Moral Determinant

This paper explores the things that have influenced my moral worldview. It includes insight on what I consider when making decisions. I discuss who and what I look too when deciding my morals and what I consider to be right and wrong.

Over the last decades, research in moral psychology was dominated by the role of reasoning in making moral judgments (Kohlberg, 1969; Turiel, 1983), while a more recent research emphasizes the role of automatic emotional processes (Blair, 1995; Haidt, 2001; Pizzaro & Salovey, 2002). Therefore, there has been a great tension to whether intuitions or reasons play critical role in making moral judgments.

Cultural ethical relativists believe that morality is dependent on the culture the individual is involved with. While physical laws are universally accepted, morals are objective depending on where someone lives or who they grew up around. Furthermore, morality is formed based on the history of political and social instances in cultural ethical relativism. This theory of cultural ethical relativism is widely accepted throughout the world. It is so popular because there is empirical evidence that shows that culture’s morals differ through certain parts of the world or different religions. While one culture might consider something to be moral, a different culture might consider the same exact thing to be immoral. An example of this involves

In this paper, I am going to explain what two moral theories I mainly use to make a moral decision. In this paper, I used the textbook to help me figure out what moral theories are and it helped me decide which moral theories to use that best fit me when I make moral decisions. The two moral theories that I chose to highlight in this paper are utilitarianism and cultural relativism because I believe that they are the two that best fit me when I make a moral decision. The definition of morals is “a person’s standards of behavior or beliefs concerning what is or is not acceptable for them to do”. Morals are an important thing to have because it is good to know what is and isn’t

Ethics are the product of a society’s culture so it is natural there will be different responses to similar ethical scenarios. Beekum, Stedam, and Yamamura (2003) suggest these differing conclusions will lead to conflict where one side perceives the outcome is ethical whereas the other does not. Another possible outcome is that one side may not even see a decision even being morally significant. Global organizations have the additional challenge when operating within a multi-national environment of recognizing cultural differences while maintaining a core moral and ethical foundation.

The main goal of this chapter is to elucidate the explanatory target of this thesis. Empirical research on morality is abundant, but discussions about the nature of its explanatory target are often vague or completely absent. Building upon Sinnott-Armstrong and Wheatley’s (2012, 2013) ideas, I would like to argue that neither moral judgments nor moral norms are unified explanatory targets. In particular, I will argue that there is no property or set of properties that unifies all the members of the class of moral judgments or the class of moral norms—a negative thesis that I call the ‘disunity thesis’. I will explain why this issue matters (or should matter) for people working on the empirical research of morality, and I will put forward some

When an individual is proposed with a moral dilemma they will often seek the advice of others rather than acting solely upon their immediate cultural, familial, and cognitive predispositions; suggesting that judgments are also made about the moral judgments of others (Rest, Cooper, Coder, Masanz & Anderson, 1974).

In the article on ‘’The Moral Instinct’’, Steven Pinker begins by posing a question, who do you find the most admirable: Bill gates, Mother Teresa or Norman Borlaug? These are all great people but who we choose is based upon our perception of what we prefer from their accomplishments. Pinker begins by saying, we as human strive towards moral goodness, and this gives us a sense of being worthy. He then argues that moralization is used as a psychological state that we use to deem our actions as moral or immoral. Moreover, some actions are prohibited universally, such as killing or rapping, and people who commit these acts are deserved to be punished which is agreed upon the majority.

Based on the book Everybody Does It by Thomas Gabor (1994), the universality of moral disengagement is seen in all kinds of people from all kinds of statuses and ways of life. Many psychological theories regarding morality have concentrated on the formal character of moral reasoning to the neglect of moral conduct. In the social cognitive theory of moral self, reasoning based on morals is linked to moral actions via

Moral reasoning is not necessarily related to moral behavior, and neither are moral emotions according to Hoffman (1987). People can know what is right and not to do it. They can feel really miserable about treating each other horribly, and do it anyway. Culture has a large impact on how the information or assessment is interpreted. Culturally sensitive is described as taking every culture into consideration and understanding that there are individuals who do not share the same views as others, Cohen et al., (2013).

I believe moral decision making is more centered on a person than their environmental influences and cultural influences. Sometimes, the environment we are raised in may not affect our way of thinking, although at times we, as people, may say so. One example is from an article I read in my human sexuality class called, “Murder In Amman”. The article focused on the awareness of honor killings in the Middle East, however, as I was reading the interviews, only one of them really seemed to “pop” out the page for me and that was the victim’s father. He strongly spoke out against honor killings and yet he was raised in a society where this was seen as acceptable to save one’s family’s reputation, but the man bravely spoke out against it. This stood

Moral behavior is an aspect of our humanity that is essentially learned at a very young age. Our moral behavior is sculpted based on our culture and our surroundings. It is responsible for the actions we choose to commit. When our moral behavior is inhibited, we stray away from the right thing to do and act in ways that would seem malicious and cruel to a rational bystander. Social and situational context can explain what induces moral people to act in heinous ways. A heuristic is a mental shortcut that readily comes to mind and simplifies cognitive tasks. The solution itself is not perfect or guaranteed to be optimal, but it is enough to satisfy the immediate goals (1). A heuristic affects moral behavior by invoking automatic evaluations, which strongly influence judgements and actions and can

Western liberal and deeply individualistic societies have defined morality in a very narrow sense. By just considering harm, western liberals miss out on the wider variety of moral flavours available in other societies. In more traditional societies, where a greater emphasis is placed on the value of community, morality is not as narrowly defined. Countries that prioritize the group, above the individual, take a more sociocentric approach to morality which brings in the wider array of moral bases. Other than care/harm, Haidt distinguished between four more bases for morality, fair/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Unlike in western liberals, conservatives and those in more sociocentric societies taste all of these flavours of morality when making moral judgments. Liberals, according to Haidt, are able to understand fair/cheating and

According to this informational source, “Moral values, [skeptics] argued, are strictly human inventions, a position that has since been called moral relativism.” This definition of moral relativism given by this source is sets the tone for this paper because moral relativism is the face behind the mask of the evolution of ethics throughout a single person’s lifetime. The next major idea stated in the Ethics section of this source is “cultural relativism which maintains that morality is grounded in the approval of one's society - and not simply in the preferences of individual people.” This serves as evidence for the idea that there is no possible way for a person to shape ethics and morals without the involvement of some living being. A human’s initial ethical lense is egoism. It is a simple default setting for a living being to ensure existence. Then, as a young child learns from modern society, altruistic view begin to filter into a toddler’s ethics, also known as “sharing is caring”. A child’s ethics are molded by the people who raise

Different societies have different moral codes. Cultural relativism claims that ethics is relative to individuals, groups, cultures and societies. Relativism resists universal moral normal. The moral code of society determines what is right or wrong in that society. There’s no objective standard that can be used to judge one’s society code against another. Its arrogant to judge others cultures. We should always be tolerant of them. Cultural relativism for many people is a response to the complexity of moral issues and the number of different responses various. Groups our cultures have given to moral issues so for many when we look at just how different cultures have responded two different issues the way different cultures. All this diversity that there seems to be a response where we want to say well, maybe there isn 't some sort of absolute right or wrong maybe morality really is just relative to a different group that different people believe different things. In this paper, I will discuss the aspect of my culture from an outside perspective and discuss another culture from an inside perspective. In sociology, the principle is sometimes practiced to avoid cultural bias in research, as well as to avoid judging another culture by the standards of one 's own culture. For this reason, cultural relativism has been considered an attempt to avoid ethnocentrism. Cultural relativism is related to but often distinguished from moral relativism, the view that morality is relative to