to think the consequentialism choices are more appropriate (see Figure 2 ).

Figure 2. Compared with a warmth possessor, a competence trait possessor was regarded as more likely to think the consequentialism choices are more appropriate (Study 2). Error bars reflect standard errors.

This result validates the previous hypothesis that participants do think that warm people will be inclined to make deontological moral judgments and that competent people will be inclined to make consequentialist judgments; this result further advances Study 1. On the basis of knowing that people’s character traits can be inferred from moral judgments, Study 2 shows that people’s tendency of moral judgments can also be inferred from their personality traits.

This raises the questions of whether people realize that others may judge them based on their moral judgments, and whether they will be able to strategically shift their judgments to create an ideal impression ( Rom et al., 2017 ). Study 3 focused on these questions.

Having demonstrated that people infer personality traits based on others’ moral dilemma judgments in Study 1 and that they infer moral judgments based on personality traits in Study 2, in Study 3, we examined whether people will strategically shift their moral judgments based on information about others’ inferences. Specifically, Study 3 explored how people judge moral dilemmas when they perceive that they need to be in a certain social role with either warmth or competence as the core quality. It was hypothesized that the moral judgments will tend to be deontological when people realize that they need to strive to be in a warm social role. By contrast, their moral judgments will incline toward utilitarianism when they want to be in a competent role.

In Study 3, an interview situation was set up to test these hypotheses. Participants were required to prepare for a fictional job interview, in which they needed to work hard to get an offer. Each job they applied for corresponded to a social character whose core quality was warmth or competence. They were told that their performance in the job application process would determine their final payment. Hence, in order to ensure that the two characters in the experiment actually fit the warmth and competence dimensions, respectively, we conducted a pretest.

Forty-five Chinese university students were recruited (27 females, 18 males, M age = 20.58, and SD = 1.85) to test whether participants prioritized warmth for receptionists of mental health center, and competence for restaurant managers.

We firstly introduced to all participants that warmth and competence are universal dimensions of social perception and each dimension was described by several labels. The words used here come from the summary of Cuddy et al. (2008) . Then, they were asked to rate how important the traits of the two dimensions were to each character. Finally, participants rated the importance of the warmth and competence on scales from 1 (not at all important) to 7 (very important).

These ratings were submitted to a 2 (role: receptionist of mental health center vs. restaurant manager) × 2 (trait: warmth vs. competence) repeated measures ANOVA with both two factors within-subjects. There was no main effect of either social role, F (1,44) = 0.131, p = 0.719, and η p 2 = 0.003, or trait, F (1,44) = 0.317, p = 0.577, and η p 2 = 0.007. However, we found a significant interaction, F (1,44) = 84.315, p < 0.001, and η p 2 = 0.657. Simple effect tests demonstrated that participants rated warmth ( M = 6.53, SD = 0.73) as more important than competence ( M = 5.08, SD = 1.35) for a receptionist in a mental health center, F (1,44) = 59.77, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.58, and competence ( M = 6.51, SD = 0.59) as more important than warmth ( M = 5.2, SD = 1.17) for a restaurant manager, F (1,44) = 45.00, p < 0.001, and η p 2 = 0.51 (see Figure 3 ).

Figure 3. In pretest, participants rated warmth as more important than competence for a receptionist in a mental health center and competence as more important than warmth for a restaurant manager (Study 3). Error bars reflect standard errors.

So, if people are going to apply to be a receptionist of a mental health center, they may make a more deontological judgment about the dilemma, given that the traits required for the role is warmth. They may make a more consequentialist judgment when they apply to be a restaurant manager, of whom the core personality is competence.

Seventy-one Chinese university students (30 females, 41 males; M age = 19.5, and SD = 1.63) were invited into the laboratory to participate in this study.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (social role: receptionist of mental health center vs. restaurant manager). Firstly, they were told that they needed to go for an interview, and that their final payment would depend on how well they performed in the interview. The basic payment was ¥6, and the additional rewards ranged from ¥1 to ¥6. Then, they read a brief description of the job that they were applying for and took enough time to understand and prepare.

When the formal interview came, participants needed to first verbally describe their understanding of the key points of the job and their initial plans upon entry. After a short break, a questionnaire was filled out. The questionnaire included questions on moral judgment and simple intelligence test questions as fillers. After each moral dilemma, participants had a relatively long time to make decisions. They needed to rate to what extent they thought that it was appropriate to carry out a utilitarian behavior in each scenario. Participants used a scale ranging from 1 (not at all appropriate) to 7 (very appropriate), with higher scores being closer to a utilitarian judgment and lower scores being closer to a deontological judgment. The moral dilemmas used in Study 3 were Trolley, Footbridge, and Lifeboat dilemmas. We were also interested to see whether participants in the formal experiment, like those in the pretest, rated the importance of warmth and competence in the job differently. So, we increased measurement of this question at the end of the interview.

Instructions and questions were displayed on a computer screen at certain times, and participants responded with pen and paper. The reward they received was actually at random, not related to their answers.

We submitted ratings to a social role (receptionist of mental health center vs. restaurant manager) independent t test and then found a significant main effect, t (69) = 2.67, p = 0.009, and Cohen’s d = 0.64. As predicted, people who aspired to be restaurant managers ( M = 3.82, SD = 0.22) exhibit more consequentialist tendencies than those who aspired to be mental health center receptionists ( M = 2.96, SD = 0.23; see Figure 4 ).

Figure 4. People who aspired to be restaurant managers exhibit more consequentialist tendencies than those who aspired to be mental health center receptionists (Study 3). Error bars reflect standard errors.

Moreover, Study 3 also re-examined participates’ ratings of the importance of warmth and competence in the two occupations.

Ratings were submitted to a 2 (role: receptionist of mental health center vs. restaurant manager) × 2 (trait: warmth vs. competence) repeated measures ANOVA with the first factor between-subjects and the last factor within-subjects. There was no main effect of either social role, F (1,69) = 0.000003, p = 0.99, η p 2 = 0.000003, or trait, F (1,69) = 0.013, p = 0.91, and η p 2 = 0.0002. There was a significant interaction, F (1,69) = 31.41, p < 0.001, and η p 2 = 0.313. Simple effect analysis demonstrated that participants rated warmth ( M = 6.41, SD = 0.89) as more important than competence ( M = 5.53, SD = 1.21) for a receptionist in a mental health center, F (1,69) = 14.46, p < 0.001, η p 2 = 0.17, and competence ( M = 6.43, SD = 0.83) as more important than warmth ( M = 5.51, SD = 1.04) for a restaurant manager, F (1,69) = 17.07, p < 0.001, and η p 2 = 0.19 (see Figure 5 ). This result replicates the trend of participants’ evaluation in pretest. Again, people do have different perceptions of warmth and competence in the mental health center receptionist and restaurant managers.

Figure 5. Participants in Study 3 rated warmth as more important than competence for a receptionist in a mental health center and competence as more important than warmth for a restaurant manager, which replicates the trend of participants’ evaluation in pretest (Study 3). Error bars reflect standard errors.

The results of Study 3 conformed to the hypotheses. When people perceive that others have expectations of them, and strive to be in a social role that conforms to the warmth dimension, their moral judgments are inclined to be deontological. When people strive to be in a social role that conforms to the competence dimension, their moral judgments are inclined to be consequentialist. This conclusion suggests that moral judgments, like many other social judgments, are sensitive to environmental factors and social influences, rather than reflecting a stable individual approach to moral decision-making.

The results of Study 3 suggested that people do make different moral judgments when faced with the demands of different social roles, consistent with the assumption that moral judgments are sensitive to environmental factors, but what was the reason for this effect? Those effects we found in Study 3 are driven by a number of motivations such as making a good impression to others, obtaining approval, and finally getting a job offer. In social interaction, people need to identify the ideal expectations of their evaluators, then perform in accordance with this expectation. Hence, we assumed that the perceived external expectation would be an important mediator of the effect of social role on moral judgments. Therefore, Study 4 had two objectives: to examine whether the effects in Study 3 could be replicated in a new sample and to test the mediating effect of perceived external evaluation.

Sixty-four Chinese university students (41 females, 23 males; M age = 19.92, SD = 1.97) participated in Study 4.

Procedure and materials of this study are similar to those of Study 3. Once again, a new group of participants were asked to accomplish the task of job applying. They had to make efforts toward adopting either a receptionist of mental health center (a warm role) or a restaurant manager (a competent role). We again measured participants’ moral judgments in the context of different social perception interventions. However, only one dilemma (Footbridge) was used here. In addition, based on the experimental process of Study 3, Study 4 added a cognitive question of participants on the recruiters’ ideas at the end. We asked: “and what do you think the recruiter is looking for in your response to that dilemma question?” Then, participants should rate it on a scale from 1 (not at all appropriate) to 7 (very appropriate), with higher scores being closer to the deontological judgment and lower scores being closer to the consequentialist judgment. Instructions and questions were displayed on a computer screen at certain times, and participants responded with pen and paper. The reward they received was actually at random, regardless of their answers.

We submitted ratings to a social role (receptionist of mental health center vs. restaurant manager) independent t test and then still found a significant main effect (see Figure 6 ), t (62) = 3.94, p < 0.001, and Cohen’s d = 0.98. People who strive to be a competent role (restaurant managers; M = 3.31, SD = 1.84) exhibited more consequentialist tendencies than those who aspire to be warm role (mental health center receptionists; M = 1.81, SD = 1.12).

Figure 6. Participants who aspired to be restaurant managers (competent role) exhibit more consequentialist tendencies than those who aspired to be mental health center receptionists (warm role), which is consistent with the trend of results in Study 3 (Study 4). Error bars reflect standard errors.

In order to determine whether perceived external expectation mediated the effect of perceived target social roles on moral judgments, we conducted a 10,000-iteration simultaneous mediation bootstrap analysis using the PROCESS macro according to the procedures recommended by Preacher and Hayes (2008) .

As expected, target social role positively perceived external expectation, B = 0.47, SE = 0.11, p < 0.001, and 95% CI [0.25, 0.70]. There was a significant indirect effect of target social roles on moral judgments through perceived external expectation, B = 0.27, SE = 0.07, p < 0.001, and 95% CI [0.14, 0.43] (see Table 1 ).

Table 1. Model estimation results for mediation of perceived external expectation effect on target role to moral judgment.

This provides further evidence that people indeed take into account the expectations of the outside world when making moral judgments. They engage in self-presentation of their moral judgments to ensure that the outside world receives information about the personality traits that they want to convey.

General Discussion

Moral judgments as signals of personality traits.

Study 1 and Study 2 confirmed that people will infer personality traits based on others’ moral dilemma judgments and will also speculate about others’ moral judgments based on their personalities. Specifically, Study 1 showed that people see those who make deontological moral judgments as having personality characteristics on the warmth dimension and those who make utilitarian moral judgments as having personality characteristics on the competence dimension. Study 2 found that people think that a person who fits the warmth dimension will be inclined to make deontological moral judgments, whereas a person who fits the competence dimension will be inclined to make utilitarian moral judgments. According to these results, we can surmise that each type of moral decision has an underlying social signaling value.

In addition, Study 1 found that individuals with deontological moral judgments were rated positively as a whole. This result is also consistent with previous studies. In fact, moral intuitions often align with deontology. For example, people who made deontological decisions in moral dilemmas were rated as more empathetic and moral ( Uhlmann et al., 2013 ). According to Kreps and Monin (2014) , those who expressed utilitarian views were considered less moral than those who expressed deontological views, and they were sometimes even considered less moral than those who expressed no clear views. In a series of five studies, Everett et al. (2016) found that people who make deontological judgments are more likely to be selected as social partners, are considered more moral and trustworthy, and are more trusted in economic games. In a study by Sacco et al. (2017) , participants reported liking and trusting deontological decision makers. Deontological decisions had an even greater effect on perceived trustworthiness than on liking, and trust was crucial for group cooperation. Researchers such as Everett et al. (2016) argue that these findings provide empirical support for the selection of moral intuitions and that deontological judgments confer an adaptive function by increasing the likelihood that a person will be chosen as a partner. Thus, deontological moral intuition may represent an evolutionarily prescribed a priori condition that is realized through partner selection mechanisms. This similar trend has been found in the context of China and other countries, suggesting to some extent that the sociocultural connotations of ethics may be consistent across cultures.

However, in some cases, utilitarianists are preferred to deontologists. According to previous studies and theories, it is well known that utilitarian judgments are often the result of slow, deliberative cognitive processes and they maximize revenue. In real life, when people choose social partners, what they value most about others may vary from relationship to relationship. When choosing an emotional partner, a deontologist may be viewed most favorably, but when choosing a doctor or lawyer, a utilitarian might be preferred.

How Does Social Perception Affect Moral Judgment?

Moral behavior, for example moral judgments, can also be regarded as a form of self-presentation and impression management. Based on this idea, Study 3 and Study 4 examined people’s moral judgments in situations where they were aware of being perceived by others. We found that when people perceived that they needed to be in a social role that conformed to the characteristics of the warmth dimension, their moral judgment was inclined to deontology. When people needed to be in a social role that conformed to the characteristics of the competence dimension, their moral judgment was inclined to utilitarianism. Study 4 found that this association was mediated by perceived external expectations. These findings suggest that social cognitive factors have an impact on people’s moral judgment. Thus, a social cognitive perspective on moral judgment can perhaps address the limitations of the information and processing models of moral judgment. Social perception can be regarded as a kind of information, but it is different from the information emphasized in these other models, such as information related to moral events themselves and the agent’s intentions. Instead, information from social perception comes from the external environment.

How do we comprehend the results? When moral judgment occurs in a social context, it is no longer a private decision. However, few researchers have paid attention to social influences on moral judgment. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, moral judgment and moral norms are derived from the strategic interaction among group members who experience interest fusion and conflict ( Krebs, 2008 ). Considering that the human sense of morality is thought to have developed partly to promote social cooperation in groups, moral judgment that is sensitive to social perception is adaptive. The assumption is that when people believe that actions (judgments) contain rich information about others’ moral qualities, they use this information to obtain their own objectives. Perspective-taking or “mind-reading” abilities are invaluable tools in strategic interactions ( Krebs, 2008 ). They enable people to construct cognitive representations of others and store those in mind; to look at events from the perspective of others and understand others’ thoughts, feelings, and plans; and to imagine how others will respond to their actions ( Selman, 1980 ).

Krebs (2008) argued that the evolutionary mechanism of dynamic strategic interactions between communicative individuals explains the moral judgments that group members make, how they choose to accept or reject these judgments, and how certain moral judgments are copied and repeated enough to constitute cultural norms. Krebs proposed a simple model to describe the relationship between biological and cultural processes in the evolution of ethics. Every time an individual expresses a moral judgment of another individual, the receiver decides to accept or reject it depending on evolved information-processing and decision-making mechanisms. Senders (and receivers and observers) tend to repeat what others have accepted, and they avoid repeating what is not accepted. In this way, the process not only forms feedback but also contributes to the formation of a culture’s ethics. Therefore, moral judgments, which were found in this study to be sensitive to social perceptual factors, can also be seen as playing a role in promoting or maintaining moral norms.

Limitations and Future Directions

This study has some limitations. Firstly, the sample size in Studies 2, 3, and 4 are relatively small and are not heterogeneous enough, and samples in Studies 2 and 4 are not very gender-balanced. Experiments on related topics in the future need to increase the sample size and try to use a more representative sample, with regard to age, sociocultural background, and gender. Second, social perception was studied only in terms of the dimensions of warmth and competence. However, moral judgments are influenced by many other pieces of information, which can be further investigated. For example, there are many personality traits that can be viewed as “warm” and “competent.” However, in Study 1, the scores of warmth dimension and competence dimension were obtained by averaging the score of four warmth traits and five competence traits, respectively. Participants in Study 2 were provided with five words of different dimensions when constructing a character with core characteristics, and it is unknown which exact words or traits the participants adopted to make the final prediction of the agent’s moral judgment. Therefore, future researchers can look for the connection between moral judgments and personality traits that are more elaborate and specific than the dimensions of social perception evaluated in the current study.

It needs to be emphasized that this study addressed the relationship between moral judgment and personality traits at the level of interpersonal perception. What we learned is that people make assumptions about the judgments that people will make based on certain personality traits, and their moral dilemma decisions are accordingly adjusted when they are in the context of specific requirements. The issue is not whether a person actually has these traits, or whether people with these traits actually make certain kinds of judgments; rather, it is social perception that matters. Therefore, whether they do so or not in actuality is unclear, and this is a topic that can be explored in future research.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics Statement

This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Central China Normal University. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

WJ and MP proposed the research, analyzed the experimental results, and wrote the manuscript. WJ designed and carried out the experiments. Both authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This research was supported by the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (No. 18YJC90018), self-determined research funds of CCNU from the colleges’ basic research and operation of MOE (CCNU19TD018), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (CCNU20QN024). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.557216/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords : moral judgment, social perception, deontology, utilitarianism, warmth, competence

Citation: Jin WY and Peng M (2021) The Effects of Social Perception on Moral Judgment. Front. Psychol. 11:557216. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.557216

Received: 17 June 2020; Accepted: 23 December 2020; Published: 23 March 2021.

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Copyright © 2021 Jin and Peng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Ming Peng, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Kant’s Theory of Judgment

Theories of judgment, whether cognitive (i.e., object-representing, thought-expressing, truth-apt) judgment or practical (i.e., act-representing, choice-expressing, evaluation-apt) judgment, bring together fundamental issues in semantics, logic, cognitive psychology, and epistemology (collectively providing for what can be called the four “faces” of cognitive judgment [see also Martin 2006]), as well as action theory, moral psychology, and ethics (collectively providing for the three “faces” of practical judgment): indeed, the notion of judgment is central to any general theory of human rationality. But Kant’s theory of judgment differs sharply from many other theories of judgment, both traditional and contemporary, in three ways: (1) by taking the innate capacity for judgment to be the central cognitive faculty of the rational human mind , (2) by insisting on the semantic, logical, psychological, epistemic, and practical priority of the propositional content of a judgment , and (3) by systematically embedding judgment within the metaphysics of transcendental idealism . Several serious problems are generated by the interplay of the first two factors with the third. This in turn suggests that the other two parts of Kant’s theory of judgment can be logically detached from the strongest version of his transcendental idealism and defended independently of it. This entry also includes five supplementary documents covering (i) the debate about Kant’s conceptualism vs. Kant’s non-conceptualism, (ii) the epistemology of Kantian judgment and the ethics of Kantian belief, (iii) Kant’s logic in relation to his theory of judgment, (iv) kinds of use for judgments, and (v) completing the picture of Kant’s metaphysics of judgment.

1.1 The power of judgment and the other faculties of cognition

1.2 judgments are essentially propositional cognitions, 1.3 judgments, objective validity, objective reality, and truth.

• Supplement: The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism
• Supplement: Judging, Believing, and Scientific knowing

2.1 Kinds of logical form

• Supplement: Do the Apparent Limitations and Confusions of Kant’s Logic Undermine his Theory of Judgment?

2.2 Kinds of propositional content

• Supplement: Kinds of Use

3.1 Judgment, transcendental idealism, and truth

3.2 is kant a verificationist.

• Supplement: Completing the Picture of Kant’s Metaphysics of Judgment

4.1 The bottom-up problem: essentially non-conceptual intuitions, rogue objects, and the gap in the B Deduction

4.2 the top-down problem: judgment, transcendental affinity, and the systematic unity of nature, 4.3 the dream-skeptical problem: judgment, problematic idealism, and the gap in the second analogy, 4.4 conclusion: judgment without strong transcendental idealism, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the nature of judgment.

Theories of cognitive judgment both prior to and after Kant tend to divide dichotomously into the psychologistic and platonistic camps, according to which, on the one hand, cognitive judgments are nothing but mental representations of relations of ideas, as, e.g., in the Port Royal Logic (Arnaud & Nicole 1996), or mentalistic ordered combinings of real individuals, universals, and logical constants, as, e.g., in Russell’s early theory of judgment (Russell 1966), or on the other hand, cognitive judgments are nothing but assertoric psychological states or attitudes aimed at mind-independent, abstract propositions or thoughts, as, e.g., in Bolzano’s and Frege’s theories of judgment (Bolzano 1972, Frege 1979, Frege 1984). And, seemingly, never the twain shall meet (Martin 2006, Hanna 2006a, ch. 1). But by sharp contrast to both the psychologistic and platonistic camps, Kant’s theory of judgment is at once cognitivist, anti-psychologistic, and anti-platonistic. More precisely, according to Kant, judgments are complex conscious cognitions that (i) refer to objects either directly (via intuitions) or indirectly (via concepts), (ii) include concepts that are predicated either of those objects or of other constituent concepts, (iii) exemplify pure logical concepts and enter into inferences according to pure logical laws, (iv) essentially involve both the following of rules and the application of rules to the objects picked out by intuitions, (v) express true or false propositions (truth-aptness), (vi) mediate the formation of beliefs and other intentional acts, and (vii) are unified and self-conscious.

The three leading features of this account are, first, Kant’s taking the innate capacity for judgment to be the central cognitive faculty of the human mind, in the sense that judgment, alone among our various cognitive achievements, is the joint product of all of the other cognitive faculties operating coherently and systematically together under a single higher-order unity of rational self-consciousness ( the centrality thesis ); second, Kant’s insistence on the explanatory priority of the propositional content of a judgment over its basic cognitive-semantic constituents (i.e., intuitions and concepts), over the logical form of judgments, over the inferential role of judgments, over the rule-like character of the judgment, over the self-conscious psychological states in which propositions are grasped as well as the non-self-conscious psychological processes in which propositions are synthetically generated, over epistemic beliefs in those propositions, over all other propositional attitudes, and also over intentional acts guided and mediated by those propositions, including non-epistemic acts of various kinds ( the priority-of-the-proposition thesis ); and third, Kant’s background metaphysical doctrine to the effect that judgments are empirically meaningful (objectively valid) and true (objectively real) if and only if transcendental idealism is correct ( the transcendental idealism thesis ).

According to Kant, a “judgment” ( Urteil ) is a specific kind of “cognition” ( Erkenntnis )—which he generically defines as any conscious mental representation of an object (A320/B376)—that is the characteristic output of the “power of judgment” ( Urteilskraft ). The power of judgment, in turn, is a cognitive “capacity” ( Fähigkeit ) but also specifically a spontaneous and innate cognitive capacity, and in virtue of these it is the “faculty of judging” ( Vermögen zu urteilen ) (A69/B94), which is also the same as the “faculty of thinking” ( Vermögen zu denken ) (A81/B106).

For Kant the mind is essentially active and vital—“the mind ( Gemüt ) for itself is entirely life (the principle of life itself)” (5: 278)—and a cognitive capacity in turn is a determinate conscious propensity of the mind to generate objective representations of certain kinds under certain conditions. What do spontaneity and innateness add to a mere capacity for cognition, so that it becomes a “ faculty of cognition” ( Erkenntnisvermögen )? A cognitive faculty is spontaneous in that whenever it is externally stimulated by raw unstructured sensory data as inputs, it then automatically organizes or “synthesizes” those data in an unprecedented way relative to those inputs, thereby yielding novel structured cognitions as outputs (B1–2, A50/B74, B132, B152). So cognitive spontaneity is a structural creativity of the mind with respect to its representations. It is a controverted question of recent Kant-interpretation whether cognitive spontaneity derives exclusively from the conceptual or discursive capacity of the rational human mind (B152) (Longuenesse 1998, chs. 1–3, 5, 8), or can also derive independently from the intuitional, non-conceptual, or sensible capacity of the rational human mind, shared with minded non-rational human or non-human animals (B151) (Hanna 2006b, ch. 1, McLear 2011). Correspondingly, it is also a controverted question whether according to Kant there is only one basic kind of synthesis, i.e., conceptual/discursive synthesis, or two basic kinds, i.e., conceptual/discursive synthesis and intuitional/non-conceptual/sensible synthesis. These controverted questions, in turn, are closely connected with the recent vigorous debate about Kant’s conceptualism vs. Kant’s non-conceptualism in relation to his theory of judgment, and the implications of this for interpreting and critically evaluating Kant’s transcendental idealism and the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding, a.k.a. “the Categories” (see the supplementary document The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism and Sections 4.1 to 4.2 below).

Kant also uses the term ‘spontaneity’ in a somewhat different sense in a metaphysical context, to refer to a mental cause that can sufficiently determine an effect in time while also lacking any temporally prior sufficient cause of itself (A445/B473). Call this practical spontaneity. What is shared between the two senses of spontaneity, practical and cognitive, is the unprecedented, creative character of the mind’s operations. But in the cognitive sense of spontaneity, what is crucial is that the sensory data manifest “poverty of the stimulus” (Cook & Newson 1996, 81–85)—significant underdetermination of the outputs of an embodied cognitive capacity by the relevant inputs to that capacity, plus previous experiences or habituation—although the faculty’s spontaneity must also always be minimally conditioned by external sensory triggering (B1–2). Correspondingly, a Kantian cognitive faculty is innate in the threefold sense that (i) it is intrinsic to the mind, hence a necessary part of the nature of the rational animal possessing that faculty, (ii) it contains internal structures that are necessarily or strictly underdetermined by any and all sensory impressions and/or empirical facts—which is the same as their being a priori (B2), and (iii) it automatically systematically synthesizes those sensory inputs according to special normative rules that directly reflect the internal structures of the faculty, thereby generating its correlatively-structured outputs. So Kantian innateness is essentially a procedure-based innateness, consisting in an a priori active readiness of the mind for implementing normative rules of synthesis, as opposed to the content-based innateness of Cartesian and Leibnizian innate ideas, according to which an infinitely large supply of complete (e.g., mathematical) beliefs, propositions, or concepts themselves are either occurrently or dispositionally intrinsic to the mind. But as Locke pointed out, this implausibly overloads the human mind’s limited storage capacities.

In contrast to both Rationalists and Empiricists, who hold that the human mind has only one basic cognitive faculty—reason or sense perception, respectively—Kant is a cognitive-faculty dualist who holds that the human mind has two basic cognitive faculties: (i) the “understanding” ( Verstand ), the faculty of concepts, thought, and discursivity, and (ii) the “sensibility” ( Sinnlichkeit ), the faculty of intuitions/non-conceptual cognitions, sense perception, and mental imagery (A51/B75). The essential difference between the faculties of understanding and sensibility, and correspondingly the essential difference between concepts and intuitions (A50–52/B74–76), as distinct kinds of cognition, is a fundamental commitment of Kant’s theory of cognition generally and of his theory of judgment more specifically. Concepts are at once (a) general representations having the logical form of universality (9: 91), (b) discursive representations expressing pure logical forms and falling under pure logical laws (A68–70/B92–94, A239/B298), (c) complex intensions ranging over “comprehensions” ( Umfangen ) that contain all actual and possible objects falling under those intensions, as well as other narrower comprehensions (9: 95–96), (d) mediate or indirect (i.e., attributive or descriptive) representations of individual objects (A320/B376–377), (e) rules for classifying and organizing perceptions of objects (A106), and (f) “reflected” representations expressing the higher-order unity of rational self-consciousness, a.k.a. “apperception” (B133 and 133n.). Intuitions by contrast are conscious object-directed representations that are (1) singular (A320/B377) (9: 91), (2) sense-related (A19/B33, A51/B75), (3) object-dependent (B72) (4: 281), (4) immediate, or directly referential (A90–91/B122–123, B132, B145), and, above all, (5) non-conceptual (A284/B340) (9: 99) (Hanna 2001, ch. 4).

Understanding and sensibility are both subserved by the faculty of “imagination” ( Einbildungskraft ), which when taken generically is the source or engine of all sorts of synthesis, but which when taken as a “dedicated” or task-sensitive cognitive faculty, construed as either “productive” or “reproductive,” more specifically generates (α) the spatial and temporal forms of intuition, (β) novel mental imagery in conscious sensory states, (γ) reproductive imagery or memories, and (δ) “schemata,” which are supplementary rules for interpreting general conceptual rules in terms of more specific figural (spatiotemporal) forms and sensory images (A78/B103, B151, A100–102, A137–142/B176–181) (7: 167). At least in principle, then, the imagination mediates between the understanding and the sensibility by virtue of being an autonomous third basic cognitive capacity containing elements of each of the basic dual capacities (see,e.g., A115–119 and A139–142/B178–181)—which would, in effect, make Kant a cognitive-capacity trinitarian . But sometimes, contrariwise and somewhat incoherently, Kant seems instead to say that the imagination at once (i) belongs to sensibility and yet also (ii) is caused by the action of the understanding on sensibility. This deep unclarity about the nature of the imagination, in addition to being a flashpoint for important longstanding disagreements in Kant-scholarship on his theory of judgment (see, e.g., Heidegger 1990, Waxman 1991, Longuenesse 1998), also has some serious implications for Kant’s theory of judgment itself (again, see the supplementary document The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism and Sections 4.1 to 4.2 below).

Just as understanding and sensibility are sub served by the bottom-up cognitive processing of the imagination, so in turn they are also super served by the top-down cognitive processing of the faculty of “reason” ( Vernunft ), which produces logical inferences, carries out pragmatic or moral choices and decisions, a.k.a. “practical judgments”), imposes coherence and consistency on all sorts of cognitions, and above all recognizes and implements strongly modal and categorically normative concepts such as necessary truth and unconditional obligation, in the form of lawlike “principles” ( Principien , Grundsätze ) (A299–304/B355–361, A800–804/B828–832).

Finally, the objective unity of any judgment whatsoever is guaranteed by the faculty of apperception or rational self-consciousness, which plays the “executive” role in the corporate organization of the mind by introducing a single higher-order unity into all of its lower-order representations, via judgment, and whose characteristic output is the cogito-like self-directed judgment-forming representation “ I think ” ( Ich denke ): as in “I think about X ” (where X is some concept, say the concept of being a philosopher) or “I think that P ” (where that- P is some proposition, say the proposition that Kant is a philosopher) (B131–132). The I think according to Kant is “the vehicle of all concepts and judgments whatever” (A341/B399), because it is both a necessary condition of the objective unity of every judgment and also automatically implements one or another of a set of primitive pure a priori logical forms or functions of unity in judgments or thoughts—“the pure concepts of the understanding” or “categories” (A66–83/B91–116)—in the several semantic constituents of that judgment.

The power of judgment, while a non-basic faculty, is nevertheless the central cognitive faculty of the human mind. This is because judging brings together all the otherwise uncoordinated sub-acts and sub-contents of intuition, conceptualization, imagination, and reason, via apperception or rational self-consciousness, for the purpose of generating a single cognitive product, the judgment, under the overarching pure concepts of the understanding or categories, thereby fully integrating the several distinct cognitive faculties and their several distinct sorts of representational information, and thereby also constituting a single rational human animal. For Kant then, rational humans are judging animals .

But what exactly are judgments? Kant’s answer, in a nutshell, is that they are essentially propositional cognitions—from which it immediately follows that rational humans are, more precisely, propositional animals . In what sense, however, is this the case?

Logicians before Kant, e.g., the Port Royalists, tended to define judgment as a “representation of a relation between two concepts” (B140). This pre-Kantian definition implied that all judgments are of subject-predicate form; but in fact, as Kant points out (here following the Stoic logicians), some judgments—e.g., disjunctive judgments, and hypothetical conditional judgments—are truth-valued relational complexes of subject-predicate judgments and thus, apparently, have essentially truth-functional form, not subject-predicate form. This idea later heavily influenced George Boole’s ground-breaking view of logic as a set of a priori “laws of thought” governing a formal calculus of binary functions that mimic the “bipolar” behavior of the classical truth and falsity of propositions (Boole 1854). Perhaps even more importantly however, the pre-Kantian definition also failed to explain the unity of a judgment, and the difference between a judgment and a mere list of concepts. So in order to solve this “unity-of-the-judgment” problem—which later re-surfaced as “the problem of the unity of the proposition” in early analytic philosophy (Hylton 1984, Linsky 1992)—Kant offers a radically new conception of the judgment as a higher-order cognitive binding function for different types of lower-order objective representational content. In a pre-Critical essay, “The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures,” he says that a judgment is an act of logical predication whereby a concept is applied to a thing, as expressed by the copula ‘is’ or ‘are’ (2: 47). In his logical textbook, the Jäsche Logic , he says that it is a representation of the unity of consciousness linking together several other representations, or a representation of their relation in a single concept (9: 101). And in the Critique of Pure Reason he characterizes judgment at least four times:

Judgment is … the mediate cognition of an object, hence the representation of a representation of it. In every judgment there is a concept that holds of many [representations], and that among this many also comprehends a given representation, which is then immediately referred to the object. (A68/B93)

All judgments are … functions of unity among our representations, since instead of an immediate representation a higher one, which comprehends this and other representations under itself, is used for the cognition of the object, and many possible cognitions are hereby drawn together into one. (A69/B94)

A judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception. That is the aim of the copula is in them: to distinguish the objective unity of given representations from the subjective. (B141).

[Pure general logic] deals with concepts , judgments , and inferences , corresponding exactly to the functions and order of those powers of the mind, which are comprehended under the broad designation of understanding in general… If the understanding in general is explained as the faculty of rules, then the power of judgment is the faculty of subsuming under rules, i.e., of determining whether something stands under a given rule ( casus datae legis ) or not. (A130–132/B170–172)

Despite the superficial differences in emphasis and formulation, these six characterizations all converge on the same basic account: a judgment is a higher-order complex conscious cognition that refers to objects either directly (via the essentially indexical content of intuitions/non-conceptual cognitions)or indirectly (via the essentially attributive or descriptive content of concepts); in which concepts are predicated either of those objects or of other constituent concepts; in which concepts are intrinsically related to one another and to intuitional/non-conceptual cognitions by pure general logical forms/pure concepts of the understanding that express various modifications and, apparently, truth-functional compounds of the predicative copula; which enters into inferences according to a priori laws of pure general logic; which essentially involves both the following of rules and the application of rules to the perceptual objects picked out by intuition/non-conceptual cognition; and in which a composite objective representation is generated and unified by the higher-order executive mental processing of a single self-conscious rational subject. The crucial take-away points here are (a) a judgment’s referential bottoming-out in intuitions/non-conceptual cognitions, which thereby constitute directly-referential singular terms in singular categorical judgments, that cannot be semantically replaced by individual concepts or definite descriptions without change or loss of meaning (contrast, e.g., Thompson 1972 and Hanna 2001, ch. 4), (b) the “privileging of predication” (Longuenesse 1998, 104) over other sorts of logical operations, (c) the intrinsic logico-syntactic and logico-semantic form of the judgment, based on modifications or compound truth-functional relations of the predicative copula, (d) the rule-like character of the judgment, (e) the judgment’s unified conscious objective representational (i.e., semantic) content, and above all (f) its higher-order rationally self-conscious ground of objective unity. As such, Kantian judgments are neither merely psychological objects or processes (as in psychologistic theories of judgment), nor are they essentially mind-independent, abstract objects (as in platonistic theories of judgment), nor again are they inherently assertoric takings of propositions to be true (as, e.g., in Frege’s theory of judgment). Instead, Kantian judgments are intersubjectively shareable, rationally communicable, cognitively-generated mental-act structures or types whose logically-structured truth-apt semantic contents can be the targets of many different kinds of epistemic or non-epistemic propositional attitudes.

As just noted, every judgment has an intrinsic logical form that is both syntactic and semantic in nature, centered on predication. Even more fundamentally however, every judgment also has an “intension” ( Inhalt ) or semantic content : the “proposition” ( Satz ). A propositional content is not monolithic but rather a unified composite of individually meaningful proper parts. More specifically, a proposition is the logically well-formed and semantically well-composed, truth-valued, unified objective representational content of a judgment; and more generally it is “what is judged” in the act of putting forward any sort of rational claim about the world (9: 109) (14: 659–660) (24: 934). Although a proposition is always generated by means of psychological processes, it is not , however, psychologically private and incommunicable: on the contrary, it is intersubjectively shareable and rationally communicable, due to the fact that the very same propositional form-and-content can be individually generated by many different judging animals, provided they are all equipped with the same basic cognitive architecture. In this way judgments for Kant are essentially propositional cognitions, in that the primary function of the faculty of judgment is just to generate these logically well-formed, semantically well-composed, truth-valued, intersubjectively shareable, rationally communicable, unified objective representational contents.

Given the seminal role of the judgment’s propositional content, it is easy to see then that for Kant the propositional function of the judgment is more basic than its inferential role—although every judgment does indeed play an inferential role (Longuenesse 1998, 90–95)—and for this reason Kant’s logical constants (i.e., all, some, this/the, affirmation, propositional negation, predicate-negation, the predicative copula, if-then, disjunction, necessarily, possibly, and actually) are defined strictly in terms of their specific roles in the propositional content of judgments, quite apart from the ways those judgments can enter into inferences (A69–76/B94–102). In recent years, however, inferentialist treatments of Kant’s theory of judgment and Kant’s logic, which treat the semantic contents and logical constants of judgment as essentially dependent on and determined by their inferential roles, have become increasingly popular and influential (see, e.g., Landy 2009 and Leech 2012).

The characteristically rational activity of taking-for-true implies the subjective validity of a judgment, or its apparent meaningfulness and apparent truth for an individual rational cognizer. By contrast, the “objective validity” ( objektiv Gültigkeit ) of a judgment is its empirical meaningfulness, precisely because it is compositionally based on the empirical “reference” ( Beziehung )—whether singular or comprehensional—of the basic constituent objective representations of any judgment, namely intuitions and concepts. The empirical reference of intuitions and concepts, in turn, is necessarily constrained by the specifically aesthetic or sensible, non-conceptual, non-discursive, and pre-rational or proto-rational dimension of human experience, which itself is jointly determined by (a) the brute givenness of material objects to our receptive capacity for empirical intuition, via the relation of external affection, and (b) the necessary and non-empirical forms of empirical intuition, our representations of space and time (A19–22/B33–36), which ultimately express the outer and inner sensory aspects of the embodiment of our minds). In this way, an intuition is objectively valid if and only if either (i) it directly refers to some individual actual or possible external sensible object or to the subject’s phenomenally conscious inner response to this outer reference (this accounts for the objective validity of empirical intuitions), or else (ii) it represents a phenomenally immanent necessary condition of empirical intuitions (this accounts for the objective validity of the forms of intuition) (A239–240/B298–299). By contrast, a concept is objectively valid if and only if either it applies to some actual or possible objects of empirical intuition (this accounts for the objective validity of empirical concepts) or else it represents a necessary condition of empirical concepts (this accounts for the objective validity of pure concepts) (A239–240/B298–299, A240–242/B299–300).

A necessary but not sufficient condition of the objective validity of a judgment is its logico-syntactic well-formedness (grammatical correctness) and logico-semantic well-formedness (sortal correctness) (A73/98, A240–248/B300–305). So a judgment is objectively valid if and only if it is logically well-formed and all of its constituent intuitions and concepts are objectively valid (A155–156/B194–195). Otherwise put, and fully spelled-out, the objective validity of a judgment is its anthropocentric rational empirical referential meaningfulness . Kant also sometimes uses the notion of “objective reality” ( objektive Realität ) to characterize objectively valid representations that apply specifically to actually or really existing objects, and not to merely possible objects (A242 n.). True judgments are thus objectively real propositions. Objective validity, in turn, is a necessary but not sufficient condition of truth, and hence of objectively real propositions, for false judgments are also objectively valid (A58/B83). In this way the objective validity of a judgment is equivalent to its propositional truth-valuedness , but not equivalent to its propositional truth.

By contrast, all judgments that are not objectively valid are “empty” ( leer ) or truth-valueless. Nevertheless, it must be noted that for Kant empty judgments can still be rationally intelligible and not in any way nonsensical, if all the concepts contained within them are at least logically consistent or “thinkable” (Bxxvi n.). In this way, e.g., some judgments containing concepts of noumenal objects (things-in-themselves, or real essences) or noumenal subjects (rational-agents-in-themselves, or persons) are empirically meaningless and truth-valueless, hence empty, yet also are rationally intelligible targets of what Kant calls “doctrinal” belief (see the supplementary document Judging, Believing, and Scientific Knowing ), and even, at least from a certain Critical meta-philosophical standpoint, essential both to Kant’s theoretical metaphysics (A254–255/B309–310, A650–654/B678–682) and also to his practical metaphysics of freedom and morality (A530–558/B566–586).

So much for truth-valuedness: but what is truth? According to Kant, truth is a predicate of whole judgments, and not a predicate of the representational proper parts of judgments, i.e., intuitions/non-conceptual cognitions and concepts (A293/B350). Furthermore we already know that objective validity is a necessary but not sufficient condition of the truth of a judgment. Kant also holds that logical consistency is a necessary but not sufficient condition of the truth of a judgment (A60/B85). Most importantly however, according to Kant the “nominal definition” of truth is that it is the “agreement” or “correspondence” ( Übereinstimmung ) of a cognition (i.e., in this context, an objectively valid judgment) with its object (A58/B82). Now a Kantian nominal definition is a special type of analytic definition that picks out the “logical essence” of that concept—i.e., the generic and specific intensional criteria for bringing things under that concept—but without also picking out the “inner determinations” or real essences of the things falling within the comprehension of that concept, which would be the job of a real definition (9: 142–143). So the nominal definition of truth means that for Kant truth just is agreement or correspondence, which can then be further unpacked as a relation between a judgment and an object such that (i) the form or structure of the object is isomorphic with the logico-syntactic and logico-semantic form of the proposition expressed by the judgment, (ii) the judger cognitively orients herself in the world by projecting the object under specific “points of view” ( Gesichtspunkte ) or modes of presentation that would also be typically cognitively associated with the constituent concepts of the judgment by any other rational human animal in that context (8: 134–137) (9: 57, 147) (24: 779), and (iii) the object represented by the judgment really exists (Hanna 2006b, ch. 5). Another way of putting this is to say that truth is nothing but the objective reality of the total propositional form-and-content of the judgment : that is, nothing but the real existence of that which is precisely specified by the logico-syntactic and logico-semantic features of the judgment taken together with the judger’s intersubjectively rationally communicable cognitive orientation. Or in still other words, true judgments are nothing but ways of rationally projecting ourselves onto actual truth-makers . This is not what is nowadays called a “deflationist” conception of truth, however, because Kant is not saying that truth is nothing but asserting the corresponding actual facts. On the contrary, for Kant truth is irreducible to merely asserting the facts, because for him the concept of truth also inherently expresses both the judger’s fundamental rational interest in “getting it right” (whether theoretically via true judgment or practically via good intentional action) and also her intersubjectively shareable and rationally communicable cognitive orientation , as well as belonging intrinsically to the core moral concept of sincerity .

In any case, the nominal definition of truth must be sharply distinguished from the real definition of truth, i.e., the “criterion” ( Kriterium ) of truth, which is a rule for determining the truth or falsity of judgments in specific contexts (A58/B82). According to Kant there is no all-purpose or absolutely general criterion of truth (A58–59), such as the “clarity-and-distinctness” criterion of the Cartesians. Nevertheless there are special criteria of truth for each of the basic classes of judgments: analytic judgments, synthetic a posteriori (or empirical) judgments, and synthetic a priori judgments (for more details about this threefold distinction and the special truth-criteria, see Section 2 ).

The truth of empirical judgments is the bottom-level sort of truth for Kant, in that all of the other kinds of truth presuppose it. In turn, the proper object of an empirical judgment is an actual or possible “object of experience” ( Gegenstand der Erfahrung ), which is an empirical state-of-affairs, or a really possible individual material object insofar as it has macroscopic physical or “phenomenological” (in the Newtonian sense) properties and can enter into causal or otherwise dynamical relations in the spatiotemporal material world according to necessary laws of nature (A176–218/B218–265). By the nominal definition of truth as agreement or correspondence, this entails that actual objects of experience are the truth-makers of empirical judgments. It also leads to what Kant calls “the criterion of empirical truth” which states that since the objectively valid propositional content of an empirical judgment can be specified as a necessary conceptual rule of sensory appearances, then if that rule is effectively applied to the temporal succession of our sensory representations of the phenomenal material world, and that rule coheres with the causal-dynamic laws of nature, then that judgment is true (A191/B236, A451/B479) (4: 290) (18: 234).

See the supplementary documents:

The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism Judging, Believing, and Scientific Knowing

2. Kinds of Judgments

One of the most controversial, influential, and striking parts of Kant’s theory of judgment is his multiple classification of judgments according to kinds of logical form and kinds of semantic content. Indeed the very importance of Kant’s multiple classification of judgments has sometimes led to the misconception that his theory of judgment will stand or fall according to the fate of, e.g., his analytic-synthetic distinction, or his doctrine of synthetic a priori judgments. Important as these classifications are however, it is crucial to remember that the core of Kant’s theory of judgment consists in the centrality thesis, the priority-of-the-proposition thesis, and the transcendental idealism thesis, all of which can still hold even if some of his classifications of judgments are rejected.

The modern conception of logical form—as found, e.g., in the symbolic and mathematical logic of Gottlob Frege’s Begriffsschrift (“Conceptual Notation”) (Frege 1972), Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (Whitehead and Russell 1962), and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1922)—owes much to Kant’s conception of logical form, if not so very much to his particular conception of logic, which from a contemporary point of view can seem “terrifyingly narrow-minded and mathematically trivial,” as Allen Hazen has drily put it (Hazen 1999). On the other hand, however, it is clearly true that Kant’s conception of mathematical form, which is found in his theory of pure or formal intuition, substantially influenced Wittgenstein’s view of logical form in the Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1922, props. 2.013, 5.552, 5.61, and 6.13). There is an ongoing scholarly debate about whether Kant’s conception of mathematical form is a direct expression of the narrow-mindedness of his logical theory, or instead a direct expression of the striking originality of his philosophy of mathematics (Parsons 1983, Friedman 1992, Shabel 2003, Hanna 2006b, ch. 6, Shabel 2006). But even more importantly, Kant’s deep idea that logic and logical form can exist only in the context of the judging activities and judging capacities of rational human animals , has heavily influenced some heavily influential philosophers of logic, linguists, philosophers of language, and cognitive scientists from Boole and Wilhelm von Humboldt (Von Humboldt 1988), to Frege, the later Wittgenstein, and Noam Chomsky (Wittgenstein 1953, para. 241–242, Chomsky 1975, Bell 1979, Bell 1987).

2.1.1 Pure general logic and the table of judgments

As mentioned in Section 1 , every judgment for Kant has an intrinsic logical form. These logical forms correspond one-to-one to the pure concepts of the understanding or categories, a claim which is argued-for in what Kant calls the metaphysical deduction of the categories (A76–83/B102–109, B159). On the basis of this, it is possible to argue that all concepts, whether pure or empirical, have a logical ground (Newton 2015). In any case, the total set of such logical forms/pure concepts is the “table of judgments,” which Kant also describes as “the functions of unity in judgments ” (A69/B94, emphasis added). He does this in order to draw special attention to the fact that for him the very idea of a logical form/pure concept is essentially judgment-based: logical form is nothing but the intrinsic logico-syntactic and logico-semantic form of and in a proposition. So for Kant the propositional content of a judgment is more explanatorily basic than its logical form or pure-conceptual structure.

The table of judgments, in turn, captures a fundamental part of the science of pure general logic: pure , because it is a priori, necessary, hence strictly universally true, and also without any associated sensory content; general , because it is strictly underdetermined by all objectively valid representational contents and also abstracts away from all specific or particular differences between represented objects (cf. MacFarlane 2002), and thereby “has to do with nothing but the mere form of thinking” (A54/B78); and logic because, in addition to the table of judgments, it also systematically provides categorically normative conditio sine qua non rules for the truth of judgments (i.e., the law of non-contradiction or logical consistency) and for valid inference (i.e., the law of logical consequence) (A52–55/B76–79) (9: 11–16).

In this connection, there are two crucial points to note about Kant’s pure general logic.

First, pure general logic is sharply distinct from transcendental logic, in that, although both logics are pure and a priori, whereas pure general logic is “general” in that it is strictly underdetermined by all objectively valid representational contents and also abstracts away from all specific or particular differences between represented objects, hence is ontically unrestricted , nevertheless transcendental logic is “special” in that it is ontically restricted , i.e., objectually-committed, and thereby presupposes the existence of certain specific categories or kinds (including natural kinds) of objects (A55–57/B79–82). In this way, transcendental logic presupposes pure general logic, and is synthetic a priori, not analytic. Some recent Kant-commentators, however, have argued that on the contrary, pure general logic presupposes transcendental logic (see, e.g., Rödl 2008, Tolley 2012), on the grounds that for Kant, thought by its very nature is object-directed. But the generality and inherently formal character of pure general logic is fully consistent with its being objectively valid: hence the fact that thought by its very nature is object-directed does not by itself imply that the logic governing thought is ontically restricted or objectually-committed.

Second, pure general logic is absolutely binding on any rational human thinker and provides an unconditional logical ought : the laws of logic are the categorically normative laws of thought for all actual and possible rational animals. Thus pure general logic is both a formal science and also a moral science , but not a natural science . As such, pure general logic fully heeds the lesson of the Naturalistic Fallacy, that is, the irreducibility of the ought to the is . Correspondingly, just like the unconditional moral ought , as expressed by the Categorical Imperative, the logical ought , as expressed by, e.g., the law of non-contradiction, is rarely correctly obeyed in the real world by finite flawed thinkers like us, who commit logical fallacies and moral sins with comparable frequency: sadly, ought does not entail is . Still, as non-naturalistic, Kant’s pure general logic is irreducible to all contingent facts and especially to all empirical psychological facts; hence his logic is thoroughly anti-psychologistic, which exploits the flip-side of unconditional obligation, whether logical or moral: happily, is does not entail ought .

Kant’s table of judgments lays out a (putatively) exhaustive list of the different possible logical forms of propositions under four major headings, each major heading containing three sub-kinds, as follows.

Table of Judgments Quantity of Judgments: Universal, Particular, Singular. Quality: Affirmative, Negative, Infinite Relation: Categorical, Hypothetical, Disjunctive Modality: Problematic, Assertoric, Apodictic (A70/B95)

Consistently with Kant’s “privileging of predication,” it is arguable that his logical forms are all either modifications or else truth-functional compounds of simple monadic (i.e.,1-place) categorical (i.e., subject-predicate) propositions of the general form “ Fs are Gs .”

In this way, e.g., the three kinds of quantity of judgments are supposed by Kant to capture the three basic ways in which the comprehensions of the two constituent concepts of a simple monadic categorical proposition are logically combined and separated. So Kant says that universal judgments are of the form “All Fs are Gs ”; that particular judgments are of the form “Some F s are G s”; and that singular judgments are of the form “This F is G ” or “The F is G .”

By contrast, the three kinds of quality of judgments are supposed by Kant to capture the three basic ways in which the constituent concepts of a simple monadic categorical judgment can be either existentially posited or gesetzt , or else existentially cancelled or aufhebe , by respectively assigning non-empty actual extensions to concepts, or null actual extensions to concepts (A594–595/622–623). So Kant says that affirmative judgments are of the form “it is the case that F s are G s” (or more simply: “ F s are G s”), negative judgments are of the form “no F s are G s”; and infinite judgments are of the form “ F s are non- G s.”

By contrast again, the three kinds of relation of judgments are supposed by Kant to capture the three basic ways in which simple 1-place subject-predicate propositions can be either atomic (elementary) or molecular (compound) in respect of their truth-values. So Kant says that categorical judgments repeat the simple atomic 1-place subject-predicate form “ F s are G s”; molecular hypothetical judgments are of the form “If F s are G s, then H s are I s” (or: “If P then Q ”); and molecular disjunctive judgments are of the form “ Fs are either G s or H s or …” (where each partition of the total domain is mutually exclusive and the total set of partitions is exhaustive).

By contrast yet again and finally, the three kinds of modality of a judgment are supposed by Kant to capture the three basic ways in which the copula of a simple 1-place subject-predicate proposition “contributes nothing to the content of the judgment … but rather concerns only the value of the copula in relation to thinking in general” (A74/B99–100). This doctrine might seem to confuse the three propositional attitudes of “opining” ( Meinen ), epistemic belief, and certainty (A820–823/B848–851), as discussed in the supplementary document Judging, Believing, and Scientific Knowing , with the alethic modal notions of possibility, actuality, and necessity. Or even worse, it might seem to psychologize modality.

And this in turn raises in a pointed way a general difficulty in the common interpretation of Kant’s theory of judgment: the tendency to hold that his logic and theory of judgment are at bottom epistemological or empirical psychological theories. But this common interpretation, as specifically applied to Kant’s view of the modality of judgments, should be rejected for four reasons. First, he explicitly isolates and discusses propositional attitudes in the context of his epistemology of judgment and his ethics of belief, so it is obvious that he does not confuse logical modality with propositional attitudes. Second, he firmly rejects logical psychologism, as we have already seen. Third, the notion of “value” ( Wert ) here clearly means the truth -value of a whole proposition, not its propositional content specifically, which explains why a modal predicate “contributes nothing to the content of a judgment,” i.e., it contributes nothing to the specific content of a judgment over and above its truth-value. Fourth and most importantly, the notion of “thinking in general” for Kant is the conceptual equivalent of Leibnizian logically possible worlds (Bxvii n., A573/B601). Thus the three kinds of modality of a judgment for Kant are, at bottom, the three basic ways in which truth can be assigned to simple 1-place subject-predicate propositions, or to non-categorical sentential propositions, across logically possible worlds—whether to some worlds (possibility), to this world alone (actuality, as essentially indexically determined by human sensory intuition/non-conceptual cognition), or to all worlds (necessity). So Kant says that problematic judgments are of the form “Possibly, F s are G s” (or: “Possibly P ”); assertoric judgments are of the form “Actually, F s are G s” (or: “Actually P ”); and apodictic judgments are of the form “Necessarily, F s are G s” (or: “Necessarily P ”).

See the supplementary document:

Do the Apparent Limitations and Confusions of Kant’s Logic Undermine his Theory of Judgment?

For Kant, as we have seen, the propositional content of a judgment is more basic than its logical form. The propositional content of a judgment, in turn, can vary along at least three different dimensions: (1) its relation to sensory content, (2) its relation to the truth-conditions of propositions, and (3) its relation to the conditions for objective validity.

2.2.1 A priori judgments and a posteriori judgments

The notion of “cognitive content” for Kant has two sharply distinct senses: (i) intension or Inhalt , which is objective and representational (semantic content); and (ii) sensory matter or Materie , which is subjective and non-representational, reflecting only the immediate conscious response of the mind to the external impressions or inputs that trigger the operations of the faculty of sensibility (phenomenal qualitative content) (A19–20/B34, A320/B376). To be sure, for Kant just as for the Empiricists, all cognition “begins with” ( mit … anfange ) the raw data of sensory impressions. But in a crucial departure from Empiricism and towards what might be called a mitigated rationalism , Kant also holds that not all cognition “arises from” ( entspringt … aus ) sensory impressions: so for him, a significant and unique contribution to both the form and the objective representational content of cognition arises from the innate spontaneous cognitive capacities (B1). This notion of cognition’s “arising from” either sensory impressions or innate spontaneous cognitive capacities can best be construed as a strict determination relation (similar to what is nowadays called “strong supervenience”) such that X strictly determines Y if and only if the X -features of something are sufficient for its Y -features, and there cannot be a change in anything’s Y -features without a corresponding change in its X -features. This allows us to say that a cognition is a posteriori, empirical, or dependent on sensory impressions and/or contingent natural objects or facts just in case it is strictly determined in its form or in its semantic content by sensory impressions and/or contingent natural objects or facts; but a cognition is a priori, non-empirical, or absolutely independent of all sensory impressions and/or contingent natural objects or facts just in case it is not strictly determined in its form or in its semantic content by sensory impressions and/or contingent natural objects or facts and is instead strictly determined in its form or in its semantic content by our innate spontaneous cognitive faculties (B2–3). It should be noted that the apriority of a cognition in this sense is perfectly consistent with all sorts of associated sensory impressions and also with the actual presence of sensory matter in that cognition, caused by contingent natural objects or facts, so long as neither the form nor the semantic content is strictly determined by those sensory impressions and/or contingent natural objects or facts. “Pure” a priori cognitions are those that in addition to being a priori or absolutely independent of all sensory impressions and/or contingent natural objects or facts, also contain no sensory matter whatsoever (B3). So in other words, some but not all a priori cognitions are pure.

Applying these notions to judgments, it follows that a judgment is a posteriori if and only if either its logical form or its propositional content is strictly determined by sensory impressions and/or contingent natural objects or facts; and a judgment is a priori if and only if neither its logical form nor its propositional content is strictly determined by sensory impressions and/or contingent natural objects or facts, and both are instead strictly determined by our innate spontaneous cognitive faculties, whether or not that cognition also contains sensory matter. Kant also holds that a judgment is a priori if and only if it is necessarily true (Axv, B3–4, A76/B101). This strong connection between necessity and apriority expresses (i) Kant’s view that the contingency of a judgment is bound up with the modal dependence of its semantic content on sensory impressions and/or contingent natural objects or facts, i.e., its aposteriority (B3), (ii) his view that necessity is equivalent with strict universality or strenge Allgemeinheit , which he defines in turn as a proposition’s lack of any possible counterexamples or falsity-makers (B4), and (iii) his view that necessity entails truth (A75–76/B100–101). Furthermore Kant explicitly holds that not only do a priori judgments really exist in various sciences, including physics and legitimate (i.e., transcendental idealist) metaphysics, but also that there really are some pure a priori judgments, e.g., in mathematics (B4–5, B14–18).

2.2.2 Analytic judgments and synthetic judgments

Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments is the historical origin of, and therefore significantly related to, but—crucially—not precisely equivalent, either in intension or extension, with the nowadays more familiar analytic-synthetic distinction, according to which (1) analyticity is truth by virtue of linguistic meaning alone, exclusive of empirical facts, (2) syntheticity is truth by virtue of empirical facts, and (3) the necessary statement vs. contingent statement distinction is formally and materially equivalent to the analytic-synthetic distinction. By 1950 this more familiar distinction was accepted as gospel truth by virtually all analytic philosophers: but in the two decades after the publication of W.V.O. Quine’s iconoclastic “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” in 1951 (Quine 1961), it was gradually replaced by the new-and-improved post-Quinean gospel truth that there is no such thing as an acceptable analytic-synthetic distinction. This plain historical fact is closely related to the highly regrettable further fact that Kant’s analytic-synthetic distinction is nowadays often wrongly interpreted (i) in terms of the more familiar and now largely discredited analytic-synthetic distinction, and also (ii) as reducible to an epistemic distinction between uninformatively or trivially true a priori judgments and informative judgments. Ironically Frege, the father or grandfather of analytic philosophy, was much nearer the mark in the Foundations of Arithmetic when he correctly construed Kant’s theory of analyticity semantically , as a theory about necessary internal relations between concepts; although at the same time he not quite so correctly said that Kantian analyticity boils down to “simply taking out of the box again what we have just put into it” (Frege 1953, 101). Frege’s 19th century characterization of Kantian analyticity, it turns out, has significant parallels with the 18th century Leibnizian and Wolffian theories of conceptual and/or logical truth that heavily influenced Kant’s work on analyticity (Anderson 2015). Backing away now from Frege and the Leibniz-Wolff tradition, however, the crucial fact is that Kant’s analytic-synthetic distinction concerns two irreducibly different kinds of semantic content within objectively valid propositions (Hanna 2001, chs. 3–4), and this distinction is neither primarily epistemic in character (although it does have some important epistemic implications [Hanna 2006b, 362–379]) nor does it specifically concern the logical form of judgments (4: 266).

Frege regarded Kant’s notion of analyticity as trivial; and, correspondingly, it is also true that if the Leibniz-Wolff approach to conceptual and/or logical truth largely determined Kant’s theory of analyticity, then Kant’s notion of analyticity is impoverished (Anderson 2015). But on the contrary Kant’s notion of analyticity is substantive, by virtue of five important ideas: first, Kant’s pro-Leibnizian idea that all concepts have intensional microstructures, or what he calls “logical essences” or “conceptual essences” (9: 61); second, his anti-Leibnizian idea that logically possible worlds are nothing but maximal logically consistent sets of concepts, not things-in-themselves (A571–573/B599–601); third, his referentialist idea that all grammatically well-formed, sortally correct, and logically consistent concepts have non-empty cross-possible-worlds extensions (a.k.a. “comprehensions”) (A239/B298–299) (9: 95–96); fourth, his semantic restrictionist idea that all and only objectively valid propositions have truth-values; and fifth, finally, and most importantly, his logical analyticity idea that the notion of analyticity covers not only the so-called “containment”of predicate-concepts in subject-concepts in categorical propositions, and not only the intensional identity of subject-concepts and predicate-concepts, but also all the logical truths of truth-functional logic and monadic predicate logic. Then for Kant a judgment is analytic if and only if its propositional content is necessarily true either by virtue of necessary internal relations between its objectively valid conceptual microstructures and/or its conceptual comprehensions, or by virtue of its truth-functional logical connectives, or by virtue of its monadic predicate logical connectives (Hanna 2001, ch. 3), leaving open the question of whether for Kant all logical connectives are strictly truth-functional. In any case, let this be repeated with strong emphasis: Kant does not define analyticity in terms of either the containment or the identity of concepts, which are at best sufficient conditions for analyticity and not also necessary conditions for analyticity. On the contrary, Kant explicitly states a universal, necessary, and sufficient semantic criterion for the truth of analytic judgments, namely that a judgment is analytically true if and only if its denial entails a contradiction, in a broad sense of “entailment” that includes intensional entailment and not merely classical deductive entailment (A151/B190–191). This criterion also directly connects the notion of an analytic truth with the notion of a logical truth in a correspondingly broad sense that fully includes the tautologies and valid sentences of truth-functional logic and monadic predicate logic, but is neither restricted to nor reducible to (with the addition of “logical definitions” [Frege 1953], whatever they actually turn out to be on Frege’s account, which is not at all clear [Benacerraf 1981]) the truth-functional tautologies and valid sentences of classical polyadic predicate logic.

Needless to say, however, if one holds that the Kantian definition of analyticity is truth-in-virtue-of-containment, and also that the Kantian definition of syntheticity is truth-in-virtue-of-non-containment, together with a Kantian conceptualist view of the nature of judgment, then one’s conception of Kant’s analytic and synthetic judgments will be correspondingly different (Anderson 2004, Anderson 2005, Anderson 2009, Anderson 2015).

But what about syntheticity? Since for Kant the analytic-synthetic distinction is exhaustive in the sense that every proposition is either analytic or synthetic but not both, his two-part doctrine of analyticity in turn provides him with a two-part negative doctrine of syntheticity: A proposition is synthetic if and only if its truth is not strictly determined by relations between its conceptual microstructures or conceptual comprehensions alone, or by truth-functional logic or monadic predicate logic alone (which for Kant is expressively captured by the table of judgments and the table of pure concepts of the understanding); and a judgment is synthetically true if and only if it is true and its denial does not entail a contradiction. But this negative characterization of course does not tell us what the truth of synthetic judgments positively consists in. In order to do this, Kant directly connects the semantics of syntheticity with the semantics of intuitions, just as he directly connects the semantics of analyticity with the semantics of concepts (including both empirical concepts and the pure concepts of the understanding). Then positively put, a judgment is synthetic if and only if its meaning and its truth are strictly determined by its constituent intuitions, whether empirical intuitions or pure intuitions (A8, A154–155/B193–194, A721/B749) (8: 245) (11: 38). This is not to say either that synthetic judgments do not contain any concepts (in fact they always do contain empirical or pure concepts), or even that the conceptual components of a synthetic judgment are irrelevant to its meaning or truth (in fact empirical or pure concepts always are semantically relevant), but only to say that in a synthetic judgment it is the intuitional components that strictly determine its meaning and truth, not its empirical-conceptual or pure-conceptual components. In short, a synthetic judgment is an intuition-based proposition .

2.2.3 Synthetic a priori judgments

Every reader of the Critique of Pure Reason knows that Kant glosses his philosophical project in that book as a complete and systematic answer to the question, “how are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” (B19). Also every reader of the first Critique knows that Kant asserts the existence of synthetic a priori judgments in mathematics, physics, and metaphysics (B14–18, A158/B197). But fewer readers are aware that this assertion, whether right or wrong, is certainly the boldest and perhaps also the most important claim in post-Cartesian metaphysics. This is because it posits the thesis of modal dualism , or the claim that there are two irreducibly different basic types of necessary truth, in the face of the almost universally-held counter-thesis of modal monism , or the claim that there is one and only basic type of necessary truth, i.e., analytically or logically necessary truth. Given Kant’s theory of truth, modal dualism also implies the worldly existence of two irreducibly different types of modal facts as truth-makers for analytically and synthetically necessary truths respectively. In short if Kant is right, then there are fundamentally more things in heaven and earth than modal monists are prepared to acknowledge. Moreover Kant holds that all the basic statements of traditional metaphysics are, at least in intention, synthetic a priori judgments (B18). Hence his famous critique of traditional metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic is nothing but a deepened and extended investigation of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments.

But what is a synthetic a priori judgment? Combining the a priori-a posteriori distinction with the analytic-synthetic distinction, Kant derives four possible kinds of judgment: (1) analytic a priori, (2) analytic a posteriori, (3) synthetic a priori, and (4) synthetic a posteriori. By virtue of the fact that analytic judgments are necessarily true, and given Kant’s thesis that necessity entails apriority, it follows that all analytic judgments are a priori and that there is no such thing as an analytic a posteriori judgment. By contrast, synthetic judgments can be either a priori or a posteriori. Synthetic a posteriori judgments are empirical, contingent judgments, although they may vary widely as to their degree of generality. Synthetic a priori judgments, by contrast, are non-empirical, non-contingent judgments.

More precisely however, synthetic a priori judgments have three essential features. First, because a synthetic a priori judgment is a priori, its meaning and truth are strictly underdetermined by sensory impressions and/or contingent natural objects or facts, and it is also necessarily true. Second, because a synthetic a priori judgment is synthetic, not analytic, its truth is not determined by conceptual/truth-functional-logical/monadic-predicate-logical factors alone, and its denial is logically consistent. Third, as is the case with all synthetic judgments, the meaning and truth of a synthetic a priori judgment is intuition-based. This third factor is the crucial one. For while the meaning and truth of synthetic a posteriori judgments is based on empirical intuitions , the meaning and truth of synthetic a priori judgments is based on pure intuitions or our a priori formal representations of space and time (B73) (8: 245) (11: 38). Now since according to Kant our a priori formal representations of space and time are both necessary conditions of the possibility of human experience and also necessary conditions of the objective validity or empirical meaningfulness of judgments, which in turn confers truth-valuedness upon propositions, it then follows that a synthetic a priori judgment is a proposition that is true in all and only the humanly experienceable possible worlds and truth-valueless otherwise (Hanna 2001, 239–245). By sharp contrast, analytic judgments, as logical truths in either a narrow (truth-functional or syllogistic) or broad (intensional logic) sense, are true in all logically possible worlds, including those logically possible worlds in which human experience is not possible, i.e., the worlds containing non-phenomenal or non-apparent entities, especially including things-in-themselves, i.e., the “noumenal worlds.”

So analytic and synthetic a priori judgments sharply differ not only in the nature of their semantic content (i.e., concept-based/truth-functional-logic-based/monadic-predicate-logic-based vs. intuition-based) but also in their modal scope (true in all logically possible worlds vs. true in all and only humanly experienceable worlds and truth-valueless otherwise). Nevertheless, despite this sharp difference in modal scope—from which it follows, perhaps surprisingly, that for Kant there are logically possible worlds in which synthetic a priori propositions such as “7+5=12” are thinkably deniable—since synthetic a priori judgments are either true or truth-valueless in every logically possible world , it also follows that they are never false in any logically possible world and thus satisfy Kant’s general definition of a necessary truth, i.e., that a proposition is necessary if and only if it is strictly universally true, in that it is true in every member of a complete class of possible worlds and has no possible counterexamples or falsity-makers (Hanna 2001, ch. 5). Less abstractly and gallumphingly put, a synthetic a priori judgment is a necessary truth with a human face .

In the discussion so far, judgments are essentially identified with their propositional contents. But according to Kant it is also possible for a rational cognizer to use the very same propositional content in different ways. The fundamental difference in uses of judgments is between (a) theoretical judgments and (b) non-theoretical judgments. But there are also some crucial differences between theoretical uses of judgments. For a discussion of these kinds of use, see the following supplementary document:

Kinds of Use

3. The Metaphysics of Judgment: Transcendental Idealism

There is a very real sense in which Kant’s positive metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason is essentially an elaboration of his theory of judgment: “it is not at all [traditional] metaphysics that the Critique is doing but a whole new science, never before attempted, namely the critique of an a priori judging reason” (10: 340). This results directly from the conjunction of the centrality thesis and the transcendental idealism thesis: judgment is the central cognitive activity of the human mind, and judgments are objectively valid and true if and only if the metaphysics of transcendental idealism is correct. In this section, the crucial connection between judgment and transcendental idealism will be spelled out in more detail.

Transcendental idealism is the conjunction of two theses: (1) cognitive idealism , which says that all the proper objects of human cognition are nothing but mind-dependent sensory appearances or phenomena, not things-in-themselves or noumena (A369), and (2) representational transcendentalism , which says that all representations and their contents necessarily conform to the forms or structures of our innate spontaneous cognitive capacities (Bxvi, A11/B25) (4: 373 n.). There are weaker and stronger interpretations of these theses (see, e.g., Allais 2015), but in any case transcendental idealism in its strongest version directly entails that all the objects of human experience are token-identical with objectively-valid sensory representational contents:

You put the matter quite precisely when you say The content ( Innbegriff ) of a representation is itself the object; and the activity of the mind whereby the content of a representation is represented is what is meant by ‘referring to the object. (11: 314)

Longuenesse aptly dubs this Kantian thesis “the internalization to representation of the object of representation” (Longuenesse 1998, 20, 108). But perhaps even more importantly, Kant’s “internalization to representation of the object of representation” entails that all the basic phenomenal forms or structures of those objects of experience are type-identical with the forms or structures introduced into representations by the innately pre-programmed spontaneous operations of our cognitive faculties, and in particular with the spatiotemporal structures of our subjective forms of sensory intuition. Indeed, Kant explicitly holds that space and time are nothing but our subjective forms of intuition, which is his controversial thesis of “the transcendental ideality of space and time” (A28–30/B44–45, A36/B52–53, A42–43/B59–60). The upshot is that according to the strongest version of transcendental idealism, all the objects of human experience are nothing but what we represent them to be, when we represent sensory objects according to the a priori normative principles of our understanding and our reason : so our cognition does not conform to the objects we cognize, rather those objects necessarily conform to our innate a priori normatively-governed faculties of cognition (Bxvi, A92/B125–126).

Now assume that this strongest version of transcendental idealism is correct. Then add to this assumption Kant’s centrality thesis, to the effect that judgment is the central human cognitive faculty, and also the priority-of-the-proposition thesis. It follows immediately that all the objects of human experience are token-identical with the propositional contents of objectively valid empirical judgments , and also that all the basic phenomenal forms or structures of objects of human experience are type-identical with the spatiotemporal and logico-syntactic and logico-semantic forms or structures that are inherent in the propositional contents of empirical judgments, which we can now see to be forms or structures that have been introduced directly into nature by the acts of the cognitive faculties of sensibility, imagination, understanding, apperception, and reason, which are all brought together and fused in the unifying act of judgment or thought . In short, the strongest version of Kant’s transcendental idealism is also a judgment-based idealism , according to which actual or non-actual/merely possible empirical objects or states-of-affairs are nothing but true or false empirical propositions, and according to which the basic phenomenal contours of the world we cognize are precisely the same as the innate intuitional, formal-syntactic, and semantic contours of the several cognitive faculties that jointly generate our judgments.

Kant’s judgment-based idealism has some crucial consequences for his theory of truth. If the strongest version of transcendental idealism is correct, then to every true empirical judgment there necessarily corresponds an actual empirical fact, and conversely, and also to every true a priori judgment there necessarily corresponds some objectively real conceptually-represented or intuitionally-represented structure across a complete set of logically or experientially possible worlds. What this means is that whereas Kant’s theory of truth is explicitly realistic at the empirical level—which is what he calls his “empirical realism” (A28/B44, A35/B52, A370–373)—in that actual empirical facts or modal facts (whether these are conceptually-represented logical world-structures or intuitionally-represented non-logical world-structures) always present themselves as in some irreducible respects external or extrinsic to our cognition, and therefore not controlled by us, nevertheless at the transcendental level his theory of truth is fully anti-realistic: transcendentally speaking, we impose truth upon the world . In short, the strongest version of transcendental idealism plus the centrality thesis plus the priority-of-the-proposition thesis jointly necessarily guarantee that all and only the cognitively well-generated judgments are true. This is what Kant calls the “transcendental truth” of judgments (A146/B185). Transcendental falsity, by contrast, is always the result of some special idiosyncrasy or accidental glitch in the cognitive generation of a given judgment, and thus represents a mere “performance error” in the operation of our cognitive faculties, and not a gap in our transcendental cognitive “competence.” Thus any sort of serious skepticism at the transcendental level of Kant’s theory of judgment is automatically ruled out of court.

One important critical question that needs to be raised is whether, in view of the strongest version of his transcendental idealism, Kant’s theory of judgment is reductionist in some basic respects, and in particular whether he reduces the meaning or propositional content of a judgment to a rule for confirming or disconfirming the assertion of that propositional content in the tribunal of sensory experience. This is of course the thesis of verificationism. Several important Kant commentators—e.g., Bird 1962, Strawson 1966, and Stroud 1968—have held that Kant’s theory of judgment is verificationist. Familiar problems with verificationism include its susceptibility to epistemic skepticism, its commitment to an implausible coherence theory of truth, and specific difficulties about how to confirm or disconfirm judgments about the non-immediate past or future.

It cannot be denied that there are some verificationist strands in Kant’s theory. For one thing, his “criterion of empirical truth” (see Section 1.3 above) is in effect verificationist. Moreover, to the extent that both Kant’s theory of transcendental truth and also his verificationism are anti-realist and judgment-based, there is at least an elective affinity if not precisely an equivalence between the two doctrines. Nevertheless, Kant is not a reductionist about meaning. In other words, he is not committed to the thesis that the propositional content of a judgment is nothing but a rule for confirming or disconfirming the assertion of that propositional content in the tribunal of sensory experience. While he does seem to be committed to the thesis that the propositional content of a judgment will be empirically meaningful or objectively valid only if it contains a rule for confirming or disconfirming the assertion of that propositional content in the tribunal of sensory experience, this does not by any means exhaust the propositional content of that judgment. Over and above its verificationist element, the propositional content of every judgment also contains a “thick” or non-deflationary correspondence-relation to relatively external or extrinsic actual facts (see Section 1.3 above). Furthermore the propositional content of every judgment contains a set of a priori logical forms deriving from the pure understanding, as well as a higher-order a priori rational subjective unity deriving from the faculty for apperception or rational self-consciousness (see Section 2.1.1 above). What this means is that Kant is at most a weak verificationist, and that the verificationist elements of his theory of judgment are significantly tempered by his semantic non-reductionism, his empirical realism, and his mitigated rationalism.

A more complete picture of Kant’s metaphysics of judgment is obtained by sketching in accounts of judgments of experience and transcendental judgments. These are discussed in the following supplementary document:

Completing the Picture of Kant’s Metaphysics of Judgment

4. Problems and Prospects

The basic parts of Kant’s theory of judgment are now all in place. In this concluding section, we will look briefly at several serious problems for Kant’s theory. These problems, which come to a head in the debate about Kant’s conceptualism vs. Kant’s non-conceptualism (see the supplementary document The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism ), all ultimately stem from the interplay between either the centrality thesis or the priority-of-the-proposition thesis, and the transcendental ideality thesis. This in turn suggests that the other two parts of Kant’s theory can be logically detached from his transcendental idealism and defended independently of it.

What can be called the bottom-up problem for Kant’s metaphysics of judgment follows directly from his non-conceptualism (see the supplement The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism ), and exposes a fundamental gap in the B Deduction. In our discussion of the B Deduction (see the supplement Completing the Picture of Kant’s Metaphysics of Judgment ) it was noted that Kant’s argument for the objective validity of the categories will go through only if all the objects of human intuition are necessarily also objects of human experience, that is, are necessarily also objects correctly represented by true judgments of experience, that is, are necessarily also objects falling under all of the categories, or at the very least under the principle of the Second Analogy of Experience, which provides the criterion of the objectivity of objects of experience. But if this claim fails, then there can in principle be nomologically ill-behaved or “rogue” objects of human intuition that fall outside the scope of judgments of experience and thus also outside the categories, or at least outside the scope of the Second Analogy. As several Kant-interpreters have pointed out, given the possibility of essentially non-conceptual intuitions, then the B Deduction is in big trouble (Kitcher 1990, Hanna 2016b). More precisely, Kant’s non-conceptualism entails that there can be objectively valid empirical intuitions that are both autonomous from and also independent of concepts, and thereby directly refer to objects. Since the cognition of these objects does not require either concepts or the faculty of understanding, and since these intuitions consciously represent objects over and above any conceptual content whatsoever, then some of these intuitions can pick out rogue objects that fall outside the constraints of all the categories, and thereby outside the constraints of the Second Analogy in particular. So it is not true that the categories and principles of pure understanding necessarily apply to all objects of conscious human perception, and the categorial anarchy of at least some sensory objects is really possible. Therefore the B Deduction is unsound.

The bottom-up problem has a metaphysical mirror-image, which can be called the top-down problem . This problem afflicts Kant’s transcendental doctrine of judgment, and consequently also his theory of the principles of pure understanding (see the supplement Completing the Picture of Kant’s Metaphysics of Judgment ). The worry here is simply that even allowing for the transcendental schematism of the judgment, there is still no absolute guarantee that a given universal transcendental principle or transcendental concept of the understanding, construed as a rule for ordering sensory appearances or sensory objects, has been completely applied to sensory appearances or objects. In other words, even allowing for his transcendental doctrine of the judgment, Kant has not given us good reason to think that there cannot be any sensory appearances or objects that fail to be subsumed under the transcendental principles of nature. In the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant calls the specifically causal-law-governed or nomological interconnection of all sensory appearances or objects under transcendental principles the “transcendental affinity”of the sensory manifold of intuitions (A114). In the A edition of the first Critique, Kant asserts that if the categories are objectively valid, then the transcendental affinity of the manifold automatically follows. Then, assuming the strongest version of transcendental idealism, he further asserts that from transcendental affinity, an “empirical affinity” of the sensory manifold of intuitions also directly follows (A115). Now since empirical affinity is the complete application to actual empirical nature of the system of causal laws under transcendental principles, it follows that empirical affinity is the same as the systematic unity of nature . So Kant is saying that the systematic unity of nature is a trivial consequence of transcendental affinity.

In the first Critique ’s Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic however, Kant quietly but very significantly backtracks on this crucial point and treats the principle of the systematic unity of nature as stemming only from a regulative but not a constitutive use of judgment, although this principle is also asserted to have some sort of transcendental force (see the supplement Kinds of Use ). Then in the first Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment , Kant explicitly says that

[it] is quite possible in itself (at least as far as the understanding can make out a priori), [that] the multiplicity of these [empirical] laws, along with the natural forms corresponding to them, being infinitely great, [could] … present to us a raw chaotic aggregate and not the least trace of a system, even though we must presuppose such a system in accordance with transcendental laws. (20: 209)

In other words, now Kant is saying that the transcendental affinity of the manifold does not entail an empirical affinity of the manifold or the systematic unity of nature. To be sure, in the third Critique , he also explicitly ties together the principle of systematic unity with the regulative use of reflective judgments of taste, and says that it is a subjectively necessary transcendental principle presupposed by legitimate judgments of taste (see the supplement Kinds of Use ). But if the principle of systematic unity is only subjectively and not in fact objectively necessary, then Kant has not shown us that the system of causal laws of nature must be completely applied to sensory appearances or objects. Rather he has shown only that we must epistemically believe it to be completely applied to sensory appearances or objects. So there remains the real possibility of relatively or absolutely chaotic aggregates of sensory appearances or objects that are not subsumed or even in principle cannot be subsumed under the transcendental affinity of the manifold, i.e., the real possibility of the categorial anarchy of rogue objects. In other words, for all that Kant has argued, and by his own reckoning, even assuming transcendental affinity there might still be no complete application of transcendental laws to nature. So the transcendental schematism of the pure concepts is insufficient to bridge the gap between categories and sensory appearances, and the transcendental doctrine of judgment fails.

As we saw in the supplement Completing the Picture of Kant’s Metaphysics of Judgment , the Second Analogy of Experience, if true, guarantees both the objectivity and the universal diachronic or temporally successive causal necessitation of objects of experience and all of their parts, under natural laws. As we also saw in Section 1.3, the “criterion of empirical truth” for a judgment of experience says that since the objectively valid propositional content of an empirical judgment can be specified as a necessary conceptual rule of sensory appearances or objects, then if that rule is effectively applied to the temporal succession of our sensory representations of the phenomenal material world, and that rule coheres with the causal-dynamic laws of nature, then that judgment is true. And finally, as we also saw in Section 3.1, the centrality thesis, the priority-of-the-proposition thesis, and the transcendental idealism thesis jointly entail the “transcendental truth” of judgment, which is that necessarily every well-generated judgment of experience is true and corresponds to an actual object of experience, that is, to an actual empirical fact.

But here is a simple objection to this three-part doctrine, borrowed from Descartes’s famous “dream skepticism” in the first of the Meditations on First Philosophy . Kant calls this form of skepticism “problematic idealism” (B274). To generate the relevant version of problematic idealism, suppose that all the sensory appearances or objects currently falling under the Second Analogy, the criterion of empirical truth, and the principle of transcendental truth are nothing but causally well-ordered parts of my inner sense alone . Then any object of experience corresponding to my currently true judgment of experience might be nothing but a very coherent dream or a hallucination. Nothing Kant has said can rule this out. Even the famous Refutation of Idealism in the first Critique , if sound, says only that “inner experience is possible only through outer experience in general” (B278–279), and Kant explicitly concedes that at any given time, for all we know, we could be dreaming or hallucinating:

from the fact that the existence of outer objects is required for the possibility of a determinate consciousness of our self it does not follow that every intuitive representation of outer things includes at the same time their existence, for that may well be the mere effect of the imagination (in dreams as well as delusions). (B278)

So even if inner experience and outer experience are necessarily connected in general, the truth and objectivity of any particular judgment of experience, by Kant’s own criteria for truth and objectivity, are consistent with the possibility that the particular object of experience corresponding to that judgment is nothing but very coherent dream or a hallucination. After all, I can perfectly well dream or hallucinate a boat going downstream, as well as actually seeing one. It is true that Kant does remark in the General Note on the System of Principles in the B edition of the first Critique that “in order to understand the possibility of things in accordance with the categories, and thus to establish the objective reality of the latter, we do not merely need intuitions, but always outer intuitions” (B291). This seems correct. But unfortunately, given what Kant says at B278, nothing in his transcendentally idealistic metaphysics of judgment will guarantee that any set of sensory appearances or objects satisfying his criteria for the truth and objectivity of judgments of experience on any particular occasion will in fact be material objects in space corresponding to outer intuitions, and not merely causally well-ordered mental imagery corresponding to inner intuitions, i.e., mere “phantoms of my brain.” So the Second Analogy’s criterion of objectivity is ultimately insufficient to yield the empirical truth of judgments of experience, despite Kant’s explicit claim that this criterion does yield both their objective validity and their empirical truth (A202/B247).

As we have seen in Sections 4.1 to 4.3, Kant’s theory of judgment leads to at least three serious problems when it is taken in conjunction with the issue about his conceptualism vs. his non-conceptualism (in the supplement The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism ) and his metaphysics of strong transcendental idealism (Section 3.1 and the supplement Completing the Picture of Kant’s Metaphysics of Judgment ). Does this mean his theory of judgment is philosophically unacceptable and at best an antiquarian curiosity of 18th century German philosophy? No. This is because it seems very likely that the problems in Kant’s theory of judgment are principally due to his conjoining the centrality thesis and the priority-of-the-proposition thesis with the thesis of transcendental idealism. But suppose that the strongest version of transcendental idealism is false, and that the transcendental idealism thesis is either logically detached from the other two theses or else retained but instead based on a significantly weaker version of transcendental idealism (Hanna 2006b, ch. 5): what remains? We are left with a general Kantian theory of human rationality that is essentially oriented towards judgment, and then in turn with specific Kantian accounts of the nature of judgment and of the various irreducibly different kinds of judgment, that are essentially oriented towards the anthropocentric empirical meaningfulness and truth of the proposition. As such, Kant’s theory of judgment is thoroughly cognitivist but also anti-psychologistic and anti-platonistic, and it thereby smoothly combines the several “faces” of judgment into a unified doctrine. So the fact that Kantian non-conceptualism (see the supplement The Togetherness Principle, Kant’s Conceptualism, and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism ) makes serious trouble for the B Deduction (Section 4.1), together with the further fact that the strongest version of transcendental idealism is very likely false—since the unqualified transcendental ideality thesis, when conjoined with the centrality thesis and the priority-of-the-proposition thesis, collectively entail contradictions in Kant’s theory that are not entailed by the conjunction of the other two theses alone—do not ultimately compromise the inherent philosophical interest, contemporary relevance, and critical defensibility of the other basic parts of Kant’s theory of judgment.

Internal references to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason contain page numbers from both the A (1781) and B (1787) German editions. All other internal references to Kant’s writings are cited using the relevant volume and page number from the standard “Akademie” edition of Kant’s works: Kants Gesammelte Schriften , edited by the Königlich Preussischen (now Deutschen) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: G. Reimer [now de Gruyter], 1902–).

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Essay on changing moral judgments.

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Moral judgments, ideas of peace, and views on ethical behavior are highly subject to change in society. This is part one of a sample essay that discusses the importance of changing norms regarding moral judgments and analyses three major works that discuss the role and impact of history, ethnicity, and gender. This sample essay from Ultius provides an example of the benefits and features the company offers .

Challenges to moral judgments

Common ethical themes of the three works selected include the fallacy of considered moral judgments, notions of justice, and reflective equilibrium to reconsider our prior moral judgments, notions of justice. The tool is reflective equilibrium; the substance is communication. Throughout each of the three works, miscommunication seems to be the problem the solution is more information. This miscommunication is evidenced by cultural ethnicity and gender discrimination .

Through actual experiences, new information is acquired altering the understanding of reality. When this happens considered moral judgments must be reconsidered to attain reflective equilibrium. This is a worthy cause because the best ethical decisions are made when the most information is gathered. This essay analyzes the challenges to considered moral judgments and how those are changed through experience. This essay begins by defining essential ethical.

Defining moral judgment

Defining our terms, considered moral judgments are notions of morality that are present in our conscience predicting how we understand values and virtues. Based on considered moral judgments we have developed a form of normative values that are expectations for how people may act in accord with their understanding of virtues or values (their considered moral judgments). For example, consider meeting a person who obviously looks of Indian decent based on our own experience with Indian people.

We have a prediction that this person will speak with an “Indian” accent and be Hindi. Through communication, we learn that this person has a southern accent, is Christian, and is the Republican Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal. This is an example of a considered prior judgment, a bias, a presumption. A considered moral judgment is more concerned with the belief that he is Hindi rather than Christian because this spiritual belief would likely influence moral deliberation as would his political ideology identifying as a Republican.

Changes to preconceived notions based on new information

Our considered moral judgment is proved wrong as we meet this person, so we must augment our consideration. This is done using the practice of reflective equilibrium where we restore balance between our own theoretical world of normative values and reconcile that with the actual world that we meet. The result of this reflective process may be a change in our understanding of normative values, accommodation of value pluralism (different values may exist simultaneously and be equally correct), or a stiffening in the notion of what is good and bad.

Many fictional accounts of racism and inequality are evident in literature. It's important to explain these concepts as we will apply them to each of the two books:

• Seasons of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
• Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
• As well as the popular film Monsters, Inc.

Common themes in each of these works include the profound power of cultural bias, racism, and sexism, generating a normative value system derived from prior considered moral judgments that is shown throughout the works to be false or incomplete. The justification for these moral judgments becomes suspect considering the new experience and new information therefore through the process of reflective equilibrium and liberalism the moral judgments are reconsidered considering the new information.

The result could be greater cultural understanding or hardening a stance because accommodating value pluralism could be just too much to bear. Experiences and new information present new information that challenges the validity of these considered moral judgments and the normative value system is challenged.

Ethical theories of justice and utilitarianism in literature

Our normative value system may be most concerned with ethical theories of justice which come in the forms of utilitarianism and desert. J.S. Mills and John Rawls discuss justice extensively, for purposes of this paper we will use Rawls’ ideas as they marry well with our other discussion regarding reflective equilibrium (credited to Rawls). In each of the works we evaluate, the notion of just desert and utility at the expense of others. These notions of justice are used to rationalize certain actions.

Season of Migration to the North: Sudanese people as a moral judgment case study

First, this paper will discuss Season of Migration to the North . In this work, an unnamed narrator returns to his hometown in northern Sudan after studying in London. Upon his return, he meets a man named Mustafa Sa’eed who greatly intrigues him. The narrator learns a great deal about Mustafa, but eventually, upon his death, finds out a very secret side to his life that severely alters the narrator's understanding.

Miscommunication is prevalent in the work when discussions on eastern and western cultures occur. On Western culture, the narrator writes:

“ I preferred not to say the rest that had come to my mind: that just like us [the Europeans] are born and die, and in the journey from the cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated; that they fear the unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child; that some are strong and some are weak; that some have been given more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the differences are narrowing and most of the weak are no longer weak.” (Salih, 5).

Here the narrative discusses that westerners are essentially the same as the Sudanese, with the same aspirations and desires. They are not extraordinarily privileged and like the Sudanese, some are just better off than others.

The narrator makes it clear that he identifies as Sudanese, “Over there is like here, neither better nor worse. But I am from here, just as the date palm standing in the courtyard of our house has grown in our house and not in anyone else’s” (Salih, 41).

Personal identity and human nature

A large portion of the book is about personal identity, how it is shaped by ethnic roots, cultural experiences, and interactions with others. Although the narrator was educated abroad, he was born Sudanese and through contemplation arrives at the conclusion that he is personally Sudanese. The course of the book is his journey to ultimately accept this identity while he was certainly given a choice.

This was not without struggle though as the narrator sees many parallels to Mustafa, “I feel hatred and seek revenge; my adversary is within and I needs must confront him ... I begin from where Mustafa Sa’eed had left off. Yet he at least made a choice, while I have chosen nothing” (Salih, 111).

Here the narrator acknowledges his internal struggle for identity and individualistic meaning of life , and he is disturbed by the choices. They do not reconcile with his desires, but they are his realities. Ultimately, the choice drives him to attempt suicide by drowning himself in the Nile. However, he reconsiders and accepts his identity. Although a main theme of this work is miscommunication, the more important moral theme is that of reconciling oneself with their internal truths.

The narrator is a born Sudanese with an English upbringing, he felt separate from both cultures, in a limbo. He didn’t like certain facets of either identity, but couldn’t pick and choose, and ultimately surrendered to his Sudanese nature realizing it was not perfect, but accepting that perfection is an illusion.

Interpreter of Maladies: Preconceived notions impact on moral judgments

Cultural limbo continues in the next work examined where communication is a major theme in the short story Interpreter of Maladies . The fully Americanized Das family is in India visiting relatives on a semi-annual sojourn. The story surrounds their interaction with a driver in India, Mr. Kapsi. Throughout the course of the trip, Mr. Kapsi becomes highly engaged in a fantasy about the Das family, specifically Mrs. Das. Mr. Kapsi’s job, when he is not driving a cab is working as a translator in a doctor’s office. Mrs. Das finds this entertaining and asks for some anecdotes .

Although the Das family look Indian, they are clearly not from India, “The family looked Indian but dressed as foreigners did, the children in stiff, brightly colored clothing and caps with translucent visors” (Lahiri, 5).

The challenge for the family was not that they struggled with their ethnic identity, it was that they had trouble communicating with their children. Further, the presence of Mr. Kapsi presents a man who speaks many languages so is adept at communication, however, is missing out on a life he would prefer, that of a scholar of languages. He replaces his self-willed shame of his job as an interpreter at a doctor’s office with the fantasy that he could have fantastic correspondence with Mrs. Das.

Whenever anyone in this story makes a judgment about someone else, they turn out to be wrong and the results harmful. Both Mrs. Das and Mr. Kapsi misjudge and prefer the world of their fantasies disassociated with reality. And while abandoning reality, the themes of miscommunication and concern over identity are also exemplified in the film, “Monsters, Inc.”

Monsters, Inc:: Prejudice portrayed in children's films

Monsters. Inc. is a film about an alternative world where monsters live. Their city is powered by the screams of children. Every night, the monsters frighten the children collecting their screams to provide power to the city. Ironically, as monsters are supposed to scare the children , the monsters themselves are deathly afraid of children considering them to be toxic. One evening one sneaks into the monsters’ world and then is concealed by Sulley.

It is intentionally unknown exactly where the bias against children as toxic came from in the film. It is the stuff of legends, and that is the point. Biases can come from evidence, or they can come from folklore passed down through the ages as just is, and no one questions it. That is the case in Monsters, Inc. Ultimately it is realized that children are not toxic. This revelation disturbs the symbiotic relationship between monsters and children.

Changing moral judgments based on status quo

Children are supposed to be scared of monsters and vice versa, it is revealed that monsters are scared of children the entire system comes crashing down. Notions of identity fall apart. For this fiction, the farce must maintain to promote comity among the cultures. This film is an example of cultural bias passed down for generations where entire worlds are built around the lie.

The question was raised on how these works tie into the American experience in the United States. The main themes we have explored in this work include; miscommunication, prejudice and bias based on historic interpretation, and cultural identity crises. In each work, we saw Sudanese, Indians, and monsters, struggle with their identity. All of these themes are present in the current United States.

U.S. national identity and impact on citizens' preconceived notions

Since the United States is such a heterogeneous country with nearly every ethnicity represented in our populace, the notion of national identity is a constant concern. Many people immigrate to the United States searching for the freedom to self-identify. They bring their ethnic culture with them, but they have a choice on how to express it. Like the narrator in our first story, he was torn between two identities and ultimately chose his native one.

For all those who overcome the challenges to immigration , they are possibly going through the same experiment and will most assuredly be required at some point to decide what their identity is. Interestingly, the common practice is to call oneself an “Indian-American,” “African-American,” or “Irish-American.” Each of these monikers includes the original ethnicity but adds America, because for so many, coming to American is a dream come true. Although individuals may be asked to make an identity choice they do not have to abandon the heritage of their past to do so.

America is always seeking an identity and there seem to be two moral paths American’s can take. One is the path of dissatisfaction that the United States is not inclusive or sensitive enough to other cultures. Another choicCe is that America is the most tolerant country in the world where everyone is invited to express their heritage. Both are true, the latter more so, but that does not in any way suggest the path to assimilation and tolerance is easy.

Over the course of the American experiment, the government has been faced with hard choices in reactionary politics to the uprising of the people demanding fair treatment. The government, like a large sailing vessel, is hard to turn. Ultimately it does because people are willing to fight for it, without that fight, the ship would never turn.

Moral judgments in American culture

Miscommunication in the United States like in each of these works usually results in disaster. Presuming to know something when there is more information to gain is a common habit of American’s and one that should be broken. In ethics, proper decisions are made when all the necessary evidence and information is attained. Maintaining a bias without exploring its veracity is committing a moral error. Perpetuating a bias in this fashion is moral treason. It must be the commitment of the willing moral agent to seek out as much information as possible on other cultures.

This practice has never been more important than the period after the September 11th terrorist attack on the World Trade Center , United States. Again, the United States reacts to a military attack by determining the whole of an entire race of people are at fault. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, American Japanese were placed in concentration camps (that’s what they were and that’s what they should be called) because of their birth they were automatically assumed to be agents of the Empire of Japan. This is illogical and immoral.

America's views on Islam too broad and biased

Post-September 11, Islam is to blame and any Islamic person is now a potential terrorist. In both these instances, some of a certain ethnic group killed many Americans, but the sword of the United States swings broadly and swiftly. These are only a couple of examples. The optimistic outlook for the United States and its cultural awareness is one of slow deliberate progress. With each generation more tolerance is accepted, there is more questioning.

Like the characters in each of the works, we analyzed eventually each of the characters goes through a transformation to ultimately rely on the truth. Considered prior judgments the United States can be a place of narrow-minded focus. Muslims in America can attest to the moral judgments made against them on a daily basis. And in observing politics, the divide between the major parties seems vast. These divides unlike the books analyzed are based on considered prior judgments of the other side’s reaction to certain ideas.

Partisanship in American politics is only partly representative of the nation as a whole. The disdain for the other side is profound and based on presumptions sustained against individuals. One problem with this is that as politicians, they are playing a role and not engaged with their authentic selves. In the works analyzed in this paper, each character had to undergo a self-reevaluation. The information gathered in this reevaluation provided fodder for reconsidering their considered prior judgments.

Judicial ideology in the United States

Notions of justice are prevalent in the United States as well as the struggle between economic classes rages on. Socrates views on justice is that each person should have equal right and access to the whole of the social system and that the least among a society should be raised up. This is in contrast with Nietzsche who believed that the best should be exalted. Regardless, the current state of affairs in the United States seems to favor Rawls.

This mood shift occurred when so many people suffered individual paradigm shifts when the economy crashed in 2008. People who felt secure in their jobs found themselves taking government payments to support their families facing retraining for a job half way through their careers. The effect of the economy was devastating and a moral shift occurred. This moral shift opened the minds of all American’s into embracing other possibilities. This is the same process all the characters in the analyzed works had to undergo.

For the visiting Indians, they had to face reality that although they looked the part, they were not culturally attuned to the part of being Indian. The greatest struggle was that of the narrator in Seasons of Migration to the North who was undergoing a powerful existential crisis. Continuing in Monsters, Inc. , where the idea of children not being toxic was challenged once they met a child (an unheard of thing). Each of these changes caused a reconsideration of considered moral judgments in a manner consistent with reflective equilibrium.

This is the process that any contemplative person will undergo when faced with new facts that challenge a considered moral judgment. Sometimes the information will present itself, other times it must be sought, however, the best moral decisions are made when all the relevant particulars of the moral decision are fully understood. Since the United States encourages diversity as much as it does, it is the world’s melting pot.

Throughout this essay, we have used the tools of communication to affect reflective equilibrium regarding cultural and ethnic biases derived through considered moral judgments. In each of our works, the normative value systems of the characters have changed with the addition of new information. These changes are exemplified in the ever-evolving mood of the United States of America, the ultimate melting pot of moral thought. Few other countries face the moral questions the United States does. Expanding the tools of ethics in this regard is a good thing as it is good for America.

Works Cited

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of maladies. London: HarperCollins, 2000. Print.

Monsters, Inc. Dir. Pete Docter. Perf. John Goodman and Billy Crystal. Disney Enterprises Inc. :, 2002. Film.

Salih, Tayeb. Season of migration to the North. Oxford England: Heinemann, 1991. Print.

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