Freedom from what? Separating lay concepts of freedom.

Debates about freedom of will and action and their connections with moral responsibility have raged for centuries, but the opposing sides might disagree because they use different concepts of freedom. Based on previous work, we hypothesized that people who assert freedom in a determined (D) or counterfactual-intervener (CI) scenario assert this because they are thinking about freedom from constraint and not about freedom from determination (in D) or from inevitability (in CI). We also hypothesized that people who deny that freedom in D or in CI deny this because they are thinking about freedom from determination or from inevitability, respectively, and not about freedom from constraint. To test our hypotheses, we conducted two main online studies. Study I supported our hypotheses that people who deny freedom in D and CI are thinking about freedom from determinism and from inevitability, respectively, but these participants seemed to think about freedom from constraint when they were later considering modified scenarios where acts were not determined or inevitable. Study II investigated a contrary bypassing hypothesis that those who deny freedom in D denied this because they took determinism to exclude mental causation and hence to exclude freedom from constraint. We found that participants who took determinism to exclude freedom generally did not deny causation by mental states, here represented by desires and decisions. Their responses regarding causation by desires and decisions at most weakly mediated the relation between determinism and freedom or responsibility among this subgroup of our participants. These results speak against the bypassing hypothesis and in favor of our hypothesis that these participants were not thinking about freedom from constraint.

The effect of cognitive load, ego depletion, induction and time restriction on moral judgments about sacrificial dilemmas: a meta-analysis.

Greene's influential dual-process model of moral cognition (mDPM) proposes that when people engage in Type 2 processing, they tend to make consequentialist moral judgments. One important source of empirical support for this claim comes from studies that ask participants to make moral judgments while experimentally manipulating Type 2 processing. This paper presents a meta-analysis of the published psychological literature on the effect of four standard cognitive-processing manipulations (cognitive load; ego depletion; induction; time restriction) on moral judgments about sacrificial moral dilemmas [n = 44; k = 68; total N = 14, 003; M(N) = 194.5]. The overall pooled effect was in the direction predicted by the mDPM, but did not reach statistical significance. Restricting the dataset to effect sizes from (high-conflict) personal sacrificial dilemmas (a type of sacrificial dilemma that is often argued to be best suited for tests of the mDPM) also did not yield a significant pooled effect. The same was true for a meta-analysis of the subset of studies that allowed for analysis using the process dissociation approach [n = 8; k = 12; total N = 2, 577; M(N) = 214.8]. I argue that these results undermine one important line of evidence for the mDPM and discuss a series of potential objections against this conclusion.

How Stable are Moral Judgments?

Psychologists and philosophers often work hand in hand to investigate many aspects of moral cognition. In this paper, we want to highlight one aspect that to date has been relatively neglected: the stability of moral judgment over time. After explaining why philosophers and psychologists should consider stability and then surveying previous research, we will present the results of an original three-wave longitudinal study. We asked participants to make judgments about the same acts in a series of sacrificial dilemmas three times, 6-8 days apart. In addition to investigating the stability of our participants' ratings over time, we also explored some potential explanations for instability. To end, we will discuss these and other potential psychological sources of moral stability (or instability) and highlight possible philosophical implications of our findings.

Moral progress: Recent developments.

Societies change over time. Chattel slavery and foot-binding have been abolished, democracy has become increasingly widespread, gay rights have become established in some countries, and the animal rights movement continues to gain momentum. Do these changes count as moral progress? Is there such a thing? If so, how should we understand it? These questions have been receiving increasing attention from philosophers, psychologists, biologists, and sociologists in recent decades. This survey provides a systematic account of recent developments in the understanding of moral progress. We outline the concept of moral progress and describe the different types of moral progress identified in the literature. We review the normative criteria that have been used in judging whether various developments count as morally progressive or not. We discuss the prospects of moral progress in the face of challenges that claim that moral progress is not psychologically possible for human beings, and we explore the metaethical implications of moral progress.