Social cognitive theory of morality

About: Social cognitive theory of morality is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5842 publications have been published within this topic receiving 250337 citations.

‘And So They Ordered Me to Kill a Person’: Conceptualizing the Impacts of Child Soldiering on the Development of Moral Agency

Abstract: Approximately 300,000 child soldiers serve in various armed groups around the world, and become directly implicated in the perpetration of kidnappings, killings, and torture. Considering that children construct moral concepts and a sense of themselves as moral beings in the context of their everyday interactions with others, the concern with how their harrowing experiences of violence may affect their moral development is particularly compelling. To date, however, no research has been conducted examining how these youths grapple with the violence they have perpetrated and how they reconcile their own actions with a view of themselves as moral people. In this paper, I review the limitations of constructs relying on moral disengagement and post-traumatic stress, which are typically used for examining the aftermaths of violence perpetration, and outline a new framework grounded on the normative developmental process whereby children grapple with their experiences of wrongdoing.

Tools from moral psychology for measuring personal moral culture

Abstract: Moral culture can mean many things, but two major elements are a concern with moral goods and moral prohibitions. Moral psychologists have developed instruments for assessing both of these and such measures can be directly imported by sociologists. Work by Schwartz and his colleagues on values offers a well-established way of measuring moral goods, while researchers using Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory have developed validated measures of moral prohibitions. Both values and moral foundations are distributed across the social landscape in systematic, sociologically interesting ways. Although typically measured using questionnaires, we show that values and moral foundations also can be used to analyze interview, archival, or “big data.” Combining psychological and sociological tools and frameworks promises to clarify relations among existing sociological treatments of moral culture and to connect such treatments to a thriving conversation in moral psychology.

Voluntary moral enhancement and the survival-at-any-cost bias

Abstract: I discuss the argument of Persson and Savulescu that moral enhancement ought to accompany cognitive enhancement, as well as briefly addressing critiques of this argument, notably by John Harris. I argue that Harris, who believes that cognitive enhancement is largely sufficient for making us behave more morally, might be disposing too easily of the great quandary of our moral existence: the gap between what we do and what we believe is morally right to do. In that regard, Persson and Savulescu's position has the potential to offer more. However, I question Persson and Savulescu's proposal of compulsory moral enhancement (a conception they used to promote), proposing the alternative of voluntary moral enhancement.