case study on moral values

Narvaez, D. \(in press, 2018\). Moral development and moral values: Evolutionary and neurobiological influences . In D. P. McAdams, R. L. Shiner, & J. L. Tackett \(Eds.\), Handbook of personality \(pp. 345-363\). New York, NY: Guilford.

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Article Contents

Introduction, overview of moral foundations theory, what's in a norm integrating mft with conceptual work on norm content and norm meaning, how moral values can influence normative interactions, modeling moral distance and its relationship to norm processes and outcomes, contributions and directions for future research, acknowledgments.

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What's in a Norm? Centering the Study of Moral Values in Scholarship on Norm Interactions

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Kathryn Quissell, What's in a Norm? Centering the Study of Moral Values in Scholarship on Norm Interactions, International Studies Review , Volume 24, Issue 4, December 2022, viac049, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viac049

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Some norms go through long contested periods, resulting in norm change, rejection, or persisting conflict. Others are adopted quite quickly, with little resistance across diverse societies. An underlying and unanswered theoretical question is why? A foundational characteristic of a norm as a concept, and a key aspect of constructivist scholarship on norms, is the role of values and moral principles in giving norms meaning and in motivating global policy change. For a field placing significant emphasis on the importance of ideas, the limited theorizing around the value-based content of these ideas is a notable shortcoming. Emphasizing the importance of moral values as among the most deeply held beliefs, I outline a theory of how moral values and moral distance can help explain why certain normative processes and outcomes occur. Building from constructivist work on norms and social psychology scholarship on morality, I propose that moral distance, the degree of alignment, overlap, or separation in moral values between actors can help to explain the type of contestation, the intensity and duration of contestation, and what processes or outcomes are more likely to transpire. The shorter the moral distance, the more likely persuasion or adaptations will occur, leading to the eventual adoption of a norm. The greater the moral distance, the more likely prolonged and heated contestation will occur, leading to rejection or enduring contestation. I argue that centering the analysis of moral values and moral distance in research on normative agreement and disagreement can therefore contribute to understanding why or under what circumstances conflict is more or less likely to happen.

Algunas normas pasan por largos periodos de cuestionamiento, que dan lugar a un cambio normativo, a un rechazo o a un conflicto persistente. Otras se adoptan con bastante rapidez, con poca resistencia en diversas sociedades. Una pregunta teórica subyacente y sin respuesta es ¿por qué? El papel que desempeñan los valores y los principios morales a la hora de dar significado a las normas y de motivar el cambio político global es una característica fundamental de una norma como concepto, y un aspecto clave de los estudios constructivistas sobre las normas. Para un área que pone un énfasis significativo en la importancia de las ideas, la limitada teorización en torno al contenido basado en los valores de estas ideas es una carencia notable. Subrayando la importancia de los valores morales como una de las creencias más arraigadas, esbozamos una teoría sobre cómo los valores morales y la distancia moral pueden ayudar a explicar por qué se producen determinados procesos y resultados normativos. Basándonos en el trabajo constructivista sobre las normas y en los estudios de psicología social sobre la moralidad, proponemos que la distancia moral, el grado de alineación, solapamiento o separación de los valores morales entre los agentes, puede ayudar a explicar el tipo de cuestionamiento, la intensidad y la duración de la misma, y qué procesos o resultados son más probables. Cuanto más corta sea la distancia moral, más probable será que se produzca la persuasión o las adaptaciones que conduzcan a la adopción ulterior de una norma. Cuanto mayor sea la distancia moral, más probable será que se produzca un cuestionamiento prolongado y acalorado, que conduzca al rechazo o a un cuestionamiento duradero. Argumentamos que centrar el análisis de los valores morales y la distancia moral en la investigación sobre el acuerdo y el desacuerdo normativo puede, por tanto, contribuir a la comprensión de por qué, o en qué circunstancias, es más o menos probable que se produzca un conflicto.

Certaines normes traversent de longues périodes de contestation, qui entraînent soit leur évolution, soit leur rejet, ou encore la persistance de tensions. D'autres, en revanche, sont adoptées plus rapidement, et rencontrent peu de résistance au sein de diverses sociétés. La raison de ce contraste demeure une interrogation théorique sous-jacente et non élucidée. Le rôle des valeurs et des principes moraux dans la détermination des normes et dans l’évolution des politiques à l’échelle mondiale constitue une caractéristique fondamentale de la norme en tant que concept, ainsi qu'un élément central des travaux constructivistes portant sur les normes. Dans un champ de recherche accordant autant d'importance aux idées, le manque d'attention théorique prêtée au rôle des valeurs constitue un écueil notable. En mettant en lumière l'importance des valeurs morales en tant que croyances parmi les plus profondément ancrées, j'avance que les valeurs et la distance morales contribuent à expliquer la raison d’être de certains mécanismes et impacts normatifs. M'appuyant sur des travaux constructivistes relatifs aux normes et sur la littérature en psychologie sociale traitant de moralité, je suggère que la distance morale, le degré d'alignement, les affinités ou les désaccords entre différents acteurs en matière de valeurs morales contribuent à expliquer la nature, l'intensité et la durée des contestations, ainsi que les mécanismes et effets les plus susceptibles d’être observés. Plus la distance morale est courte, plus un effet de persuasion ou d'adaptation a des chances de voir le jour, aboutissant à l'adoption d'une nouvelle norme. À l'inverse, plus la distance morale est importante, plus les risques d'une contestation longue et houleuse sont élevés, ce qui entraîne soit le rejet de la norme, soit la persistance de la contestation. Par conséquent, je soutiens que centrer l'analyse des valeurs et de la distance morales sur les consensus et les différends en matière de normes permet de comprendre pourquoi, ou dans quelles circonstances, un conflit est susceptible d’émerger.

Some norms go through long contested periods, resulting in norm change, rejection, or persisting conflict (see, e.g., Zimmerman 2016 ; Niemann and Schillinger 2017 ). Others are adopted quite quickly, with little resistance across diverse societies ( Traven 2015 ). An underlying and unanswered theoretical question is why? Constructivist norms research has made notable contributions to understandings of how norms and policies spread, fail to spread, or change along the way ( Hoffmann 2010 ). Early constructivist scholarship provides frameworks for understanding global norm promotion strategies and processes, as well as conditions and processes through which norm diffusion occurs. More recent work on norm contestation addresses many of the earlier work's shortcomings, by, for example, challenging the conceptualization of norms as static and of norm promotion as the unidirectional socialization of state actors. This latest phase of constructivism builds knowledge of more iterative and interactive engagement around norms, strengthening the nuance and specificity of explanations and developing better understandings of norms themselves and the complexities and varieties of normative change processes.

While scholars are achieving greater conceptual clarity and developing nuanced insights into a variety of normative processes and outcomes, much of this work focuses on identifying and labeling ways of resisting and changing norms that go beyond the simple accept-or-reject framework of early research. For example, recent work on contestation has identified a range of ways actors can resist norms, such as through signaling, transgression, denial, neglect, disregard, avoidance, backlash, and immunization ( Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999 ; Dixon 2017 ; Evers 2017 ; Nuñez-Mietz and Iommi 2017 ; Stimmer 2019 ). Similarly, this research has discerned a diversity of ways norms can change, offering processes of adaptation, modification, localization, translation, transformation, decoupling, interpretation, clarification, decay, disintegration, or de-internalization ( Acharya 2004 ; Chorev 2012 ; McKeown 2009 ; Panke and Petersohn 2012 ; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 2013 ; Zimmerman 2016 , 2017 ; Dixon 2017 ; Stimmer 2019 ). These terms are useful in laying out various scenarios that expand and complicate our understanding of how norms work. However, they are also proliferating in the absence of attempts to synthesize or identify patterns in what is known about norm contestation. What results in the body of work is a sense that all norms and norm processes are relative, with contestation of one kind or another as the only known likelihood. This is inaccurate and presents an obstacle to theory development.

The limited attention in the literature to generalizable patterns exists for both conceptual and theoretical reasons. To begin, there are still inconsistent conceptualizations of what is in a norm ( Winston 2018 ; Stimmer 2019 ; Jurkovich 2020 ). Scholars often use multiple terms for similar components. More importantly, a consequential aspect of norm content has been relatively neglected: the moral values used to justify the behavior change the norm is seeking. In considering this justificatory component, scholars typically identify specific rules, principles, legal precedents, or desired goals that justify action, but they stop short of identifying and assessing the underlying values that motivate and provide meaning for these arguments. Neglecting values, particularly moral values, in the study of norm content leaves out crucial information about why actors care that a problem be addressed in the first place. Values provide the “oughtness” for why a particular action or outcome is good or bad, with moral values as a distinctly significant subset of values, given that they are often the most deeply held ( Haidt 2001 ). Moral values motivate action. If they are not clearly defined in the justificatory part of a norm, we might miss norm components that stay stable or change; in doing so, we might overlook important drivers of contestation or agreement or misunderstand all that is at stake in a conflict over meaning. Without more clearly defining the moral value–based content of a norm, the comprehensive study of norm meaning, normative interactions, and norm change becomes a challenge.

Overlooking moral values can lead to identifying a process or outcome without fully understanding why it happened, constraining the development of deeper or more generalizable explanations for why and how norms do or do not change or diffuse. For a field placing significant emphasis on ideas, the limited theorizing around the content of these ideas is a notable shortcoming. Norm content is typically treated as an outcome or the entity affected by actors, their strategies, the communicative environment, and local structures. It is not examined as a factor that can affect the contestation process. There are important and practical reasons to pay more attention to the influence of moral content on normative interactions, not only because differences in the perceived validity or application of norms driving conflict could be due in part to different moral values, but also because these moral values can affect perceptions of actors and actor identities, the effectiveness of advocacy strategies, and the degree of contentiousness in the communicative environment during normative interactions. I suggest that the moral values in the justificatory part of the norm can have direct effects on the process and outcomes of contestation. Theorizing moral values in normative interactions could therefore explain why certain processes or outcomes occur.

Some norms are more controversial: this controversy might be due to the actors, strategies, and environment of the conflict, or it could be driven in part by the moral content of the norm as it collides or competes with other norms. In a normative interaction, identifying the moral content of the norm in question, and of other relevant norms actors hold, can illuminate how aligned or misaligned core beliefs are surrounding the issue in question. I refer to the degree of alignment, overlap, or separation in moral values as moral distance. Moral distance can help explain the type of contestation, predict the intensity and duration of contestation, and suggest what processes or outcomes are more likely to transpire. As the moral distance shortens, persuasion or adaptation becomes more likely, leading to the eventual adoption of a norm. As the moral distance grows, prolonged and heated contestation becomes more likely, leading to rejection or enduring contestation. In the most extreme circumstances, moral conflict can become sacralized, creating some of the most difficult contentious dynamics. These dynamics require strategies of de-escalation, a type of politics I call destigmatization, which has not been fully considered in international relations (IR).

In summary, addressing the underlying question of why some norms are adopted quickly while others go through longer periods of contestation, adaptation, or rejection requires greater attention to the moral content of norms and how moral distance can shape interactions. Centering the analysis of moral values and moral distance in research on normative agreement and disagreement can therefore contribute to understanding why, or under what circumstances, conflict is more or less likely to happen, an issue many scholars have suggested for future research ( Dixon 2017 ; Evers 2017 ; Kukkonen et al. 2018 ). In this paper, I integrate some of social psychology's most developed theoretical work on morality, specifically moral foundations theory (MFT), with the most recent IR work on norms. Building from this scholarship, I introduce the concept of moral distance and illustrate what it adds to constructivist theory in several steps. First, I introduce MFT and show how attention to moral values can help to better specify norm content. Next, I describe the new construct of moral distance and illustrate how it helps to better understand the relationships among norm content, actors, strategies, and the environments of normative interaction. I then bring together these ideas to model and advance theoretical propositions on what these relationships would predict about normative processes and outcomes, illustrating how moral content and moral distance can help explain underlying patterns in contestation. Finally, I conclude by discussing the contributions of the paper and articulating directions for future research.

Morality is frequently referenced in IR research, but it is often neglected or used superficially in theoretical work. Norms entail a position of “oughtness,” what Finnemore and Sikkink (1998 , 891) refer to as “shared moral assessment.” However, the oughtness of why someone should or should not do something, or why a particular action or outcome is good or bad, is not necessarily moral. “Values” is the concept closest to Finnemore and Sikkink's statement of oughtness. The field of social psychology has extensively theorized and explored how values shape human judgment. Values in this discipline are defined as the judgments humans make of what is good or important in life, which are then used as criteria for evaluating actions, people, and events ( Schwartz 2012 , 3). Values are beliefs tied to affect, and they motivate goal attainment. They can be both individual and collective, and they serve as the standards from which rules, laws, and principles are derived ( Schwartz 2012 ). Individuals also order and prioritize their values based on importance. Moral values are other-oriented ( Haidt 2008 ), working to constrain selfishness ( Haidt 2008 , 70) and provide guidance on how to treat other people ( Yudkin et al. 2021 , 2). Importantly, moral values are also the most deeply held ( Haidt 2001 ), typically outranking self-oriented values in priority ( Schwartz and Bardi 2001 ).

In making decisions, people often face trade-offs among competing values. As moral values tend to be prioritized and play a particularly important role in human judgment, I propose focusing on moral values as a jumping-off point for greater theorizing around values in constructivist work on norms. MFT scholars have identified and verified five main moral values as key areas of concern in diverse societies: (1) caring for and protecting others from harm, (2) maintaining fairness and reciprocity, (3) in-group loyalty, (4) respecting authority, and (5) protecting one's purity and sanctity ( Haidt 2001 ; Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009 ; Horberg et al. 2009 ). Many norms in the IR literature have moral content, particularly in human rights ( Price and Sikkink 2021 ), security ( Rathbun and Pomeroy 2021 ), and culture war issues.

Some norms have little to no moral content, such as those related to maritime zones or fishing rights where the “oughtness” might be tied to concerns for financial gain or other self-oriented values. Moral values are not relevant to the study of all norms. However, when considering situations typically seen as a clash between ideas of right and wrong and rational self-interest, it might be more accurate to categorize them as conflicts between different moral foundations. For example, in the case of torture, the moral values of in-group loyalty and protection might conflict with a more universal moral duty to protect all people from harm ( Price and Sikkink 2021 , 5). The value-based content of a normative interaction should be assessed, and while norms with moral content are only a subset of the broader universe of norms, there is a wide range of cases to consider.

A large body of interdisciplinary scholarship contributes to MFT based in theories of motivated reasoning and the dual-processing brain ( Haidt and Joseph 2004 ; Kahneman 2011 ). The basic idea is that human cognition has evolved such that the first reaction to stimuli in the broader environment is an automatic, intuitive emotional response. This intuitive response informs a post-hoc process of rationalization or deliberative reasoning. These ideas are consistent with IR work on emotions and psychology ( Crawford 2000 , 2014 ; McDermott 2004 ; Mercer 2005 , 2010 ; Hutchinson and Bleiker 2014 ; Kertzer et al. 2014 ). As an evolved characteristic of human information processing, morality is akin to other universally human activities. Haidt (2012, xii–xiii) argues that “the human mind is designed to ‘do’ morality, just as it's designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many other things.” Other research in neuroscience and anthropology supports the premise that cognitive moral systems are universal ( Oxley et al. 2008 ; Sinnott-Armstrong 2008 ; Jost et al. 2014 ), indicating that all societies contain the five foundational moral values. However, humans construct moral virtues, meanings, and institutions in variable ways related to the salience of these five innate psychological systems ( Koleva et al. 2012 ). Societies and individuals build moralities based on how much emphasis they give each foundational value and in response to feedback from the social environment. Morality is not only intrinsic and systematic, but also malleable and varied. Similar moral building blocks can be arranged in different ways to create diverse moral orders, providing a set of constructs that can explain both similarity and variation.

Each of the five primary moral foundations is descriptive of moral concerns identified across cultures, and each includes a particular virtue and related violation. First, drawn from work on the evolution of empathy, the widespread concern for caring, nurturing, and protecting vulnerable individuals from harm is referred to as the care/harm foundation ( Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009 , 1031). Scholarship on the evolution of reciprocal altruism, evidence for cross-cultural punishment for cheating or free-riding, and moral philosophy's focus on justice, fairness, and proportionality inform the second category, often called the fairness/inequity foundation ( Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009 , 1030–31). Recognizing these first two categories as key constructs of Western liberalism, MFT scholars identified three other categories of moral values that are more communitarian. Drawing from coalitional psychology, the virtues of loyalty, patriotism, vigilance against traitors, and self-sacrifice for the group are categorized under what they call the in-group loyalty/betrayal foundation ( Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009 , 1031). Studies of primate and human hierarchy identified virtues of obedience, respect for authority, maintaining traditions, and the importance of leadership in what they refer to as the authority/subversion foundation ( Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009 , 1031). Last, many world religions extol the virtues of purity and sanctity, which serve evolutionary hygienic functions as well as the social and cultural functions of regulating greed and carnality, suppressing selfishness, and cultivating spirituality, in what MFT scholars call the purity/degradation foundation ( Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009 , 1031). Many of the issues IR researchers have studied, particularly in human rights, draw upon the care/harm and fairness/inequity foundations, but these studies have in large part neglected analysis of these moral concerns and have not recognized the diverse moral concerns of advocacy targets that might stem from more communitarian moral principles.

Social psychologists have primarily used MFT to study politics in the United States, at the level of individuals, through lab-based psychological experiments and media analyses, demonstrating the strong influence of moral values on political positions and persuasion in debates around issues such as climate change ( Feinberg and Willer 2013 ), same-sex marriage ( Haidt and Hersh 2001 ), and stem-cell research ( Clifford and Jerit 2013 ). These studies found that people often see the same issue differently, depending on which of the five moral values are most salient for them ( Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009 ). For example, in one study of homosexuality in the United States, conservatives rated homosexual sex as more offensive than progressives did due to conservatives’ much stronger moral intuitions regarding traditional sexual purity ( Haidt and Hersh 2001 ). In this and other studies ( Haidt and Graham 2007 ; Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009 ; Graham et al. 2011 ; Clifford and Jerit 2013 ; Feinberg and Willer 2015 ), purity—as well as in-group loyalty and respecting authority—were more salient for political conservatives than for progressives, who tended to find the values of protection from harm and ensuring equity to be most salient ( Feinberg and Willer 2015 ). There might also be differences in which issues are moralized. Conservatives tend not to moralize harm to the environment, which is one reason they are less likely to prioritize environmental concerns ( Feinberg and Willer 2013 ). Each foundation might also be interpreted in different ways. For example, conservatives tend to see fairness as getting what you deserve, whereas liberals are inclined to see it as greater equality ( Haidt 2012 ). In this way, conservatives are more likely to accept the trade-off of benefiting in-group members over out-group welfare ( Feinberg and Willer 2015 ). Speaking to global applicability, another study investigating whether these political distinctions hold across world regions found that regardless of region, political progressives put comparatively greater emphasis on the harm and fairness foundations while conservatives tend to emphasize the in-group loyalty, authority, and purity foundations ( Graham et al. 2011 ).

MFT therefore provides a framework for identifying key concerns of individuals in diverse contexts. Incorporating this framework and the insights of MFT literature on political conflict and persuasion into IR constructivist scholarship can help researchers understand what norms mean to different people in different places, giving norm content and norm meaning greater clarity and thereby strengthening norm conceptual work. Additionally, the insights into what happens when individuals with similar or different moral values interact provide a theoretical foundation for understanding norm processes and outcomes. In the following section, I outline the conceptual and theoretical benefits of incorporating morality into work on norms, beginning with a discussion of what makes up a norm.

Norms in IR are conceptualized as collective expectations or shared understandings of the proper behavior of a specific group of actors ( Finnemore and Sikkink 1998 ; Checkel 1999 ). The latest stage of norm research has clarified the concept of a norm and developed better means of distinguishing norms from other constructs (such as moral principles, supererogatory standards, and formal law) ( Jurkovich 2020 ), identified the components of norm content ( Winston 2018 ; Stimmer 2019 ), and described what happens to norm content and strength over time as norms change through contestation processes ( Deitelhoff and Zimmermann 2020 ; Ben-Josef Hirsch and Dixon 2021 ). While this work has helped improve conceptual clarity, there are still multiple terms for similar norm components, suggesting general agreement but limited synthesis.

There is general agreement that norms contain two primary pieces. One is a behavior modification request ( Winston 2018 ; Jurkovich 2020 ) or claim ( Stimmer 2019 ) and the other is variously described as the underlying values ( Winston 2018 ), “oughtness” ( Jurkovich 2020 ), frames ( Stimmer 2019 ), or overall purpose for these behaviors. I refer to these two pieces as the behavioral and justificatory components of a norm, respectively. Additionally, several scholars argue that these norm components must be linked to a specific problem ( Winston 2018 ) and to specific actors responsible for carrying out the behaviors ( Jurkovich 2020 ). Improved conceptual clarity on norm content facilitates identification of what is or is not a norm, a norm's specific content in a particular moment and place, which components of a norm are being contested, and how norm content does or does not change over time. However, the values content of norms is underspecified even in literature highlighting the dearth of IR work on values ( Sucharov 2011 ). For example, in the justificatory component, scholars typically identify specific rules, principles, legal precedents, or desired goals that justify action, but they do not identify or assess the underlying values that motivate and provide meaning for these arguments. Winston (2018) even refers to this justificatory component as the “value” of the norm but does not actually assess values. For example, when she maps out the content of the nuclear nonproliferation norm cluster, the value she states is “nuclear war is undesirable” (Winston 2018, 650). This is a desired goal or outcome deriving from values individuals hold, such as the harm moral value, which emphasizes protecting the welfare of all people. It is an outcome based on something we value, but not a value itself.

Without greater attention to moral values in norms, important information about the norm's meaning is lost—information useful for identifying and explaining why a norm is important and what links norm components together. Moral values will most likely be present in a norm's justificatory component, as this component helps to explain why the issue is a problem, why certain actions should be taken, and why particular actors are responsible for carrying out these actions. The justificatory component can therefore help hold the other pieces of the norm together. As such, the justificatory component requires more thorough analysis than it generally receives, and one means of doing this analysis is through greater attention to the presence or absence of moral values. For example, using Winston's (2018 , 651) anti-plastic-bag norm cluster, there could be different values motivating why plastic shopping bags are seen as a problem. As the MFT literature suggests, there are political and cultural differences in why people do or do not moralize the environment ( Feinberg and Willer 2013 ). The South African emphasis on preserving and protecting the natural environment suggests that the harm moral value underlies South Africans’ justification for addressing the plastic bag problem. On the other hand, in India, the goal of preserving sacred cows suggests a purity concern. These moral values provide different justifications for why this problem is important. There is not necessarily a conflict between these moral values, and both countries might agree to ban plastic bags, but they would do so for different reasons. In this case, these different justifications can still hang together in a norm cluster because they are not contradictory, and they link to the same behavioral outcome.

However, for other norms, differing justifications may lead to different ways of prioritizing behaviors or to behaviors that are in conflict. For example, a broad community of global actors agree that female genital mutilation (FGM) is a problem, but they differ as to why FGM is a problem and to what behaviors they suggest as remedies ( Winterbottom, Koomen, and Burford 2009 ; Cloward 2016 ). Within this community, there is overlapping agreement that FGM is problematic because it can physically harm women and girls, making them more vulnerable to infection, chronic morbidity, and mortality. Harm is one of the primary moral values used to justify action. Some actors in this community also place significant emphasis on how FGM violates the rights of women through coercion, violence, and restrictions on bodily autonomy, in ways that male circumcision or other cultural practices do not; this is an argument based in the value of fairness. Advocates who place greater or exclusive emphasis on harm could support the abolition of the practice, but they might also support harm-reduction strategies, such as medicalizing the practice to prevent HIV transmission or encouraging communities to practice less invasive forms of FGM. To advocates who care deeply about fairness, harm-reduction behaviors are inadequate, as they do not completely eradicate the harm or the rights violations of FGM ( Leye et al. 2019 ). These advocates instead seek full abandonment of the practice, sometimes through criminalization, which could drive the practice underground and make it more dangerous in the short term. FGM normative conflict could be an indicator of ongoing contestation over the behavioral component of the norm, but it also demonstrates tensions in the justificatory component with contestation over which moral value is most important. In this example, the advocates have overlapping concerns, but they place different salience on harm versus fairness, contributing to conflict. Analyzing the justificatory component of a norm and how it links to the other components is therefore important for understanding norm development, conflict, and change.

Moral value–based information is useful for identifying what is in a norm, what norms mean to different actors, and what holds norm components together for these actors, aiding in the study of norms as non-static but discrete entities. Additionally, moral value–based information is useful for examining what happens during normative interactions and how and why norms change. It can help clarify what is being contested, and it can shape the processes and outcomes of contestation in more generalizable ways, providing a theoretical foundation for explaining why some norms go through longer processes of contestation with variable outcomes, while others are adopted more easily.

Explaining Moral Distance

Fundamentally, normative interactions are about why a particular new practice should or should not be adopted, or to what extent the norm needs to be modified to work appropriately for a given problem in each context. Even with all the ways actors can resist or change norms, there is a basic spectrum of interactions, ranging from complete agreement on a norm to reconcilable disagreements, to intractable disagreements. As the contestation literature has also demonstrated, any outcome, such as adoption or rejection, is not necessarily stable and should not be considered permanent. However, many of the identified processes can be mapped onto this spectrum of agreement, as illustrated in  figure 1 . The extent of agreement or disagreement on the components making up a norm, and why this level of agreement is present, is an early indicator of what processes and outcomes are most likely for a new norm. Disagreements on the behavioral component, as well as which actors or which problem a norm applies to—all types of application contestation—are more likely to lead to adaptation or changing norm content ( Deitelhoff and Zimmermann 2020 ). Disagreements over a norm's validity are likely to be more contentious ( Deitelhoff and Zimmermann 2020 ), as these disagreements are over the justificatory component of the norm and therefore may be based on moral values. If actors align, overlap, or can be brought closer together on a norm's justificatory component, then adaptation or adoption of the norm can occur. If actors are far apart or are driven further apart on the justificatory component, then rejection of the norm becomes more likely. The degree of contentiousness at the beginning of an interaction, along with what takes place during an interaction, can also anticipate likely outcomes. It is therefore important to investigate and theorize what contributes to these varying degrees of agreement and the intensity of contestation.

Spectrum of agreement.

I suggest that if moral values are present in the justificatory component of a norm, in norm promotion efforts, and in the normative concerns of potential norm adopters, these concerns will likely contribute to the degree of agreement or disagreement along this spectrum. How aligned, overlapping, or disparate the moral concerns are—what I refer to together as moral distance—is an important factor for understanding the extent of agreement and intensity of contestation, with greater moral distance contributing to greater disagreement and contentiousness. MFT provides initial insight into which moral values are more or less likely to lead to misalignment and conflict. In Graham et al.’s (2011) cross-national work, they found that greater alignment on moral concerns was possible when certain moral foundations were in use, whereas misalignment was more likely when others were heavily emphasized. They found the strongest correlations between political conservatism and the authority and purity domains, whereas the harm foundation was weakly associated with political progressivism. In other words, there was more overlap between progressives and conservatives on concern for harm and the greatest disconnect on authority and purity concerns. Graham et al. (2011 , 379) argue that this indicates that the most intractable political debates worldwide are likely to involve concerns related to respect for traditions, authority, and physical and spiritual purity, whereas the greatest degree of moral commonality may be found in issues related to harm and care. Therefore, moral commonality or overlap is more likely if the harm foundation is agreed upon and if the authority or purity domains are less salient. The fairness and in-group foundations have some shared salience across conservatives and progressives, but fairness tends to have greater salience to progressives and in-group loyalty to conservatives. The positions suggested through MFT are illustrated in  figure 2 , with the foundations with greater potential to overlap toward the center of the spectrum and the foundations with less overlapping salience toward the poles. Distance here is conceptual rather than numeric. The figure demonstrates that certain values tend to cluster depending on how liberal or conservative an individual is, along with which moral values are more likely to be held in common across the political spectrum (adapted from Graham et al. 2011 ).

The political spectrum of moral distance.

In terms of moral distance, actors are aligned when they share the same moral concerns. If they share some moral concerns but not others, this is termed moral overlap. If the actors differ on which moral concerns are salient, there can be different degrees of separation depending on which moral foundations are most salient, and on how congruous these concerns are with each other. For example, on the issue of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights, purity concerns supporting discrimination against LGBTQ individuals are incongruous with concerns about harm to these individuals, which creates greater moral distance. In the example of plastic bag bans, concerns about contaminating the environment (a purity violation) are congruous with concerns about harm, which shortens moral distance. Individuals may also have more than one salient moral concern. Through normative interactions, individuals can move closer together or further apart based on changing salience.

The argument that moral values and moral distance matter is consistent with prior constructivist work on issue characteristics, norm alignment, and cultural match; however, it provides greater specificity and can be useful in explaining both successful and unsuccessful norm adoption. In their early work, Keck and Sikkink (1998) proposed that certain types of issues were more likely to emerge and see successful norm promotion, creating norm alignment and policy change. These issues are characterized by their ability to cause bodily harm to individuals, short and clear causal chains assigning responsibility for harm, or the degree to which they infringe on legal equality of opportunity ( Keck and Sikkink 1998 , 27). This description of issue attention emphasizes the harm and fairness moral foundations. While many studies support this generalization, these issue characteristics can be present with issues that do not emerge as priorities, such as concern for harm to children conceived through wartime rape ( Carpenter 2007 ), or for those issues with unsuccessful or uneven rights campaigns (e.g., LGBTQ rights) that do not see norm alignment or policy adoption ( Symons and Altman 2015 ; Nuñez-Mietz and Iommi 2017 ). The original hypotheses about harm and equality of opportunity have not been thoroughly developed, tested, or refined ( Price and Sikkink 2021 , 38) to explain these different outcomes. Identifying and examining the salient moral values and the variation in moral distance between different actors in these norm interactions could provide more specific and generalizable insights into cases of attention, neglect, or resistance.

As Symons and Altman (2015) suggest, norms requiring the national regulation of particular behaviors, such as those tied to gender, sexuality, race, drug use, and some forms of environmental protection, are more likely to be resisted because they are often salient to group and individual identities ( Symons and Altman 2015 , 67) and therefore can trigger status or identity threat—either directly, among state decision-makers, or indirectly, through broader cultural norms and public opinion influencing policy choices ( Symons and Altman 2015 , 71–74). Underlying many of the issues Symons and Altman examine are conservative purity concerns, the moral foundation furthest from the center on the moral distance spectrum. For the groups these scholars identify, promotion of rights and protection from harm frequently confront perceptions of immoral purity violations tied to the policy target groups, which contradict concerns for fairness or care. While bodily harm, rights violations, and clear causal chains matter in a general sense, moral distance can moderate the response to norms with these characteristics. This helps to explain why problems with these issue characteristics can experience different processes and outcomes. Issues with highly salient purity concerns among target actors are more strongly resisted due to the difference in moral concerns between norm entrepreneurs and targets.

Moral distance also fits with scholarship on norm alignment, but it adds a specific dimension to how norm alignment is assessed. Additionally, moral distance can help to better differentiate normative agreement from policy change, a long-standing challenge in the field. Normative agreement or alignment is often conflated with policy outcomes, making it difficult to know what role it plays in the policy process ( Ferree 2003 ). For example, if a new policy is adopted, norms are thought to be in alignment. Normative agreement is rarely assessed directly, even though it should theoretically precede policy change. Without clearly identifying and assessing the content of global and domestic norms and where norms overlap or diverge in important ways between actors, it is difficult to discern whether agreement is occurring, if advocacy influences agreement, or if agreement is less important than other factors in a particular case of policy change. Social movement scholarship has not reached this level of precision, and there have been calls for greater specificity in defining norm alignment and identifying when it is or is not occurring ( Snow et al. 2014 ). Identifying the moral values–based positions of all those involved and the moral distance between key actors can be useful for assessing the degree of agreement, while also distinguishing normative agreement from policy outcomes.

Further, the concept of moral distance contributes to our understanding of culture, cultural match, and intercultural relations ( Checkel 1999 ; Acharya 2011 ; Wiener 2014 ). Actors in the global south may resist norms from the global north, defending their opposition as a means of preventing further colonial interference, maintaining cultural boundaries, and safeguarding sovereignty ( Acharya 2011 ). In doing so, these actors often highlight moral concerns and moral differences, such as in the backlash against LGBTQ rights in East Africa ( Nuñez-Mietz and Iommi 2017 ; Dreier 2018 ), as a defense of culture. Culture, generally defined as the beliefs and practices of particular people and communities, almost always has moral dimensions. Culture shapes the preferences of gatekeepers and the public, with both direct and indirect consequences for discourse and the potential congruence of beliefs and practices between actors ( Checkel 1999 ; Symons and Altman 2015 ). Constructivist work on cultural match ( Checkel 1999 ), matchmaking ( Acharya 2004 ), and cultural background knowledge and validation ( Wiener 2014 ) has long emphasized the importance of domestic norms in norm adoption and contestation, suggesting that the processes of matchmaking and validation create alignment and facilitate the adoption of new norms. However, the understanding of culture incorporated into this work has been narrow. For example, Checkel (1999 , 87) defines cultural match as “a situation where the prescriptions embodied in an international norm are convergent with domestic norms, as reflected in discourse, and legal systems, and bureaucratic agencies.” More weight is given here to legal and public administration structures (fit with rules and institutions) than to other elements of culture, such as values and beliefs. Likewise, Acharya (2004) places more emphasis on the local behavioral preferences and rules already in place than on the justifications or meanings of the different interacting norms. The work of Antje Wiener (2008 , 2009 , 2014 , 2018 ) goes the furthest in exploring culture, norm meaning, and meaning-making processes; however, she is largely concerned with normative and ethical questions surrounding access to sites of contestation, defending multiculturalism, and describing how contestation can lead to greater legitimacy in norms (higher quality norms) as opposed to theorizing how culture and norm content can influence these processes of contestation. Moral concerns and moral distance add rigor to our analysis of culture in IR and inform how we should study normative interactions when moral concerns are present.

Here I have argued that moral distance is consistent with many ideas in constructivist work, while also deepening our understanding of concepts such as issue characteristics, norm alignment, and cultural match. Moral distance can also help to explain which processes and outcomes are more likely in normative interactions. As moral distance is not static, what happens during normative interactions can shape how far apart actors are from each other. Moral concerns can be brought closer together or be pushed further apart. The actors, the strategies used, and the communicative environment of the exchange will all influence and be influenced by the moral concerns that are present. They are mutually constituting in somewhat predictable ways. In the next section, I further explain how moral distance strengthens existing explanations of norm processes and outcomes and discuss what it adds to these understandings.

Moral Distance in Normative Interactions: Integration and Contribution to Existing Literature on Norm Processes and Outcomes

Much of the scholarship examining normative interactions and norm change emphasizes the role of actors and their strategies ( Keck and Sikkink 1998 ; Acharya 2004 ; Wiener 2008 ), the communicative environment ( Payne 2001 ; Wiener 2008 , 2014 , 2018 ), and the local structures shaping political possibilities ( Checkel 1997 ; Acharya 2004 ; Zimmermann 2016 ), with change in norm content as an outcome of contestation. Even as contestation scholarship challenges the conceptualization of norms as facts ( Niemann and Schillinger 2017 ), arguing instead that norms are processes ( Krook and True 2012 ), norm content is still treated as the object shaped by contestation dynamics, not as a factor that can also influence what occurs. While the other factors emphasized in the literature are important for understanding normative processes, they do not provide a complete picture. I argue that the content of the ideas themselves also matters. If moral values are present in normative interactions, they are likely influencing these other factors and the subsequent processes and outcomes. As moral distance suggests, differences in the perceived validity or application of norms driving conflict could be due in part to different moral values. Additionally, I suggest that moral distance can affect perceptions of actors and actor identities, the effectiveness of advocacy strategies, and the degree of contentiousness in the communicative environment during normative interactions. I begin by discussing actor characteristics and identity and exploring how moral distance can shape perceptions, relationships, and identities. Then I discuss the main types of politics and advocacy strategies studied in constructivism, outlining how moral distance can moderate the effectiveness of these strategies. I also introduce a new type of politics stemming from moral conflict that constructivism has not fully considered, which I call destigmatization politics. Finally, I summarize other factors structuring the communicative exchange and examine how moral distance could affect these factors. These basic relationships are illustrated in  figure 3 and are explained in further detail below.

Factors shaping normative interactions.

It has been well established that the actors involved in normative interactions—both the norm entrepreneurs (advocates, messengers) and the targets of new norms (policy gatekeepers, powerful nodes within issue networks)—have attributes that shape whether norm promotion will be successful (see, e.g., Finnemore and Sikkink 1998 ; Busby 2010 ; Carpenter 2014 ). Busby identified specific messenger attributes, such as similarity between messengers and policy gatekeepers, on a range of characteristics that make policy change more likely. Carpenter's work further broadens conceptions of actor attributes beyond the characteristics of individuals to the characteristics of advocacy networks. Her scholarship adds the dimension of intranetwork relations to the study of advocacy, meaning that the relational ties among issues, organizations, and activists shape discursive processes, how issues are seen, and which issues get picked up ( Carpenter 2014 , 51). Norm entrepreneurs are shaped and sometimes constrained by social networks and the interests and values of those they are connected to, particularly powerful central hubs. Both scholars highlight characteristics shaping actor and network relationships and effectiveness.

While some actor characteristics appear fixed for individuals (race, age), some are more mutable (partisanship, ideology, organizational mission). Actor characteristics or attributes signal identity and group membership, which actors can shape as they present themselves to others in interactions, and which targets also perceive and interpret. Forming relational ties within actor networks and between advocates and targets relies on underlying mechanisms of trust, prestige, power, and a desire for what some security scholars call “ontological security,” or the creation of a coherent sense of self ( Mitzen 2006 ; Steele 2008 ; Flockhart 2016 ). Individuals need to feel secure in their identities, and these identities are formed and sustained through relationships ( Mitzen 2006 ). Actor identities are therefore relational and social. Actors also have needs related to identity coherence, such as a positive sense of self and group esteem or status ( Flockhart 2006 ). Actors’ identities and how they fulfill their identity needs will influence why certain norms are discussed or discarded between actors, as actors are more likely to accept norms that fit, and not contradict, their identities. As argued in the prior section, moral values will influence agreement and how a normative interaction unfolds.

As some of the most deeply held beliefs, moral values are a strong aspect of identity ( Aquino and Reed II 2002 ). They are central to how actors define and sustain a coherent sense of self and to the cultural background knowledge actors bring to an interaction. The degree to which these values align between norm entrepreneurs and targets can shape perceptions of similarity, trust, prestige, and group membership. Where values are misaligned, distrust and status and identity threat are more likely. When deeply held beliefs are challenged, people often feel threatened or defensive ( Branscombe et al. 1999 ; Effron 2014 ). As self and other categorizations are a fundamental part of identity construction ( Flockhart 2006 ), actors are likely to reject values they see as contradicting their core beliefs to preserve a coherent and positive sense of self. This suggests that the moral values in use and the moral distance between actors will shape perceptions of each other and perceptions of self, which will have consequences for the normative exchange.

Alignment on moral values is therefore one factor potentially influencing the effectiveness of norm entrepreneurs. In Busby's (2010) case study of the campaign for debt relief, he tells the story of the Irish rock star Bono meeting with US Senator Jesse Helms, a conservative from North Carolina who had previously disparaged foreign assistance as “throwing money down ratholes” ( Busby 2010 , 70), and convincing him to support debt relief by appealing to their shared Christian faith. Senator Helms's initial position, which demonstrated a lack of concern for outgroup members, shifted when Bono emphasized the Christian traditions of care and charity. Bono established in-group membership and appealed to the authority moral foundation (respect for traditions) and to the harm/care moral foundation (virtues of kindness and charity). He was able to do so effectively because of overlapping moral concerns. This is an example of what can occur when actors share moral values that reaffirm positive identities.

If messengers and targets are misaligned on moral values, moral distance will matter for how actors are perceived and for what should happen next in a normative exchange. Actors who diverge on moral values but overlap on other identity characteristics, or who hold in esteem other characteristics of each other, might garner greater trust and recognition than actors who diverge in multiple ways, but for norm adaptation or adoption to occur, they will still need to work toward bringing moral concerns closer together. If actors are seen as coming from very different moral communities, meaning their moral distance is great, interactions are likely to be contentious. Feinberg and Willer (2015) found that as the salience of different moral values to individuals gets stronger, the less likely those individuals are to try to find a middle ground or to adopt an entirely new position on the issue of concern. Other recent studies in social psychology support this point. For example, heavily moralized conflict undermines the ability of people on opposite sides to deliberate or compromise ( Marietta 2008 ; Ryan 2017 ). The greater the moralized attitude an individual has toward a particular issue, the more likely they are to reject compromises, to punish compromising politicians, and to forsake individual material gain ( Ryan 2017 ). At their most extreme, moralized issues can reach sacred status, where people treat their concern as having infinite or transcendent value, precluding any trade-offs ( Tetlock et al. 2000 ). This suggests that if moral distance between actors is great and becomes sacralized, then norm adoption or modification is unlikely, making rejection—or even embracing the position of a norm transgressor—more likely. Sacralization of moral values can occur before a normative interaction begins, if actors bring these positions into an interaction; sacralization can also be created through the interaction in response to actors, their rhetoric and their actions, and other factors structuring the communicative environment. Processes of sacralization will intensify the salience of diverging moral concerns, which can maintain or even widen moral distance. De-escalating sacralization by reducing the salience of the sacralized moral concern can shorten the moral distance, creating space for shared moral concerns, but this will be difficult to accomplish and could lead to prolonged conflict. If sacralization remains, norm rejection will be a more stable outcome. Actor characteristics—such as their identities and background knowledge as well as their strategies of engagement and the structure of the exchange—will be important for shaping what occurs in all these circumstances.

The strategies of norm entrepreneurs have also been studied extensively in constructivist scholarship, but the influence of moral values and moral distance on advocacy effectiveness has not been examined. Moral distance can shape the outcome of each of the main strategies norm entrepreneurs can employ, influencing whether it successfully engages or changes the concerns of the target. First, most of the advocacy strategies transnational advocacy scholars have identified either rely on or are facilitated by the creation of agreement on norms between entrepreneurs and targets. Although agreement is not necessary for policy change, since coercive pressures could also create this outcome, persuasion toward agreement with a norm is often a goal of advocacy and social movements. In Keck and Sikkink's framework ( Keck and Sikkink 1998 , 18–25), each type of politics engages with agreement. In information politics, advocates move politically usable information quickly and credibly to where it will have the most impact ( Keck and Sikkink 1998 , 18). Information and data not conforming to the target's previously held notions or cultural background knowledge are less likely to be accepted ( Nickerson 1998 ), making agreement one of the mechanisms for accepting new information. Symbolic politics relies on the ability to call upon symbols, actions, or stories to make sense of a situation ( Keck and Sikkink 1998 , 22); without agreement on the significance of the symbols, this strategy will not be effective. In leverage politics, the ability to call upon powerful actors to change a situation using material leverage (usually money or goods) or normative leverage (such as shaming and praise) ( Keck and Sikkink 1998 , 23) often requires achieving normative agreement with those powerful actors. Last, in accountability politics, the effort to compel targets of advocacy to act using policies, positions, or systems already in place ( Keck and Sikkink 1998 , 24) can require venue shopping for more receptive audiences, identifying other entities within the system that align with advocates, and then convincing these entities to act. One common example of this process is when executive or legislative actors reject or contest a norm, and as a consequence advocates turn to the judicial system to enforce norm adoption. For the judicial system to engage in accountability politics, it must agree with the advocates’ normative position. If norm agreement is a goal of advocacy work, moral concerns and moral distance should be considered, as they can shape receptivity to information, symbolic references, and normative or material leverage. As mentioned in the discussion of actors, how strongly individuals hold their moral concerns and how far apart they are from other actors can make these specific strategies more or less effective.

To illustrate using a couple of specific examples within information, symbolic, leverage, and accountability politics, advocates may use framing to emphasize different aspects of norms ( Benford and Snow 2000 ), such as framing arguments to fit a target's values ( Busby 2010 ) or domestic cultural norms ( Checkel 1999 ) to better match the interests and values of policy gatekeepers. Advocates can also graft or prune norms ( Price 1998 ; Acharya 2004 ), with the immediate or long-term goal of aligning with the norms held by targets. Framing can also be used to highlight similar actor attributes through building in-group recognition or using positive peer pressure tied to in-group identities, potentially making advocacy more effective. MFT studies support the importance of framing and strategically matching a problem to salient moral values. Several studies have found that effectively matching key moral values through strategic framing can build support for policies that would otherwise be rejected. For example, when advocates for climate change mitigation policies talked about climate change using harm as the main value, they did not find support from political conservatives who prioritize purity, in-group, and authority values ( Feinberg and Willer 2013 ). Reframing the problem to highlight pollution and the importance of preserving the purity of the environment increased conservatives’ willingness to adopt mitigation policies. However, many advocates frame issues according to the moral values that are most salient for them, and those with the strongest moral convictions have less motivation and less capacity to employ strategic framing because they are less willing to compromise on core beliefs ( Feinberg and Willer 2015 ). While it may be challenging for advocates, framing issues according to target moral beliefs will likely be more effective.

Framing can appeal to salient moral values or change their salience, but it does not necessarily challenge, question, or change a moral concern. Challenging and changing a deeply held belief is much harder to do than reframing an issue. Unlike in the environmental example, advocates for LGBTQ rights cannot reframe the issue to appeal to purity, as purity moral values are used to justify homophobia and are less congruous with equity-based arguments. In this scenario, norm entrepreneurs and conservative targets of LGBTQ rights advocacy are very far apart in terms of which moral values are most salient, and framing is not the best strategy for taking on purity concerns. As LGBTQ advocates in many high-income countries have found, appealing to authority moral values around tradition, such as traditional family structures, can be a successful strategy in the fight for marriage equality (e.g., “gay couples are just like straight couples who value marriage and family”). This framing strategy might secure a change in marriage laws in more liberal polities where purity concerns are less culturally dominant, and over time the normalizing of gay relationships might make existing purity concerns less salient, but it dances around the fundamental disagreement. In other countries where the backlash against LGBTQ rights and the criminalization of gay sex have continued or strengthened, reducing the salience of purity concerns might have to occur before appeals to tradition can succeed. Moral distance will therefore influence the effectiveness of framing strategies.

Naming and shaming is another tactic that has received significant attention in the literature, with studies finding variable effects on state and individual behavior, often due to factors or conditions related to the issue, the actors, and other state incentives ( Hafner-Burton 2008 ; Krain 2012 ; Murdie and Davis 2012 ). Moral distance is also likely to influence the effectiveness of this form of advocacy. Naming and shaming might not work, or might lead to worse human rights violations, when the capacity of countries to implement reforms is low and those in power are more concerned with maintaining political control ( Hafner-Burton 2008 ). Snyder (2020) proposes that shaming can also lead to backlash, particularly when the shamers are outsiders targeting widespread cultural practices. However, there is also evidence that naming and shaming can reduce human rights violations, such as in campaigns targeting the most extreme instances of genocide or politicide ( Krain 2012 ), or when campaigns from human rights organizations are supported by additional pressure from other actors in intergovernmental and domestic organizations ( Murdie and Davis 2012 ).

The reasons actors may accept new norms and change their behavior in response to naming and shaming are normative and instrumental. Perpetrators might be more likely to change their behavior if they cannot risk the loss of power, resources, allies, or legitimacy that inaction would bring, particularly if there are significant differences in the material power of the advocates and targets ( Krain 2012 ; Payne 2001 ). Keck and Sikkink (1998 , 29) also argue that countries are most susceptible to normative leverage such as naming and shaming when they “aspire to belong to a normative community of nations.” Reputational concerns and the desire to be a member of an esteemed community can make actors more vulnerable to moral pressures ( Risse et al. 1999 , 245). Shame is also a threat to ontological security, representing an insecurity in self-identity ( Steele 2008 ). If shame leads to remorse, it could change behavior; however, shame can also lead to defensiveness and the desire to resist the recognition of wrongdoing to preserve a coherent and positive sense of self. Moral distance could therefore explain some of the variation in how actors respond to naming and shaming. Greater moral distance between entrepreneurs and targets could contribute to unsuccessful naming and shaming. If actors see themselves as aligned with very different moral concerns, this can affect their identities vis-à-vis each other. If a target actor feels strongly about the rightness of their position (e.g., certain actors in African states in response to LGBTQ rights promotion), and they do not identify with the positions of the norm entrepreneurs, reputational issues will not be a concern. These actors do not want to be included in what they see as an opposing moral community. This reaction is more likely to occur when a new norm challenges important traditions, local respected authorities, or purity concerns, and when the entrepreneur is a cultural out-group member. These violations can lead to feelings of anger and resentment ( Snyder 2020 ) and threaten individuals’ or a group's status. In these circumstances, moral distance creates distinct in-groups and out-groups, potentially exacerbating the in-group moral foundation, and naming and shaming will be less likely to work. The target actors may willfully transgress the new norm, immunize themselves against it, or react through another form of backlash, such as forgoing material gain when moralized attitudes become sacralized ( Evers 2017 ; Nuñez-Mietz and Iommi 2017 ; Ryan 2017 ; Snyder 2020 ). As Adler-Nissen argues (2014, 171 ), shaming is not likely to lead to norm compliance unless the moral authority of the stigmatizer is accepted. On the other hand, if there are shared moral concerns, naming and shaming will be more likely to work, absent other political or resource-based concerns.

While there may be ways to shame effectively when the moral distance is great, more deliberative processes of normative exchange focused on reducing intergroup conflict might be better tactics for engaging in difficult moral discussions and creating conditions that are less threatening to core beliefs and identities. Deliberative processes may not work in all conflicts, particularly those that have been sacralized—and the beliefs of parties in conflict might be irreconcilable until an exogenous event such as a regime change, a crisis, or a stronger moral imperative emerges and shifts the actors or priorities. However, interactive deliberation can help to illuminate shared moral concerns and be persuasive in ways other means of communication cannot. The MFT literature has examined persuasion through the reframing of moral concerns, which can happen during deliberation, but for insight into deeper forms of persuasion, such as changing someone's mind in a more fundamental way, scholarship from psychology and political science on mitigating intergroup conflict is useful in extending MFT and work in IR on contact theory ( Cuhadar and Dayton 2011 ) and agonistic institutions ( Wiener 2014 , 2018) . Integrating this work into IR also introduces a new form of politics, which I call destigmatization politics.

Stigmatization, the negative labeling of an identity, attribute, or behavior ( Goffman [1963] 2014 ), underlies many moral conflicts. It is a fundamental driver of discrimination and inequality, and it plays an important role in the politics surrounding culture war issues, where calls for rights advancements encounter beliefs justifying discrimination. Additionally, stigmatization can occur within a normative interaction when actors are seen as very different from each other and are judged harshly for these differences, or when naming and shaming is used, which can lead to various outcomes. As Zarakol (2014 , 317) argues, when stigma is present in an interaction, “the response is much more likely to be failed attempts at correction, overcompensation or a stubborn denial that a problem exists.” The drivers of stigma are often emotional and moral, such as fear of difference (protection of the in-group), disgust (purity), and other forms of harsh moral judgment, such as around harm and fairness violations ( Herek and Capitanio 1998 ).

Many human rights and culture war issues involve concern for population groups so severely stigmatized that they are treated as less than fully human. Discrimination, violence, and genocide are documented consequences of this dehumanization. Recent experimental evidence on mitigating intergroup conflict points to multiple strategies to effectively reduce significant stigmatization. Some of these strategies are perspective taking, intergroup contact, and in-group descriptive norm setting, which I am grouping under destigmatization politics. Perspective taking typically asks individuals to imagine being in the shoes of a member of the out-group by reading a written narrative or having a personal conversation with an advocate ( Simonovits, Kézdi, and Kardos 2018 ). Intergroup contact theory facilitates interactions between members of in-groups and out-groups to increase understanding and dialogue ( Pettigrew and Tropp 2006 ; Broockman and Kalla 2016 ). In-group descriptive norm setting designates as spokespersons in-group members who have changed their minds and committed to a new norm or way of acting. These spokespersons then communicate to other in-group members why they changed, why changing has been important, and why others should change as well ( Smith and Louis 2008 ). These types of interventions have been found to strengthen persuasion, such as through durably reducing transphobia in the United States ( Broockman and Kalla 2016 ), anti-Roma sentiments in Hungary ( Simonovits, Kézdi, and Kardos 2018 ), and exclusionary attitudes toward unauthorized immigrants ( Kalla and Broockman 2020 ).

These approaches could also be used to lessen conflict within the normative exchange. As discussed earlier, stigmatization as a strategy can be effective under some conditions, but when moral distance is great it is unlikely to work. Not only is naming and shaming less likely to be effective, but stigmatization can also make the communicative environment increasingly contentious. Diverging salient moral concerns are also likely to lead to reciprocal stigmatization of actors, exacerbating conflict. To engage in deliberation and persuasion requires reducing stigmatization. If normative interactions are highly contentious or even hostile, these strategies could help reduce tensions.

Factors Structuring the Communicative Environment

The literature has demonstrated that the design of multinational and regional institutions, and treaty- and other policy-making processes, is important in shaping who is involved and to what extent they have influence over the global norm-creation process ( Acharya 2004 , 2011 ; Wiener 2018 ). It is proposed that norms created through more participatory processes may see broader diffusion as normative debates may have worked themselves into a compromise position. If people do not have access to sites of discourse where compromise, bargaining, or meaningful discussion is possible, they might also be more resistant to a new norm ( Snyder 2020 ). The location and means of the interaction—such as whether it is public, private, face-to-face, virtual, direct, indirect, in global forums, or in domestic venues—can influence what happens during the exchange. For example, there is evidence that the benefits of intergroup contact theory can be brought about in person and over the phone, but not through Twitter ( Yardi and Boyd 2010 ; Broockman and Kalla 2016 ; Kalla and Broockman 2020 ). Twitter and other rapid, reactive platforms might exacerbate moral distance rather than shortening it. As Wiener and others argue, the communicative process, particularly in terms of the degree of trust, threat, and willingness to engage with normative perspectives, is influenced by a range of factors. These include where normative interactions take place, who has access to sites of contestation, who is present during the interaction, procedural justice, other rules in use, and the means through which interactions occur.

In summary, examining the moral values used to justify a norm or resistance to a norm can help identify what is most at stake in an interaction. Additionally, when moral values provide the primary justifications for or disapproval of a norm, moral distance can shape what happens in normative interactions, how norms change, and what the eventual outcome is for norm diffusion. Moral distance can influence actor identities and the contentiousness of disagreement, and it can shape which strategies are more or less likely to lead to alignment, modification, or continued rejection of a norm. The content of the norm, the actors, the strategies, and the communicative environment of the exchange all influence each other.

In the prior section, I argued for the contributions of moral values and moral distance to constructivist understandings of normative interactions. Here I draw together and extend these arguments in a model of how moral distance might influence normative processes and outcomes. I then lay out propositions for what is likely to happen with differing degrees of moral distance, using the case of FGM as an illustration. Beginning with the overarching model represented in  figure 4 , the degree of moral distance between actors, in interaction with the strategies used and the factors structuring the communicative exchange, influences the type and intensity of contestation. By type of contestation, I mean whether the disagreement is about the validity or application of a norm, and by intensity, I mean how tranquil or contentious an interaction is, with mistrust or status and identity threat increasing the intensity of the exchange. The type and intensity of contestation will then influence the duration or time frame of contestation and whether or how contestation can be resolved. The possible outcomes include adoption of the new norm, rejection, or persisting contestation. The degree of salience of moral values when they align, overlap, or diverge will also influence what occurs during the interaction and how stable or insecure a norm outcome is.

Model of moral distance and norm processes and outcomes.

The following propositions could apply to any level of interaction, from norm entrepreneurs interacting with policy gatekeepers at the international or national level to implementation gatekeepers or community members interacting at the local level. To help illustrate the propositions, I am using the case of an anti-FGM norm as an example of what is most likely to occur given different degrees of moral distance, and how the likely processes and outcomes are conditioned by the other key factors. For the purposes of the case, I am defining the justificatory content of the anti-FGM norm as prioritizing the harm moral foundation with the fairness moral foundation present but less salient. This justification is linked to the behavior change request of abolishing the practice and is targeted at local officials in communities where FGM prevalence is high.

Moral Alignment

One of the more straightforward processes is likely to occur when actors promoting this anti-FGM norm interact with target actors who hold similar justificatory beliefs associated with FGM. In situations with moral alignment, the matching of moral values is consistent with actor identities and background knowledge and is likely to contribute to less intense interactions. Under these circumstances, information or symbolic politics is likely to be sufficient, with data and narratives framed according to harm and fairness. Other approaches will be less necessary, as greater coercion is not required. The structure of the exchange, such as the location, means, and rules of the interaction, is also more flexible since the risk of mistrust and identity and status threat are lower. Therefore, in this interaction, norm adoption is the likely outcome. Additionally, if the moral values are agreed upon and highly salient, potentially even sacralized, norm adoption will be a more stable outcome.

Proposition 1a: Moral alignment is more likely to lead to norm adoption

Proposition 1b: Norm adoption will be a more stable outcome if the aligned moral values are highly salient

Moral Overlap

When moral values overlap but are not fully aligned, there will be more contingencies. The actors, their strategies, and the structure of the interaction can lead to several different possible processes and outcomes. For example, if the anti-FGM norm entrepreneur interacts with someone who also sees the harm of FGM and holds this moral value as salient, but at the same time values tradition and maintains the salience of the authority foundation, these actors will overlap on harm but diverge on the importance of authority and fairness moral concerns. Moral overlap could lead to several possible processes and outcomes. First, if the target places significantly more emphasis on the harm of FGM or if the salience of this value is increased over the course of the interaction, this might be sufficient for norm adoption. However, if the salience of the authority foundation is close to that of the target's concern for harm, they will be less likely to agree with abolition. This might lead to a process of application contestation surrounding the suggested behavior change. Additionally, the salience of the relevant moral values and their prioritization is up for discussion. This process is less contentious than validity contestation as the actors disagree on how much to prioritize the harm moral foundation but agree that it is a valid moral value in this case. The quickest potential outcome will be to change the behavior request from abolition to harm reduction, by maintaining a tradition but converting it into a different ritual or to a less invasive form of FGM. This process could lead to norm adaptation, and the adoption of a changed norm. A medium-term possibility would be to maintain discussion and work toward persuading the target to place greater value on harm than on authority. If this is successful, adoption of the original anti-FGM norm becomes more likely as this interaction would progress toward moral alignment.

In either the adaptation scenario or the persuasion scenario, the strategies and structure of the interaction can influence the process and outcome to a greater degree than in the scenario where moral alignment occurs at the beginning. When there is moral overlap, norm entrepreneurs should maintain a shared moral identity with the target to facilitate trust and diminish the possibility of status or identity threat. To most effectively do so, they can use information, symbolic, and leverage politics to appeal to the shared moral concern. Accountability and destigmatization politics will be less necessary in a situation of shared moral ground. Maintaining trust and shared identity should also be considered in the structure of the exchange, which might favor face-to-face or direct interactions with attention to access and participation. If the interactions go poorly, leading to mistrust or identity or status threat, moral distance could increase. For example, if advocates do not take authority concerns seriously and alienate target actors, the salience of targets’ authority concerns could grow while the salience of their concern for harm could diminish, leading to more significant moral distance.

Proposition 2a: Moral overlap is more likely to lead to adaptation and adoption of a modified norm in the short term

Proposition 2b: Moral overlap could lead to adoption of the original norm under favorable strategic and structural conditions in the medium term

Proposition 2c: Moral overlap could lead to shorter moral distance under unfavorable strategic and structural conditions

Shorter Moral Distance

With shorter moral distance, the possible scenarios for processes and outcomes are more uncertain and influenced to a greater extent by what occurs in the interaction. Actors can begin an interaction with differing moral concerns, or negative interactions can move actors from moral overlap to more significant moral distance. With shorter moral distance, actors hold different moral values as highly salient. They might have multiple moral concerns, but they give clear priority to differing values. As compared to actors with greater moral distance, either their differing moral values are more congruous with each other or tensions between them are less extreme. In one example of shorter moral distance, a target actor places significant emphasis primarily on the authority foundation and has little or no concern for harm, while the norm entrepreneur prioritizes harm. Norm entrepreneurs could aim for moral overlap by creating or connecting on a shared concern for harm and then working toward increasing its salience in comparison to the authority foundation. Validity contestation is likely the main point of disagreement. With shorter moral distance, a longer period of contestation is therefore more likely than with moral overlap, as the conversion of the target actor to prioritizing harm will be more challenging. Information, symbolic, leverage, accountability, and destigmatization politics could all be useful, the latter two particularly so if there is no target actor concern for harm. For persuasion to be effective, the communicative process and structure of the exchange will matter quite a bit, as building trust and avoiding status and identity threat will facilitate increasing the salience of harm and decreasing the salience of authority, while eroding trust and threatening identities and status will lead to the opposite. If the strategy is to foster identification with each other and build trust, actor characteristics might matter more. Norm entrepreneurs with in-group characteristics will likely be more effective than those without. Finally, if short moral distance remains or if moral distance varies over time—meaning it contracts toward moral overlap or expands toward greater moral distance, without resolution—contestation could be ongoing. Shorter moral distance can be the crossroads or gateway condition to moral overlap or greater moral distance, or it could be where normative contestation could get stuck.

Proposition 3a: Shorter moral distance can lead to moral overlap under favorable strategic, structural, and actor conditions

Proposition 3b: Shorter moral distance can lead to greater moral distance under unfavorable strategic, structural, and actor conditions

Proposition 3c: If shorter moral distance persists, ongoing contestation is the likely outcome

Greater Moral Distance

If greater moral distance is present before an interaction or created through interactions, it will contribute to greater contentiousness, as it is a form of fundamental validity contestation. In the case of FGM, this could occur if norm entrepreneurs hold fairness concerns as significantly more salient than others and if targets hold purity concerns as significantly more salient. This could also occur if any of the opposing actor positions become sacralized. For example, tradition could become sacralized and therefore eliminate any concern for harm. If greater moral distance is maintained, norm rejection is the most likely outcome. Sacralization will make shortening moral distance significantly harder, making rejection a more stable outcome. Thus, shortening moral distance will take quite a bit of advocacy effort. The actors in these types of exchanges typically have very different identities, very different background knowledge, and very little trust. These conditions suggest that information, symbolic, and leverage politics are unlikely to work. Accountability and destigmatization politics provide the best opportunities for reducing intergroup conflict or locating more sympathetic actors with the power to act on the problem. Both strategies can be time consuming. Additionally, norm entrepreneurs should carefully consider actor characteristics and the factors structuring interactions to succeed in destigmatization, trust building, and de-intensifying the exchange, or in the best way to pursue accountability politics.

Proposition 4a: Greater moral distance is more likely to lead to norm rejection

Proposition 4b: Norm rejection will be a more stable outcome if the distant moral values are highly salient

Proposition 4c: Greater moral distance can lead to shorter moral distance under favorable strategic, structural, and actor conditions

The outcomes of these propositions and the factors influencing them are summarized in  table 1 .

Proposed contingencies and outcomes of moral distance in norm interactions

These propositions build from the literature on actors, strategies, and communicative environments in interaction with the new concept of moral distance. These interactions suggest that normative processes can move in patterns and somewhat predictable pathways that are linked to most likely outcomes. Together they help to explain why some norms are adopted more quickly, while others are rejected, are modified, or go through longer periods of contestation. This conceptualization of norm processes and outcomes sees norm content as central to what occurs, as it both shapes and is shaped by these other key factors.

Throughout this paper, I have positioned the important but neglected role of moral values within constructivist IR work on norms, arguing for what it contributes to understandings of norm content and normative interactions. Drawing attention to the justificatory component of norms, I suggest that more clearly defining and analyzing the values used in the rationales for why certain issues are problems, why particular behaviors should change, and who should be responsible can strengthen understandings of norm content and meaning. Additionally, this greater insight into what is in a norm can help to explain subsequent political processes. Through the concept of moral distance ( figure 2 ), I argue that pinpointing how close or how far apart actors are in their salient moral values can help to determine what processes and outcomes are most likely. I outline how this concept, in interaction with other key factors, can help explain why some norms are adopted quite quickly with little resistance, while others go through long contested periods resulting in norm change, rejection, or persisting conflict.

This theoretical contribution addresses fragmentation in the literature, key gaps in our understanding of how norms work, and what courses of action are most likely to be effective under different conditions. The spectrum of agreement illustrated in  figure 1 synthesizes different ways of contesting, rejecting, or adopting norms into a simplified framework for understanding possible processes and outcomes. When combined with my propositions on moral distance ( figure 4 and  table 1 ), it illustrates a model of the potential pathways an interaction can take, and predicts likely outcomes given moral distance, actor characteristics, strategies, and the structure of the interaction. This model thus provides a way to look for more generalizable patterns across individual cases; it is a tool scholars can use to better assess what part or parts of the norm are agreed upon, what is driving conflict, what impact various conditions have on conflict, and what this conflict is likely to mean for the norm in question.

Additionally, moral distance provides new insight into factors such as issue and actor characteristics, cultural match, and advocacy strategies, which have received a lot of attention in constructivist work and more recently in work on communicative environments. Examining moral distance can provide greater clarity on why problems with the characteristics of bodily harm, rights violations, and clear causal chains can experience different processes and outcomes—it can vary based on what moral values are salient and what the moral distance is between actors. Examining morality can also deepen the field's engagement with culture, which has been neglected in favor of a greater focus on legal rules and institutions. Ignoring values and beliefs underspecifies the content of a norm, and it contributes to “misdiagnosing” why norms resonate and diffuse, change, or are rejected. For example, much of the scholarship, including analyses of norm content in contestation processes, tends to focus on the vagueness ( Joachim and Schneiker 2012 ; Krook and True 2012 ), elusiveness ( Niemann and Schillinger 2017 ), or invisibility ( Wiener 2008 ) of norm content and meaning, with norm diffusion said to take place due to vagueness. Some norms might be vague, but this characteristic varies, and what scholars see as vagueness in some norms might simply be the result of underspecifying their components. Instead of different people seeing what they want in norms, these individuals might be interpreting the justification for a norm in different ways according to which moral values are most salient, given their cultural background knowledge and individual beliefs. The plastic bag ban might be one such example. Was the global norm vague or was the justification interpreted differently in India and South Africa? I think it could be the latter. There are potentially more patterns to be identified in what is currently seen as accidental, arbitrary, or intangible.

Integrated with work on actor characteristics, advocacy strategies, and communicative environments, moral distance points to potential explanations for when these factors are most likely to influence interactions, and why they will be more or less effective in creating alignment on a norm ( figure 3 and  table 1 ). Moral values shape actor identities and are likely considered when people assess how similar or different they are from those with whom they are interacting. Moral distance will also shape perceptions of trust among actors and status or identity threat. While actor similarity has been noted as important in advocacy ( Busby 2010 ), the role of moral distance in shaping interactions has not been explicitly investigated.

This gap extends to work on advocacy strategies. Price and Sikkink note in a recent piece on norms, moral psychology, and neuroscience that IR literature on “processes of persuasion and pressure” has largely neglected the role of moral intuitions, among other types of cognitive biases or filters, which “could help us understand the uptake of advocacy campaign techniques, including attempts to foster change” ( Price and Sikkink 2021 , 29). I agree with this assessment. Through moral distance, I describe how moral values can shape the effectiveness of different strategies, including receptivity to framing, naming, and shaming within information, symbolic, and leverage politics. While many of these strategies are understood as relying primarily on social sanctions or pressure ( Price and Sikkink 2021 , 37), moral distance suggests that social sanctions and pressure will work only under conditions of moral closeness. Greater moral distance could cause these mechanisms to backfire, by exacerbating intergroup conflict, status and identity threat, and mistrust. This argument points to another potential mechanism for norm promotion that does not rely on ostracism: destigmatization politics, a way of reducing conflict within a normative exchange and advancing rights for severely stigmatized groups. In destigmatization politics, the primary mechanism is to build relationships and understanding across groups. This mechanism is also normative and might be of particular interest to scholars concerned with dialogue, agonistic institutions, and rights promotion efforts.

Moving forward, there are several ways to investigate these ideas and propositions or otherwise use MFT in IR scholarship. MFT scholars have developed methods for identifying the presence and salience of various moral concerns through qualitative content analysis using the Moral Foundations Dictionary ( Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009 ), and through surveys using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire ( Graham et al. 2011 ). The Moral Foundations Dictionary requires refinement for specific normative debates and contexts, but it provides a starting point for examining the speeches, statements, and justifications in normative interactions. The Moral Foundations Dictionary could be adapted and used to code qualitative sources of data from past policy processes, or prospectively as events unfold. Future IR work can build from these resources to test one or more of the theoretical propositions discussed here through either retrospective or prospective data analysis. For example, the main propositions and proposed contingencies could be tested by a cross-sectional study comparing countries responding to a global norm at a specific time, or by using process tracing over a longer time frame.

Many of the proposed contingencies are logical extensions of the literature synthesis and theorizing of moral distance, but their specificity, including the relationship between the key factors and the intensity and duration of contestation, can be improved through empirical work. For example, research comparing the means of communication, a structuring factor, has only just begun. It is hard to know from existing work precisely how it will contribute to moral distance. IR scholars working on social media and advocacy could shed light on these dynamics. Likewise, research on actor attributes is still somewhat vague. Intergroup conflict scholars have started testing whether in-group or out-group messengers are more effective when it comes to persuasion through perspective taking, and the results are mixed ( Broockman and Kalla 2016 ; Kalla and Broockman 2020 ). Further work on how actor attributes, strategies, and factors structuring the interaction work in specific interactions could help to refine the general theory. There are still many unanswered questions about what will have the biggest impact in an interaction and about what is sufficient for achieving a desired outcome. These sorts of questions are useful for both scholars and practitioners, as better understanding of the relationship between the proposed factors can aid theory development and guide decision-making. Future research could also identify other moderating factors.

Additionally, the propositions and contingencies of the moral distance model could be used to establish conditions for advocacy field experiments, a methodology not typically used in constructivist scholarship. This methodology could be used to refine understandings of advocacy effectiveness. For example, field experiments could assess what happens if issues are or are not strategically framed according to the moral positions of advocacy targets, what happens in response to naming and shaming under different conditions of moral distance, and whether destigmatization politics can help defuse sacralization. The Moral Foundations Questionnaire survey could be used to assess general and issue-specific moral positions, as could interviews or analysis of other qualitative data sources, in advance of field experiments. This mixed-methods approach could improve our understanding of moral values among target actors, how advocacy strategies affect the salience of moral values, and whether changing moral distance influences norm outcomes.

In addition to destigmatization strategies as a means of mitigating moral conflict, there may be other ways to reduce moral salience and sacralization. Snyder (2020) proposes that by focusing on technical issues and capacity building in normative interactions, backlash could be avoided, but this has not been examined. It is hard to make moral issues into technical issues, but perhaps focusing on the technical dimensions of a problem and behavior change request can lessen the intensity of contestation. However, there are risks in ignoring morality or in reducing the salience of moral values overall. Ignoring moral concerns could lead to norm rejection or compliance issues later. Reducing the salience of moral concerns in favor of technical concerns could also reduce actors’ sense of an issue's importance or urgency to act, leading to stagnation. However, de-escalation of moral conflicts is an important area for additional research.

Next, the relationships between moral concerns, actors, strategies, and the discursive environment could be examined beyond just norm adoption. Moral distance and how it interacts with these other factors could also shape the processes of policy development and design, the likelihood a policy is enacted, and what happens during implementation. As I argued, the analysis of morality can be relevant at different political levels.

In a spin-off of what I am proposing, future work could also consider values more broadly. I chose to start with morality because it is a specific construct with empirically supported measures in many disciplines, it represents values relevant across cultures, and it is an indicator of values that are important and often highly salient in political discourse. However, there are also nonmoral values relevant to IR; these include, for example, self-oriented values found in libertarianism, in the desire for individual status or security as opposed to group status and security, and in individual political interests for dominance and control. MFT is considering the addition of a sixth foundation, the liberty/oppression foundation, but theoretically it is still unclear whether this foundation is other-oriented or self-oriented and therefore moral or nonmoral, and it is unclear how it differs from equity and fairness concerns under the fairness/cheating foundation. IR scholars can contribute to this conversation as it ties into political philosophy, political conflict, and power—areas missing from much of the work in MFT. Additionally, other values frameworks in social psychology could be adapted for use in IR; these include Schwartz's basic human values theory, which posits ten different values, most nonmoral, with motivational conflicts and congruities organizing the representation of value dimensions ( Schwartz 2012 ). This framework has not been used as much as MFT in the study of politics, but it could provide an initial structure for identifying and understanding nonmoral values in norm interactions.

There are also important unanswered questions about what happens when moral values and nonmoral values collide around a particular problem, and how this shapes norm processes and outcomes. For example, under what conditions are moral values more likely to win out? Some scholars may argue that material concerns will always take precedence, but the MFT literature and many current events argue otherwise. Currently in the United States, millions of people refuse to get vaccinated against a dangerous pathogen. For those motivated by partisan concerns, in-group loyalty takes priority over their own health, demonstrating a case where moral concerns trump material concerns. People can also use moral values insincerely as cover for material concerns ( Payne 2001 ; Acharya 2004 ), or late adopter targets can jump on the bandwagon of policy diffusion to avoid the stigma of backwardness, without becoming true believers ( Weyland 2009 , 41). Insincerity can be problematic if it is discovered, as that will affect trust, but these individuals are also likely behaving in a strategic manner to cover other interests or to appeal to constituencies for whom moral values matter a great deal. There are questions around what happens if people are insincere, if moral values are competing with nonmoral values for salience, and how these circumstances would affect the process I outlined above. My suggestion for future research is to identify which moral and/or nonmoral values are in use in normative interactions, to conceptualize these values in terms of congruence or noncongruence (alignment, overlap, distance), and to study what happens to norm processes and outcomes through testing and adding to the propositions I outline in this paper.

Centering the analysis of moral values and moral distance in work on normative processes and outcomes can provide a stronger theoretical basis for understanding why and how certain processes and outcomes occur. The study of moral distance fits with widely used qualitative approaches in IR scholarship on norms, and it provides avenues for less commonly used experimental methods. It provides a framework for investigating the role of morals—an often mentioned but undertheorized concept—in how different groups understand and create the meaning of norms, how normative agreement and disagreement happen, and what the possibilities are for changing the conditions or directions of normative interactions through actors, advocacy, and the structure of the exchange. With greater moral distance comes more intense contestation and fewer options for changing the direction of the discourse. With greater moral agreement, norm adoption or adaptation is more likely in the short or medium term. Integrating these ideas into IR constructivist work can therefore help to develop deeper theoretical understandings of norm content and normative interactions, reducing the fragmentation of current understandings and opening new directions for research.

I would like to acknowledge Hans Peter Schmitz for his mentorship, support, and friendly reviews as I worked on this project. His guidance has been extremely developmental, and I am very grateful. I would also like to thank Sean R. Martin for being my sounding board, copy editor, cheerleader, and partner. And finally, I would very much like to extend my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team at International Studies Review . The experience of working on this manuscript with their constructive feedback has been wonderful, and the paper is stronger because of their suggestions.

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Ethics and Morality

Morality, Ethics, Evil, Greed

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

To put it simply, ethics represents the moral code that guides a person’s choices and behaviors throughout their life. The idea of a moral code extends beyond the individual to include what is determined to be right, and wrong, for a community or society at large.

Ethics is concerned with rights, responsibilities, use of language, what it means to live an ethical life, and how people make moral decisions. We may think of moralizing as an intellectual exercise, but more frequently it's an attempt to make sense of our gut instincts and reactions. It's a subjective concept, and many people have strong and stubborn beliefs about what's right and wrong that can place them in direct contrast to the moral beliefs of others. Yet even though morals may vary from person to person, religion to religion, and culture to culture, many have been found to be universal, stemming from basic human emotions.

• The Science of Being Virtuous
• Understanding Amorality
• The Stages of Moral Development

Those who are considered morally good are said to be virtuous, holding themselves to high ethical standards, while those viewed as morally bad are thought of as wicked, sinful, or even criminal. Morality was a key concern of Aristotle, who first studied questions such as “What is moral responsibility?” and “What does it take for a human being to be virtuous?”

We used to think that people are born with a blank slate, but research has shown that people have an innate sense of morality . Of course, parents and the greater society can certainly nurture and develop morality and ethics in children.

Humans are ethical and moral regardless of religion and God. People are not fundamentally good nor are they fundamentally evil. However, a Pew study found that atheists are much less likely than theists to believe that there are "absolute standards of right and wrong." In effect, atheism does not undermine morality, but the atheist’s conception of morality may depart from that of the traditional theist.

Animals are like humans—and humans are animals, after all. Many studies have been conducted across animal species, and more than 90 percent of their behavior is what can be identified as “prosocial” or positive. Plus, you won’t find mass warfare in animals as you do in humans. Hence, in a way, you can say that animals are more moral than humans.

The examination of moral psychology involves the study of moral philosophy but the field is more concerned with how a person comes to make a right or wrong decision, rather than what sort of decisions he or she should have made. Character, reasoning, responsibility, and altruism , among other areas, also come into play, as does the development of morality.

The seven deadly sins were first enumerated in the sixth century by Pope Gregory I, and represent the sweep of immoral behavior. Also known as the cardinal sins or seven deadly vices, they are vanity, jealousy , anger , laziness, greed, gluttony, and lust. People who demonstrate these immoral behaviors are often said to be flawed in character. Some modern thinkers suggest that virtue often disguises a hidden vice; it just depends on where we tip the scale .

An amoral person has no sense of, or care for, what is right or wrong. There is no regard for either morality or immorality. Conversely, an immoral person knows the difference, yet he does the wrong thing, regardless. The amoral politician, for example, has no conscience and makes choices based on his own personal needs; he is oblivious to whether his actions are right or wrong.

One could argue that the actions of Wells Fargo, for example, were amoral if the bank had no sense of right or wrong. In the 2016 fraud scandal, the bank created fraudulent savings and checking accounts for millions of clients, unbeknownst to them. Of course, if the bank knew what it was doing all along, then the scandal would be labeled immoral.

Everyone tells white lies to a degree, and often the lie is done for the greater good. But the idea that a small percentage of people tell the lion’s share of lies is the Pareto principle, the law of the vital few. It is 20 percent of the population that accounts for 80 percent of a behavior.

We do know what is right from wrong . If you harm and injure another person, that is wrong. However, what is right for one person, may well be wrong for another. A good example of this dichotomy is the religious conservative who thinks that a woman’s right to her body is morally wrong. In this case, one’s ethics are based on one’s values; and the moral divide between values can be vast.

Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg established his stages of moral development in 1958. This framework has led to current research into moral psychology. Kohlberg's work addresses the process of how we think of right and wrong and is based on Jean Piaget's theory of moral judgment for children. His stages include pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional, and what we learn in one stage is integrated into the subsequent stages.

The pre-conventional stage is driven by obedience and punishment . This is a child's view of what is right or wrong. Examples of this thinking: “I hit my brother and I received a time-out.” “How can I avoid punishment?” “What's in it for me?” 

The conventional stage is when we accept societal views on rights and wrongs. In this stage people follow rules with a  good boy  and nice girl  orientation. An example of this thinking: “Do it for me.” This stage also includes law-and-order morality: “Do your duty.”

The post-conventional stage is more abstract: “Your right and wrong is not my right and wrong.” This stage goes beyond social norms and an individual develops his own moral compass, sticking to personal principles of what is ethical or not.

A Personal Perspective: Ten years after its publication, Being Mortal by Atul Gawande remains as relevant as ever. Perhaps more so.

You've just been served a subpoena. You let your client know so they can file a motion to quash the subpoena. The client asks you to file for them. What's your next move?

Personal Perspective: Critics accuse popular books on Stoicism of pandering to a general audience. But what's the harm of the public reading ideas about life and ethics? 

Marriage is under siege as more people find no need for it. But there remain some good reasons to consider getting married, one sociological and one psychological.

Facing an enemy in battle takes courage, but standing alone against your friends requires a special kind of courage we don't learn in school.

Personal Perspective: Adoptees have a bill of rights; shouldn't donor-conceived people have one, too?

In the complexities of human interaction, good intentions often clash with unintended consequences.

Hugh Warwick's book Cull of the Wild argues that at times we must kill invasive species and offers a thoughtful discussion about the mindset behind this dark side of conservation.

For some journalists, ignoring the crimes of corrupt or genocidal politicians, human traffickers, and drug cartels is worse than facing the repercussions of exposing such crimes.

So, you are in a situationship. But what exactly is that? Recent research sheds light and poses important questions about this newest iteration of relationships.

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Videos Concepts Unwrapped View All 36 short illustrated videos explain behavioral ethics concepts and basic ethics principles. Concepts Unwrapped: Sports Edition View All 10 short videos introduce athletes to behavioral ethics concepts. Ethics Defined (Glossary) View All 58 animated videos - 1 to 2 minutes each - define key ethics terms and concepts. Ethics in Focus View All One-of-a-kind videos highlight the ethical aspects of current and historical subjects. Giving Voice To Values View All Eight short videos present the 7 principles of values-driven leadership from Gentile's Giving Voice to Values. In It To Win View All A documentary and six short videos reveal the behavioral ethics biases in super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff's story. Scandals Illustrated View All 30 videos - one minute each - introduce newsworthy scandals with ethical insights and case studies. Video Series

Case Study UT Star Icon

Edward Snowden: Traitor or Hero?

Was Edward Snowden’s release of confidential government documents ethically justifiable?

In 2013, computer expert and former CIA systems administrator, Edward Snowden released confidential government documents to the press about the existence of government surveillance programs. According to many legal experts, and the U.S. government, his actions violated the Espionage Act of 1917, which identified the leak of state secrets as an act of treason. Yet despite the fact that he broke the law, Snowden argued that he had a moral obligation to act. He gave a justification for his “whistleblowing” by stating that he had a duty “to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.” According to Snowden, the government’s violation of privacy had to be exposed regardless of legality.

Many agreed with Snowden. Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project defended his actions as ethical, arguing that he acted from a sense of public good. Radack said:

“Snowden may have violated a secrecy agreement, which is not a loyalty oath but a contract, and a less important one than the social contract a democracy has with its citizenry.”

Others argued that even if he was legally culpable, he was not ethically culpable because the law itself was unjust and unconstitutional.

The Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, did not find Snowden’s rationale convincing. Holder stated:

“He broke the law. He caused harm to our national security and I think that he has to be held accountable for his actions.”

Journalists were conflicted about the ethical implications of Snowden’s actions. The editorial board of The New York Times stated, “He may have committed a crime…but he has done his country a great service.” In an Op-ed in the same newspaper, Ed Morrissey argued that Snowden was not a hero, but a criminal: “by leaking information about the behavior rather than reporting it through legal channels, Snowden chose to break the law.” According to Morrissey, Snowden should be prosecuted for his actions, arguing that his actions broke a law “intended to keep legitimate national-security data and assets safe from our enemies; it is intended to keep Americans safe.”

Discussion Questions

1. What values are in conflict in this case? What harm did Snowden cause? What benefits did his actions bring?

2. Do you agree that Snowden’s actions were ethically justified even if legally prohibited? Why or why not? Make an argument by weighing the competing values in this case.

3. If you were in Snowden’s position, what would you have done and why?

4. Would you change your position if you knew that Snowden’s leak would lead to a loss of life among CIA operatives? What about if it would save lives?

5. Is there a circumstance in which you think whistleblowing would be ethically ideal? How about ethically prohibited?

Related Videos

Causing Harm

Causing harm explores the types of harm that may be caused to people or groups and the potential reasons we may have for justifying these harms.

Bibliography

Whistle-Blowers Deserve Protection Not Prison http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/06/11/in-nsa-leak-case-a-whistle-blower-or-a-criminal/whistle-blowers-deserve-protection-not-prison

Eric Holder: If Edward Snowden were open to plea, we’d talk http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/eric-holder-edward-snowden-plea-102530.html

Edward Snowden: Whistleblower http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/opinion/edward-snowden-whistle-blower.html?_r=0

Edward Snowden Broke the Law and should be Prosecuted http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/06/11/in-nsa-leak-case-a-whistle-blower-or-a-criminal/edward-snowden-broke-the-law-and-should-be-prosecuted

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Human Values in Corporate Social Responsibility: A Case Study of India

• Aruna Das Gupta 4  
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Part of the book series: CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance ((CSEG))

Values provide an in-built standard of reference and judgement for our actions. Values are by no means static, permanent and unchangeable. We may have good reasons for abandoning a value or incorporating a new one in our system, but that process involves its own justification and careful reckoning. The corporate sector in India is dominated by family firms, not only in terms of overall numbers, but also with respect to representation among the largest companies. Some of the more prominent of the family controlled business houses have a history of corporate philanthropy and involvement in community development dating back to the last century and the early part of this century. These commitments, in most instances instilled by the founder of the firm, have expressed themselves in a wide variety of areas.

Author Note: This chapter draws from the author’s previous publication published in International Journal of Business Ethics in Developing Economies; Vol 1; Issue 1;July, 2012. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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Kumar, R., Murrphy, D. F., & Balsari, V. Altered Images (2001). The 2001 State of Corporate Responsibility in India Poll, (TERI Report). New Delhi.

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Tribute to Ethics. (1963), pp. 108–109. (1986). Ahmedabad: Gujarat Chamber of Commerce.

Values-The Key to a Meaningful Life. (2001). A Vedanta Kesari Presentation.

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Abstract:  This case study illustrates the difficulty of making moral judgments as well as what can be inferred about our ability to do so.  A universal moral law is seen to be a complex hierarchy of ceteris paribus principles.

Your group is requested to do four things:  

• Carefully read the situations in paragraphs A through E below. 
• Rate the actions described in A through E from best to worst according to your personal ethics. 
• Rate the actions described from best to worst according to your group as a whole. 
• Justify why you rated the actions the way you did.

Situations: (Adapted from John Hospers, Human Conduct (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), 24.

[A] Because of graft and corruption among high officials in the city government, city taxes have to be raised 35 per cent.

[B] The ambulance brings to the hospital a man bleeding to death. The hospital, being a free city hospital, does not admit him. "We don�t have room," the man at the receiving desk says falsely. "Take him to the other city hospital." At the other city hospital he is also refused, on exactly the same grounds. So he is returned to the first hospital, but by that time he is dead.

[C] A group of Black soldiers in the South going home on leave is riding in a bus. An intoxicated white soldier on the bus becomes sick and vomits. The bus driver accuses one of the Blacks of doing it and has the bus evacuated while the Black soldiers clean it up. While they are working the driver calls the local sheriff and has the Black soldiers locked up for disorderly conduct. The judge sentences them to thirty days on the chain gang. They are not permitted to get in contact with Army headquarters or with their families who are expecting them home for Christmas the next day. ( Cf ., New Republic , Vol. III, No. 1569, pp. 871-872).

[D] "Preachers, rabbis, priests . . . use religion to cloak and to support impersonal, wholesale murder � and the preparation for it. They condone the intent to murder millions of people by clean-cut young men flying and aiming intricate machineries toward Euro-Asia, zeroing in on cities full of human beings � young men who, two years before, were begging their fathers for the use of the family car for a Saturday-night date." (C. W. Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958,) 126. (The issue is about religious leaders influencing political issues, not about the ethics of war.)

[E] The communist youth turns in his parents to the Secret Police for suspected activity hostile to the aims of the Party.

Rating and Justification :

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Ethical Relativism and Ethical Absolutism :  The concepts necessary for understanding how to rate and justify the above cases are explored.

To see how this case study reflects the existence of an internal ethical standard, take a look at the Solution for Moral Judgments.

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Can moral reasoning be modeled in an experiment?

Ján Grác

1 Department of Psychology, Trnava University, Trnava, Slovakia

2 Department of Social Psychology, Maria Sklodowska-Curie University, Lublin, Poland

Piotr Janusz Mamcarz

3 Department of Emotion and Motivation Psychology, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Lublin, Poland

Dorota Kornas-Biela

4 Department of Psychopedagogy, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Lublin, Poland

Associated Data

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to containing sensitive and qualitative information, so are available from the member of Trnava University Ethical Board – professor Marián Špajdel ( [email protected] ) on reasonable request.

A review of the literature on moral issues indicates that none of the empirical approaches to moral reasoning proposes an experimental approach which controls for such object-related experimental variables as: knowledge, motivation, acceptance of moral norms and consequences of human behavior in moral situations in a single research procedure. A unique element of the proposed experimental method is a multi-stage model determining morality indicators. In the two-phase design experiment, psychology students were asked to create model ethical stories and then conduct an overall assessment of each of these stories. As a result, a base of ethical stories was created with empirical moral indicators (positive, negative, neutral). The patterns in the moral evaluation of ethical stories were determined by identifying three processes (selection, differentiation and integration). The final result is a confirmed design of the experiment and a set of formulas that can be used in education and research on morality reasoning.

Introduction

In our study, we present an experimental approach to the study of moral reasoning which allows for the control of some indicators of morality as independent variables. A research proposal for this new approach was first presented by the Slovak educational psychologist Jan Grác. This proposal will be presented first in the context of the classic approaches to moral reasoning, and then in the latest contemporary research, with particular emphasis on the opportunities for experimental exploration of this research field [ 1 ].

Empirical studies on moral reasoning are well known in the psychological and education al literature [ 2 – 6 ]. They are inspired by the two early concepts of moral reasoning offered by Piaget [ 7 , 8 ] and Kohlberg [ 9 , 10 ] who do not use experimental methods in their research. In addition, in a meta-analysis of empirical studies on moral reasoning studies published from 1940 through 2020, the authors [ 11 ] indicate that studies on morality have largely neglected to examine how moral reasoning relates to actions in experimental contexts, including moral norms and intentions.

Classic approaches to moral reasoning

Piaget [ 7 , 8 ] began his research on moral development using the clinical-experimental approach. Piaget’s research approach was a kind of methodological revolution, which shifted psychologists’ orientation from analyzing an individual`s behavior or choice to the underlying form and structure of moral reasoning. This approach was based on short dialogues with individual small children in the context of a moral issue situation. The dialogue with a child, called an indagation , aimed to ascertain his or her individual understanding of moral concepts. Piaget proposed a model of stages of moral reasoning which states as one of its premises that qualitative changes in the structure cause the appearance of a new stage at specific points in time. Piaget created a non-quantitative but qualitative and creative method of scientific exploration of moral thinking in young children.

The creative value of Piaget’s clinical experiment was used by Grác [ 1 , 12 ] to create a second phase of the experiment called modeling and concluding ethical stories , conducted by students. The methodological achievements of Piaget and Grác can be seen as analogous to the path that led Dewey [ 13 ] in his time to discover the five-phase structure of human solution-oriented thinking, which launched the empirical psychology of thinking with experimental research.

Another approach developed by Kohlberg [ 9 , 10 ] is based on hypothetically constructed moral dilemmas in order to test moral decision-making in youth and adults. A significant contribution with regard to Kohlberg’s studies was made by Rest [ 2 , 14 ], who invented a procedure called the Defining Issues Test (DIT). The test requires a subject to read a hypothetical moral dilemma and then select those statements that are the most important issues in making a decision about the test-case statements. According to Gibbs [ 15 ], Czyżowska and Niemczyński [ 3 ], Kohlberg traced the development of moral structures through a series of six stages which form an invariant and culturally universal sequence. Moral structures are measured by requesting individuals to reason about cases in which two or more conventional values are in conflict. The subject reacts to a moral dilemma, indicating what ought to be done and justifying this course of action. The interviewer tries to elicit and probe the subject`s views without interjecting or suggesting any thinking different from the subject`s own spontaneous thinking. Recently, new authors in psychological investigations of moral reasoning have frequently employed moral dilemmas [ 16 , 17 ] where the subjects’ behavior is interpreted in terms of competence levels of moral reasoning.

However, analyzing the logical foundations of Kohlberg’s research paradigm (what can be seen, e.g. [ 18 – 20 ]) on hypothetical moral dilemmas, one can draw the conclusion that research on moral evaluation is itself dilemmatic, primarily because of the one-dimensionality in which the dilemmas in moral judgement literature continue to be formulated. In Kohlberg’s approach psychologist [ 19 ], could not apply the experimental procedure in a strict manner so that the moral norms present in the tests of dilemmas would be controlled as independent variables having a hypothetical influence on the moral reasoning contained in the psychometric tests. In this type of research on moral reasoning, a researcher choses to expose the subjects to standardized tests of moral dilemmas, where the stimuli and test conditions had to remain constant by definition ( ex defintione ). In the experimental study based on Grác’s methodology [ 1 , 12 ], ethical stories will be presented not as a one-dimensional test reality but as a multidimensional moral context, which allows us to take a new research approach to moral reasoning. Thus, in our study the indicators of morality as an important context of moral evaluation will be treated as independent variables, the influence of which are strictly controlled by the experimenter.

Our most recent meta-analysis of the literature on moral reasoning from 1919–2020 found only three articles with some connection to the experimental framing of the research question. However, only one of these papers was based on laboratory-type experimental research [ 21 ], while the other analyses were based on: a thought experiment [ 22 ] and an online experimental procedure [ 23 ]. In all the above-mentioned authors the research methodology includes the paradigm of moral dilemmas. In this context, let us pose the question: To what extent is it possible to use the methodology of laboratory experiment to study moral reasoning having as an example of experimental research by Sudić & Ćirić?

Sudić & Ćirić [ 21 ] designed the laboratory experiment of 3x2x2 within groups, where the independent variables were: a) content of norm (moral, conventional, or abstract), b) rule type (obligation, or permission), and c) induced dilemma (punishment dilemma, or reward dilemma). Three dependent variables were measured in the experimental task: response time, accuracy and final confidence of performance. One of these main experimental findings is that moral rules are easier to process than conventional ones, and conventional rules are easier than abstract ones. However, these authors indicate that they are unsure as to what degree conventional and abstract rules contaminated the moral ones. Moreover, this approach is limited because the ‘correct’ response defined by this experiment is only logical consistency, and it does not take into account the broader context of real life moral reasoning.

Such experiment can be treated as a good initial exploration of the problematic of multidimensional field of moral reasoning, which is difficult to study using the method of a laboratory experiment where a possibility of control variables is rather too limited.

The second experimental approach to moral reasoning presented in our meta-analysis is a very intriguing thought experiment by Rhim, Lee & Lee [ 22 ], who studied human moral reasoning types in an autonomous vehicle moral dilemma, in a cross-cultural comparison of Korean and Canadian subjects. These authors could enrich our knowledge about the possibilities of simulation studies in the field of artificial moral intelligence regarding descriptive models of drivers’ moral reasoning in problematic road traffic situations (e.g. Tunnel Problem [ 24 ]; MIT Moral Machines [ 25 ]). However, the study of moral reasoning in road traffic situations is not exhausted by dilemmas, however. It would be useful to consider the behavior of real drivers to a greater extent, to take into account moral indicators as factors influencing complex moral thinking processes. However, this type of research, while it is referred to as thought experiments , is not geared towards controlling independent variables as in typical experiments. The methodological goal here is to develop the most accurate descriptive model of some unitary situation of human behavior under specific conditions. Thought experiments are simply case studies of analyzed situations, where the control of variables is very limited. Hence their limited usefulness for experimental studies of moral reasoning, which is a matter of formulating general conclusions. It is these more complex processes subject to manipulation in Grác’s experiments which are featured in our study.

Authors of a third study [ 23 ] presented an online experiment investigating the influence of the market environment on moral reasoning. A control group of respondents was asked to make a choice regarding moral dilemmas, while the study participants were exposed to either a market or non-market environment, and after that were asked to solve moral dilemma experimental tasks. While in principle online experiments are not objectionable, our main objection to this research is the fact that it does not consider morality indices as independent variables at all.

In the context of the above statements, one can pose the question: Is it possible to design an experiment on moral reasoning in circumstances of higher ecological validity, and if so, in what way?

J. Grác’s theoretical and methodological statements on moral reasoning

Unfortunately, none of the above approaches to moral reasoning propose any form of research which controls for object-related experimental variables, such as those related to motivation, acceptance of moral norms, and consequences of human behavior in moral situations–in a single research procedure. Grác states that this is possible, and we will demonstrate this in our experiment conditions, where subjects had as a task to define their real-life moral issue as a situation characterized by moral norms involved with the social-moral environment of their professional or educational endeavor. Such arrangements guarantee appropriate circumstances for significantly higher ecological validity of the experimental procedure.

Moreover, Grác [ 1 ] assumes that moral reasoning is a process where the subject conducts a moral evaluation of a human event based upon some premises. The premises for him or her are the indicators of morality which are analyzed in the particular situations, and then synthetized as an overall moral assessment of their activity (or non-activity) under the given social environment. Thus, a quite intriguing research question is: What kind of strategies do people use in the process of integrating indicators of morality in a particular moral situation into an overall moral evaluation of the human activity that is assessed?

This novel approach to the evaluation of moral reasoning processes is proposed by J. Grác, who has made a conceptual contribution towards the psychological analysis of the interiorization processes of moral norms. It is worthy of note that Grác in his original Slovak work [ 1 ] distinguishes between the terms: mravnost’ , and moralnost’ . In the Introduction to the Polish edition of Grác’s book, Biela [ 12 ] emphasizes that these two terms only exist in discriminative usage in two contemporary languages, i.e., Czech and Slovak, and the term mravnost’ is no longer used in Slavic languages other than Czech and Slovak. What differentiates the meanings of these two terms?

Grác on page 71 states that the term “mravnost’” denotes a morally good performance as the highest ethical level of evaluation [ 1 ]. It can be said that this is so because this term indicates the connection of morally good behavior with the accompanying positive psychological experiences, whereby the moral norm regulating both compounds of the conjunctive relationship: morally good behavior and the accompanying morally good experience–indicate a deep interiorization of the moral norm constituting the psychological basis of this conjunction. In turn, the term "moralnost‴ according to Grác means the externally observed manifestations of morally good behavior without accompanying psychological experiences. Hence, not all performances observed as morally good are simultaneously “mravne” (i.e., moral), but only those where good performance is associated with morally good psychological experiences. Therefore, “mravnost’” is interpreted by Grác as an immanent psychological phenomenon.

What is the psychological novelty of Grác’s conception of morality, and what is its methodological significance for an experimental approach to moral reasoning processes? Its greatest novelty is in extending the conditions of assessment of human performance in the defined situation as morally good or bad. In order to define the criteria enabling such an evaluation, Grác distinguished two parallel analytical dimensions of human performance: (1) moral behavior, i.e. the external revealing of moral decision making (external dimension); (2) the internal experience related to the moral behavior, i.e. intentional focus on the moral norm, motivation (internal dimension). In this way, the psychological understanding of moral norms as factors regulating human performance is enhanced by experiential and behavioral structures, creating a basis for systematizing norms as moral, executive, and legal. Executive and legal norms regulate only externally revealed human performance. The characteristic of moral norms is that they regulate both human behavior associated with internal experiences focused on a particular moral norm as well as these internal experiences themselves (i.e. internal experience not tied with revealed behavior [ 1 ].

In this context, we can evaluate an individuals’ ethical conduct in a specific situation as being a morally good action or a morally bad one. However, morally good vs. morally bad designates human behavior in a concrete situation, independent of whether the specific moral norm, e.g., hard work, courage, honesty, respect, trustworthiness, dedication, loyalty, has been actualized or not. Grác analysis posits that a person who accepts a particular moral norm but does not meet it could not be evaluated as performing a morally good action. And, similarly, a person could not be evaluated as having performed a morally good action if that person behaved in a manner consistent with the specific moral norm yet he or she did not accept this norm. Only the conjunction of the positive internal experience of the moral norm with the positive fulfillment of this norm in the situation provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for the positive ethical evaluation of a person acting in a given situation.

The mental processes involved in ethical evaluation of moral performance in everyday life situations and, particularly, in extreme situations are not passive ones on the part of the human subject; they involve active interaction with the social and natural environment.

Grác [ 1 , 12 ] states that moral reasoning implies two sets of mental processes related to moral norms. The first set is related to the mental interiorization of moral norms, and the second set deals with the regulative function of moral norms in an individual’s personal life, social interactions, and the natural environment. These mental processes create real-life moral situations, where moral norms interact with executive and legislative norms. Grác [ 1 , 12 ] presents the internormative extensional relations between executive, moral, and legislative norms using Venn diagrams (Venn, 1884), what can be seen in Fig 1 . As a justification of the purposefulness of using Venn diagrams in our analysis we can state that there is the need to prevent inaccuracies resulting from the extensional crossover of the norms under consideration. Such inaccuracies are indicated by Sudić & Ćirić [ 21 ] who, interpreting the results of their experimental research on moral reasoning, pointed out that they are unsure to what degree conventional and abstract rules contaminated moral rules in their experiment. Such contaminations, invalid and unreliable interpretations of the obtained results of empirical studies, can be prevented by precisely established scope relations between the designations of names of concepts, rules and norms presented in Venn diagrams.

Materials and methods

This research was approved by The Department of Psychology Ethical Board (Trnava University). The data were analyzed anonymously but the oral consent was obtained before the subject research.

The Venn diagram illustrated in Fig 1 demonstrates that if the logical point of view is taken into consideration, we can see the relations between the three universal classes of norms: executive (E), moral (M), and legislative (L); thus, we can dislocate the extensional connections into the seven separate subclasses of norms. Both the executive and legal norms are described in Grác’s [ 12 ] classification as beyond moral ones.

What characterizes executive norms? According to Grác [ 1 ] they are unambiguous regulators of the behavior manifested in specific situations, e.g., in contact with nature, with other people, with oneself. They are oriented towards the hic et nunc point of view, which is the optimum performance of certain activities. For example, in a sport, a sports record can be quickly replaced by another sports record (ski jumping hill record is marked in green to be visible to the jumpers). Another clear feature of this type of normative regulations is that although they improve human activities and accompany various mental experiences (e.g., attitudes, motives), the content of these experiences themselves is not subject to assessment by these norms. Thus, it can be said that neither the views nor the feelings accompanying the performance of these activities are subject to regulation within the framework of moral norms.

What do legal norms refer to? Grác [ 1 ] indicates that the subject of their regulation is also the psychological dimension of the behavior manifested, which is characterized by strictly defined effects. The specificity of these terms is that from the point of view of an injunction and prohibition, they strictly and unequivocally demarcate not only the lower limit of the effect (which is still allowed), but also the upper limit of this manifestation (which is already prohibited). The dimension of mental experiences accompanying the behavior, on the basis of a subjective cause, makes it possible to explain the objective effect, which facilitates the legal classification of the committed act as a crime or crime, which allows for the tightening or leniency of the sanction provided for in criminal law.

If we denote the general class of these norm as CN, and the symbol ∩ denotes logical conjunction, the mutual relations presented in Fig 1 can be expressed in Formula ( 1 ), respectively:

As moral norms will be the main point of reference in our experimental approach, we will now pay more attention to the subclasses from Formula ( 1 ) which contain only such norms. We will define these kinds of moral norms as pure or context-free. The first such subclass, symbolized as Ṁ , denotes the moral norms which belong only to the universe of moral norms but which do not belong to executive or legislative norms. As such, and where x symbolizes any moral norm, and ԑ is a predicator denoting belonging to , this subclass may be strictly defined as in Formula ( 2 ):

The second two subclasses are the conjunctions of moral norms with legislative norms: M∩L and moral norms with executive norms: E∩M. The appropriate formal explications can be viewed in Formulas ( 3 ) and ( 4 ), respectively:

There is also a subclass of moral norms in Formula ( 1 ) which is a conjunction of the three norms, executive, moral, and legislative: E∩M∩L, which is expressed in Formula ( 5 ) as:

The moral norms presented above will be employed in our experiment in the context of moral situation referred to as ethical stories or briefly, as moralities . This method has already been employed in psychological research on moral issues, e.g., by Piaget [ 26 ] and Kohlberg [ 10 ] to diagnose the moral development of children and youth.

It is worth reviewing the strong and weak aspects of using ethical stories in psychological research. We propose conducting a short SWOT analysis of moralities in empirical research to confront this method with personal experience or observations of real-life moral situations. The results of this analysis are collected in Table 1 .

From the outcomes of SWOT analysis, we learn that ethical stories are more easily employed in nomothetic empirical analysis on moral situations. It must be stressed clearly, however, that the subject of our research will be the cognitive aspect of ethical evaluation related to the concept of morally good performance in moralities analysis. Cognitive schemas of ethical stories offer the keys to understanding the concept of internalized behavior.

Cognitive schemas of ethical stories

Let us review the main concepts related to ethical stories. Indicators of moral context relate to analysis of cognitive schemas of ethical stories. One indicator is a moral requirement or demand to do something in a defined situation, which is usually expressed by employing the functor of assertive judgement should that was systematically elaborated by Immanuel Kant as one of his three formulations of a categorical imperative (kategorischer Imperativ) , which is the voice of human conscience–expressed by Kant as: "Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (Kant, 1966, 4:421) [ 27 ]. Without this indicator, none of the moral norms defined in Formulas ( 1 )–( 5 ), could exist at all. If we state that the symbols CI denote Categorical Imperative, we can conclude that the norm regulating one’s behavior is moral. This moral condition can be expressed as a logical alternative connection (expressed by symbol U) of the particular subsets of moral norms defined in the appropriate Formulas ( 2 )–( 5 ) and visually presented in Fig 1 as the corresponding fragments of Venn diagram:

Another indicator of morality is here the object of moral regulation, which is understood as a content or domain regulated by the particular moral norms indicated in ( 6 ). Morally good performance assumes a specific object within which a particular moral norm has been actualized. Good examples could be the ethical codes of various professions. It is precisely stated in such codes that particular content-oriented professional activities are extracted from the remaining professional activities to be regulated by moral norms.

Also belonging to the indicators of morality are what causes a moral norm to become the given norm of the content of a the concrete ethical story, that is, what specifically distinguishes the given norm (specified in Formula ( 6 )) from any other outside normative moral activity of a human being (as regulated separately only by legislative–L, or executive–E norm, as seen in Fig 1 and in Formula ( 1 )).

After reviewing the literature on indicators of morality [ 10 , 26 , 28 ], Grác [ 1 , 12 ] decided to apply the following six indicators for the experimental design: intention–I; concordance–C; application–A; outcome–E; knowledge–K; and realization–R. Realizing that moral reasoning related to ethical evaluation of human behavior in real-life situations is definitely a complicated mental process, we have decided to restructure the above indicators into complementary experimental units, in the two cognitive schemes expressed formally as:

The issue is: what values may the indicators in the Formulas ( 7 ) and ( 8 ) take? It is not a problem to apply the mathematical symbols (+) and (-) to denote, by analogy, an evaluation of human behavior in the ethical story as morally good or bad, respectively. However, these two bipolar values are not sufficient for moral evaluation of ethical stories, because in these stories we can meet with human behavior which, for various reasons, is beyond moral evaluation. That is why we have introduced a third neutral value that may be assigned to each indicator employed in our experiment. The symbol Ø taken from Boolean algebra is applied here. This value will denote that in terms of the specific indicator, the analyzed human performance is outside or beyond the specific aspect of moral evaluation. Moreover, it has to be emphasized here that in the cognitive schemas constructed in this experiment, the denotation of each indicator of morality is precisely defined not only by marking it as (+), (-) or Ø, but also by giving a particular interpretation to it in respect to the specific moral dimensions in these schemas. These symbols will be called antecedent marks in our analysis. We term these specific interpretations as definiens , which will be precisely defined for the particular schemas (see Tables ​ Tables2 2 and ​ and3). 3 ). Next, we present the cognitive schemas of IAO and KCR as the matrices for this experiment on moral reasoning.

IAO cognitive schemas

Indicators for the moral assessment and their definiens, i.e., criteria for their evaluation are defined in Table 2 .

These indicators are specific conditions under which any moral norm works in a certain life situation. The criteria are definientia (sing. definiens ) of the moral norm effect, expressing the fact that each of the perpendicularly identical symbols (+ - Ø) has a different notional content–depending on its combination with the indicators.

The first indicator of the IAO schema is Intention–I. It is understood as a motive or intent of the individual’s ethical behavior. As an individual cannot be forced to be moral, the axiological principle in ethics assumes his or her deliberation and free decision-making in the moral norm interactions. For this reason, this indicator is regarded as exceptionally important. But the indicator of the person’s motive or intention cannot be absolutized since the individual’s conscious relationship to a moral norm is an inevitable but not sufficient precondition for an ethics-based assessment of the person’s behavior. How the concrete behavior will be evaluated from the perspective of intention and motivation depends on the criterion definientia belonging to this indicator. If, for example, the motive or intention of the behavioral event is in accord with the moral norm, then the result of the partial evaluation of behavior is positive (+). If it is in discord, the result is negative (-). The symbol Ø ( nullus ) signals that neither of the previous assessments are valid. Usually, this refers to activities which, due to their content, are regarded as beyond moral, but also to those where the motive of behavior is regulated by a moral norm, but the person is not aware of it.

Application–A, the second indicator of the IAR scheme, answers the question of whether the intention which is moral is or is not obtained by moral means. If the means of the intent’s actualization corresponds with the moral norm, the result is positive (+). If the person tried to achieve the intended good by unethical means, their behavior is evaluated negatively (-). This means that the application indicator always assumes re-activation of the original intent and thus there is also the possibility of a greater or smaller change in the application process; consequently, this resultant motive may, but also may not, be in accordance with the original motive. The fact that every application implies not only motivation but also its actualization gives this indicator, according to the IAO scheme, a crucial position in the evaluation of the individual’s ethical behavior.

The third indicator of the IAO scheme is Outcome–O, as a possible or an accompanying outcome. The indicator in question is related to the assessed behavioral event. The concept of relation itself can be understood as causal or non-causal. It could be causal in the case where the intention indicator was the cause of the actualized intention and the consequence indicator was the impact of it. Since the function of the actualized intention was already adopted in the IAO scheme by the intentional indicator (as mentioned above), it is not possible–in the framework of the same scheme–to assign it simultaneously to the third indicator. Therefore, the Outcome indicator can be understood in the given scheme exclusively as non-causal, i.e. as a consequential circumstance which is related to cause and effect, but which cannot be identified with it. From the above-mentioned analysis, it follows that the assessment of the person’s behavior by means of three signs (+ - Ø) applies only to the evaluation of the accompanying consequence per se and does not influence the overall evaluation of the individual’s behavior in the given moral situation.

Synthetically, the ethical evaluation processes in a moral situation within the cognitive scheme of IAO could be formulated as follows ( 9 ):

, where: the symbols I,A and O–denote the morality indicators in the experimental cognitive schema IAO, i.e. Intention, Application, Outcome, respectively; (+),(-) and (Ø)–are the possible three values which can take each of the morality indicators in modeling phase of the experiment; U–denotes logical alternative connection of these values; and ∩–denotes logical conjunction of the three compounds which are the morality indicators in cognitive scheme of IAO.

KCR cognitive schemas

Indicators of moral assessment related to the cognitive schemas KCR and the criteria for their evaluation are presented (so called definientia ) in Table 3 .

The first indicator of morality in the KCR schema is Knowledge about moral norms, which regulates human behavior in a given situation. This is really moral knowledge about the specific norm, which can exist as a socially accepted norm within public opinion, regulating interpersonal relations. However, the acting person may or may not have knowledge about this opinion. Thus, the cognition of the moral norm can be very differentiated. The norm can exist as a socially accepted ethical obligation which a concrete individual might not know about. There could also be cases where an individual has a positive attitude toward the defined requirement and accepts it as his or her own moral norm, independently of whether such norm objectively exists as a social standard or not. The symbol Ø can be used to value this indicator, if is really unclear as to whether to assign a value (+) or (-).

The second indicator in KCR is Concordance (C) of the person interacting in a given moral situation. Concordance means the actor’s personal attitude to the particular moral norm regulating human performance in this situation. According to Grác (2008, 2015), using the signs: (+) or (-) in valuing the indicator C is relatively univocal, but some problems concerning understanding may require the sign Ø. This sign should be employed if the evaluating person has neither a positive nor negative attitude towards the given moral norm or when this person does not have his or her own understanding of the moral requirements related to the norm in question.

The last indicator Realizing–R refers to whether and how the requirements of the moral norm regulating human behavior are fulfilled. A positive (+) value of this indicator signifies that implementation of the moral norm is fulfilled. This indicator receives a negative value if implementation of the moral norm is not fulfilled in a situation where it is supposed to be. Ethical evaluation faces greater difficulty when considering whether to assign the value Ø. This case is particularly difficult to assign due to the fact that there is no analogy between a neutral attitude towards a moral norm (as in the case of indicator C above) and the neutrality of acting in a concrete situation, when we are dealing with human performance.

In concluding this stage of our analysis, we can state that ethical evaluation processes in a moral-content-situation within the cognitive scheme of KCR can be formulated as follows ( 10 ):

, where: the symbols K,C and R–denote the morality indicators in the experimental cognitive schema KCR, i.e. Knowledge, Concordance, Realizing, respectively; (+),(-) and (Ø)–are the possible three values which can take each of the morality indicators in modeling phase of the experiment; U–denotes logical alternative connection of these values; and ∩–denotes logical conjunction of the three compounds which are the morality indicators in the cognitive schema of KCR.

Control of independent variables in evaluating cognitive schemas of ethical story experiments

The main methodological requirement for any experimental condition is to control the independent variables which make an impact on the dependent variable. In our experiment on moral thinking, the main dependent variable to be explained is the ethical evaluation of human behavior in terms of moral values. It is assumed that moral reasoning is a structured mental process like any other human thinking structured towards problem solving. Since John Dewey’s How we think [ 13 ], psychologists working on problem solving, have distinguished the phases of thinking which lead human thinking to reach the goal of solving a problem. Similar thinking takes place in a real-life moral situation where a human being considers whether and which action should be taken in order to behave in a morally acceptable way, in accordance with his or her conscience–based on a moral norm.

Our experiment will be based on the evaluation of ethical stories (moralities), using the defined structured indicators of morality, called cognitive schemas of the ethical-dilemma-stories, described above as IAO and KCR.

The first novelty of this experimental approach is the two-phase design: (1) modeling of ethic-dilemma stories based on logically structured cognitive schemas, and (2) overall ethical evaluation of the modeled morality schemas.

Assessing the effect of any moral norm in conditions of an experiment situation, given by the schemas IAO and KCR, is one methodological challenge; another is grasping these conditions in a person’s actual behavior. This can be done by means of modeling written stories which present real-life moral situations. These stories enable the observer to examine intrinsically experienced behavior, e.g., their motivation or intention, which is usually hidden from a second party’s retrospection.

We use the term modeling for the creation of moral dilemma stories. This involves the assignment of arbitrary content of actually displayed behavior to the respective value indicators of the schema, so that this allocation may accurately correspond to the criterion definientia of the indicators (I,A,O,K,C,R) of morality. Educational psychology students were the subjects of this experiment. They were asked to create model ethical stories concerning moral situations of young students of their age, according to carefully-prepared instructions informing them how to do this task.

Control of independent variables in the experiment

Three question arose in the definition of modeling . The first of these is formulated as follows: how many independent variables , that is, different configurations of signs, are offered for story modeling by the schemas IAO and KCR, respectively?

In order to answer this question for IAO schemas we have to strictly consider the three indicators of morality where each of them, formally speaking, may take three possible values: (+), (-), (Ø). Thus, to calculate all configurations of each indicator combinatorically, where generally its number is n , where the number of values that each of the indicators can take may be generally symbolized by r , we could apply the formula for variations with repetition n r . This means that variations with n elements of the r th class are all possible configurations of n indicators of morality and the r values which each indicator can take. In our case, where the number of indicators n = 3 in the IAO schemas, and the number of values which each of them can take is r = 3, the number of all configurations is simply attained using Formula ( 11 ) as follows:

N(IAO)–the total number of independent variable configurations related to the indicators of morality and their values in the IAO schemas;

N(IM)–the number of indicators of morality in the IAO schemas;

N(VIM)–the number of values that can be taken by each of the indicators of morality in the IAO schemas.

And, similarly, for the KCR schemas, where the number of indicators is also n = 3, and the number of values which each of them can take is r = 3 as well, we can reach the number of all configurations simply by using Formula ( 12 ) being a replication of Formula ( 11 ) as follows:

N(KCR)–the total number of independent variable configurations related with the indicators of morality and their values in the KCR schemas;

N(IM) and N(VIM)–are as in Formula ( 11 ).

The elementary experimental fields of moral evaluation: Ethical stories

The second question is whether the same story content, which is modeled according to certain specific criteria of evaluation, can be modified in accord with further randomly applied evaluation criteria of the IAO or KCR schemas. In an effort to answer this question, we can alternately replace each indicator of morality by one of the criterion values: (+), (-), (Ø). If we take as an example the description of three 18-years-old youths who solved the problem of moving to a new place to live in different ways, we obtain the IAO and KCR schema matrices with nine boxes as a part of 27 total number of combinatorial boxes, accounted separately for the IAO and KCR cognitive schemas, as presented in Formulas ( 11 ) and ( 12 ), respectively. For the schema matrixed in our experiment the total number of rows i = 3, and the number of columns is c = 3. If any line is denoted as i and any column as j , then any field in these matrices can be expressed as an experimental field EF ij of partial moral evaluation of human performance in ethical story. An example of such EF ij are shown in Table 4 for the IAO schemas.

As in our case, the IAO scheme is a square matrix, the values in the first line can be written symbolically: i 1 c 1 = I (+), i 1 c 2 = A (-), i 1 c 3 = O (∅) and at the same time they can be checked by reading them verbally in the first row of the chart. The square matrix enables us to read the same story plot variably, i.e., according to an arbitrary configuration of boxes in the lines, without losing the inner logic (meaning). For example, if we select only positive criteria, then the story plot can be expressed in the following notation: i 1 c 1 = I (+), i 3 c 2 = A (+), i 2 c 3 = O (+). When we read it in the chart in this transcript, we find out that the story plot did not lose its inner coherence. It is possible to symbolically record only the minus or only the null configuration in the same way. However, any random two-element combinations are also possible, e.g., combination of two negative and one positive value. In that case, the notation is as follows: i 2 c 1 = I (-), i 1 c 2 = A (-), i 2 c 3 = O (+).

Based on the above, the IAO schemas make it possible not only to create stories differing in their content, but they also offer the opportunity to modify the already-modeled stories.

In a similar way, we will now give an example of experimental fields EF ij of the schemas KCR shown in the square matrix presented in Table 5 .

From Table 5 we can see that KCR schemas, similar to IAO schemas, also have a variable structure of stimuli constituted by the content of combinatorial sequences of elementary experimental fields (EF ij ) at a level equal to IAO. These experimental fields are indicators of morality of each individual ethical story presented in both the IAO and KCR schemas. The experimental control of independent variables in this experiment deals with combinatorial control of the particular scheme in terms of the formal values (+), (-) and ∅ in IAO and KCR, respectively. Moreover, in order to avoid contradictions between the concrete schemas, on the one hand, and to maintain individual and personal coherence of the ethical story content, on the other, the subjects were the heroes of each of the 27 IAO schemas and 27 KCR schemas, where each schema actor was assigned a different name in the modeled ethical stories.

Experimental design

In our experiment the stimuli are the individual schemas, which consist of three indicators of morality ordered in the two following sequences: IAO and KCR, where each of the indicators takes only one of three values in its matrix of sequences (see Tables ​ Tables4 4 and ​ and5). 5 ). The valuated indicators of morality constitute a concrete cognitive schema as a complex sequential stimulus which consists of three particular experimental fields as the objects of ethical individual story modeling in the first phase of the experiment.

Thus, each individual IAO schema can be defined as a well-ordered set of three:

where: S i (IAO) - any of the n ( n = 27 in our experiment) IAO schemas; I = {(+),(-),(∅)}; A = {(+),(),(∅)}; O = {(+),(-),(∅)} – denote the sets of values which can take particular indicators of morality in the IAO schemas. This indicates that the order of the indicators constituting the IAO schema should not be changed.

In a similar way, each individual KCR schema can be defined as a well-ordered set of three:

where: S i (KCR) - any of n (n = 27 in our experiment) KCR schemas; K{(+),(-),(∅)}; C = {(+), (-),(∅)}; R = {(+),(-),(∅)}–denote the sets of values which can take the particular indicators of morality of the KCR schemas.

The methodological analysis conducted allows us to formulate an experimental design to present cognitive schemas for ethical story modeling by educational psychology students. These ethical stories involve moral issues from the students’ own community. This design is included in Table 6 as a matrix of formal schemas numbered from 1 to 54 and presented in parallel columns in such a way that numbers for schemas IAO and KCR are located on either side of the formal valuation structures of the indicators of morality.

The order number of formal valuations of the IAO schema is always on the left side of the appropriate column for modeling formal patterns in Table 6 and the order number for the KCR schema is on the right side of this column, respectively. The signs of moral evaluation should be read from left to right both for IAO and KCR schemas.

From Table 6 we learn that both cognitive schema enable the planned experiment on moral thinking to control for variability of stimuli structure via evaluated indicators of morality of human performance modeled in experimental conditions during the students’ classes.

Subjects, experiment–(a) modeling instructions and procedure, and (b) overall moral evaluation of ethical stories

Subject group 1.

Subject Group 1 were 134 third-year educational psychology students of a modal age of 20 years, who participated in both parts of our experiment, i.e., in the modeling of ethical stories, and in the overall evaluating of these stories modeled by themselves. Their participation in this experiment came as part of a regular course on educational psychology at the Faculty of Philosophy of Trnava University in Trnava (Slovakia) over the years 1998-2000. 80% of the subjects were female students and 20% were males. After participating in theoretical lectures on cognitive schemas of ethical stories and evaluation of related indicators of morality, the students of the seminar on educational psychology were presented with the following task in accordance with these short instructions:

Experiment instructions and procedure for Subject Group 1

As you have learned today from the lecture on education psychology, each schema of an ethical story has its own order number in our experimental matrix and a concrete valuation of its three indicators of morality. Now you will receive data about two IAO schemas and two KCR schemas. Your task will be to creatively model the thinking and performance of a 17-year-old individual, different in each of the projected stories, in accordance with the given values of the individual indicators of morality according to the patterns of potential schemas, the order numbers of which will be generated by random number generator.

After this instruction each individual subject was given the Ethical Story Modeling Experiment Report Form (see the form with this protocol in the S1 Appendix ) containing four order numbers associated with indicator values for potential ethical stories generated from Table 6 by a random number generator. The subject was instructed about where and what the modeling schema of the concrete story should be in accordance to the experimental design, and that the hero of each story should be an individual person known by his or her name.

Once the modeling phase of the experiment was completed, in the next phase the experimenter asked the same subject to conduct an overall evaluation of each of the constructed ethical stories in his or her protocol as a whole by assigning a global symbol in square brackets [] to denote their overall assessment of moral values of human performance as: morally good [+], morally bad [–] or morally neutral [∅] which are now called the concluding symbols.

The experimental modeling procedure and overall moral evaluation of ethical stories took place in a seminar room where the subjects could model the educational stories in quiet and comfortable conditions. They conducted their experimental modeling and overall moral evaluation individually, sitting separately at seminar tables in small groups. The average time for modeling was about 45 minutes. After completing the story modeling and conducting the overall evaluation of each of the constructed ethical stories, the students gave the completed Protocol for Experimental Modeling of Ethical Stories and their completed Moral Evaluation back to the experimenter (see: S1 Appendix ).

Subject Group 2

Taking into account that the studied group of students (Subject Group 1) participated in the entire experiment, i.e. in modeling and then in evaluating the entire ethical story, we can state that they had a fairly high level of ethical knowledge, particularly on overall evaluation of ethical stories, gained mainly from lectures on the psychology of morality. This, however, completely rules out the possibility of using the research results from the second part of the experiment as representative for the overall evaluation of the ethical stories constructed in our experiment by the young students.

Therefore, the authors of this study decided to select two other group of young people applying to study psychology for the second part of the experiment, i.e. for overall evaluation of the ethical stories (modeled in the first part of the experiment) as the subjects who are just after their maturation and participate in the entrance exams for psychology at the University of Trnava. These subjects are called Subject Group 2. Their number is 450 (N = 450).

The research findings from this moral reasoning experiment are presented according to the two phases of this experiment: (1) the results of modeling ethical stories, and (2) the results of the overall moral evaluation of the modeled ethical stories (see: the example of the Protocol of Experimental Modeling of Ethical Stories and its completed Moral Evaluation back to the experimenter (see: S2 Appendix ).

The modeling phase

The total number of protocols received with completed modeling was 536. This means that the main result of our findings from the modeling phase of our experiment on moral reasoning is a systematized empirical data base of ethical stories, which is a kind of empirical description of characteristics of denotative meaning of the indicators of morality understood in their positive, negative, or neutral meaning in a context of cognitive schemas of ethical stories. This base is systematized in accordance with the order numbers of the 54 IAO and KCR cognitive schemas, sequenced and presented as a matrix in Table 6 . One way of presenting this data base to list the modal examples of modeling created on the base of this matrix. The full list of modal models can be found in the original Slovakian version of the report by Grác (2008, pp 119–125) and the Polish version by Grác (2015, pp.140-148).

This data base can be a source for qualitative analysis on the structuring of moral reasoning using indicators of morality. One of the opportunities for research using this data base points is to use the schemas for research on overall assessment of the moral value of the ethical stories. This is what was done in the second phase of this research project.

The moral evaluation phase

We will now show what kind of cognitive strategies the subjects developed in their overall moral evaluations, based on analyzing the values of indicators of morality as premises in inferring the conclusions in the IAO and then KCR schemas.

Strategies used to complete overall moral evaluations of the IAO schemas of ethical stories

The students’ overall moral evaluations of the IAO ethical stories allowed us to identify three regularities which describe their moral reasoning in analyzing the values of the indicators of morality in these stories. These regularities are also intuitively deducible from the syntactic structure of the indicators of morality contained in the structures of formal ethical story schemas used in our experiment. These syntactic regularities are referred to as the model strategies of overall evaluations of ethical stories.

The moral strategies of overall evaluations of IAO ethical stories

The first regularity can be called the principle of univocal values of intention and application indicators . The matrix which indicates the overall moral evaluations which fit this regularity is shown in Table 7 .

The analysis of Table 7 allows us to formulate a principle of univocal values of intention and application indicators as follows:

where: ES denotes the overall moral evaluation of ethical story; I and A denote the appropriate signs of moral values of the indicators in IAO schemas.

The second regularity of the overall evaluation of the IAO schemas of ethical stories is called the principle of preferring application (A) indicator over intention indicator (I) . Table 8 shows the matrix indicating the overall moral evaluations which fit this principle.

From Table 8 we can learn that the principle of preferring application (A) indicator over intention indicator (I) may be formally expressed as:

where the symbols denote the same as in ( 15 ).

The third regularity says that if the intention indicator is non-zero, and the sign of the application indicator is zero, the concluded overall moral evaluation of the ethical story is formally expressed by the sign of the intention indicator, independently of the sign of the outcome indicator. This regularity is called as the principle of preferring the non-zero intention indicator (I) over the zero application indicator (A) . The designates of this principle are shown in the matrix presented in Table 9 .

Analysis of the patterns of indicator signs allows us to formulate in a formal way the principle of preferring the non-zero intention indicator (I) over the zero application indicator A expressed as:

Representativeness of the syntactic models in overall evaluations of IAO ethical stories

At what level are, the above-presented models of overall evaluations of IAO ethical stories, descriptive for the subjects? Overall evaluations of IAO ethical stories extracted from the empirical data base were carried out, having been obtained in the modeling part of the experiment and prepared in the ZEU-IAO Test for further research. The participants of this part of the experiment (N = 450) were high school graduates who took their entrance exams for psychology at the University of Trnava (Slovakia). In 93.75% of the IAO ethical stories schemas, the modal evaluation of the subjects turned out to be consistent with the model strategy of logic-formal syntax. The percentages of these strategies ranged from 28.70% to 98.00% [ 1 ].

These results were consistent with a study carried out three years later with another group of high school graduates (N = 355) participating in the entrance exams for psychology at the same university. They were tested with the same ZEU-IAO test as the group of their colleagues earlier. Both study groups had no contact with each other in the interim. The second study showed that for 93.75% of the IAO ethical stories schemas, the modal evaluation of the subjects turned out to be consistent with the model strategy of logic-formal syntax indicated in Tables ​ Tables7 7 – 9 and in Formulas ( 15 )–( 17 ), respectively. This means that the strategy of integrating the morality indicators of moral stories into IAO schemes resulted in highly descriptive models for the processes of moral evaluation of these stories. The percent of subjects employing these strategies in the experimental ethical stories ranged from 32.00% to 98.30% [ 1 ].

The relatively high sample of subjects in two consecutive studies (N = 450 and N = 355) provides a strong indication that modal percentages of moral evaluations are a good fit for the model strategy of integrating moral indicators into the decision-making situations of ethical evaluations in our experiment. However, the fit with the model evaluation is strongly conditioned by the context of the moral situation itself. In the ethical stories of the IAO scheme, differences in moral conclusion congruence are as high as 70%.

Strategies used to complete overall moral evaluations of the KCR schemas of ethical stories

The first main finding concluding the moral evaluation of the ethical stories within the KCR schemas is that only concordance (C) and realization (R) indicators of morality played a decisive role in the overall moral evaluations of the stories. Familiarity with the heroes of the stories of moral norms (K) appeared only to play a contextual role in the ethical stories, with no impact on completing the moral evaluation process.

The students’ assessment data allowed us to identify the following four strategies in concluding the moral evaluations of the KCR schemas of ethical stories:

• If the sign of the concordance indicator (C) is univocal with the sign of the realization indicator (R), the sign of the concluded moral evaluation of the ethical story is equal to the signs of both indicators in the premises of this conclusion, which can be formally expressed as: ( C = R ) ⇒ ( E S = C = R ) , (18) where: ES–denotes the same as in the above formulas, and C, R denote the symbols of the KCR schemas.
• If the sign of the concordance indicator (C) contradicts the sign of realization indicator (R), the overall moral evaluation is expressed with the sign ∅. As a formal expression it is stated as: ( I ≠ R ) ⇒ ( E S = ∅ ) (19)
• If the sign of the concordance indicator (C) is neutral (∅),the overall concluded moral evaluation of the ethical story is neutral as well, which one can formulate as: ( C = ∅ ) ⇒ ( E S = ∅ ) (20)
• If the sign of the realization indicator (R) is neutral (∅),the overall moral evaluation of the ethical story takes its value from the non-zero evaluation of the concordance indicator (C). In a formal way this regularity may be expressed as: ( R = ∅ ) ⇒ ( E S = C ) (21)

Representativeness of the syntactic models in overall evaluations of KCR ethical stories

In this section we indicate to what extent the integration stretches of morality indicators in the overall evaluation of ethical stories according to the KCR scheme (formulated in Table 10 and Formulas ( 18) –( 21 )) constitute descriptive models for students participating in the experimental evaluation of these stories. To do so, we use the test results of a group of high school graduates (N = 450) who participated simultaneously in the test (both the ZEU-IAO Test and the ZEU-KCR Test). Based on the general data for the degree of compliance between the empirical distribution of moral valuation of the respondents for the tested ethical stories and the indications of the models discussed above, it can be said that in 10 test tasks out of all 16 tasks displayed for the KCR scheme, model strategies turned out to be descriptive for the evaluation of the studied group of high school graduates. This means that in 62.50% of evaluation tasks, the modal number of respondents in 10 out of 16 groups of tasks, was consistent with the logical-formal syntax model. A more detailed presentation of this research situation is indicated in Table 10 .

* The bolded percentages in the column fourth of Table 10 denote that these modal evaluations by the subjects fit in the defined ethical stories, the model strategies related to these stories.

The data from Table 10 allow us to more accurately conclude that the modal percentages of model evaluations are quite varied with respect to individual moral stories exposed in the experiment: from 49.2% to 89.2% of the respondents’ modal moral evaluations. The data clearly indicate that students’ moral evaluations of ethical stories under the KCR scheme are significantly more consistent with the logic-syntactic models of moral evaluation of these stories. The difference between the most difficult and easiest evaluations here is 40%, whereas in the IAO scheme it was 70%.

Conclusions and final remarks

In this section we will attempt to respond, first of all, to the question of which mental processes are involved in both the modeling phase of our experiment and the overall evaluation of the ethical story. Grác [ 1 , 12 ] assumes that in modeling ethical stories, semantic operations are involved to create thematic-oriented structures in accordance with the sequences determined by the formal signs of the indicators of morality which constitute the cognitive schemas of potential stories (moralities). These semantic mental operations must be focused both on securing particular sequences for the appropriate moral valuation required by the cognitive schemas obtained in the experiment, and, at the same time, on maintaining the thematic coherence of the content of the whole ethical story.

We consider here the role in moral reasoning played by the particular indicators of morality known from the literature, such as motivation and intension [ 28 – 31 ]. In the overall evaluation phase of the experiment, moral reasoning required more syntactic and formal logic cognitive operations. Grác [ 1 , 12 ] distinguishes in the structure of human mind the three processes that enabled the subjects to formulate the regularities in concluding the overall moral evaluation of ethical stories: selection , differentiation and integration . If we compare J. Dewey’s [ 13 ] first five-stage structuring of the goal-oriented thinking or problem-solving process to the Gràc model, we can interpret Gràc’s (2008) distinguished mental processes precisely as stages in the process of moral reasoning toward a goal which is the moral evaluation of a specific ethical story in an experiment. Hence, when faced with the problem of moral evaluation of a particular ethical story, the subject of that decision undertakes the following three mental processes or phases: 1. the phase of selection processes; 2. the phase of differentiation processes; and 3. the phase of integration processes.

The selection process deals with highlighting the indicators of morality that do not influence moral evaluation of ethical stories, but only create a situational context in these stories. These indicators appeared to be: the outcome indicator (O) in the IAO schemas, and the knowledge indicator (K) in the KCR schemas. This means that these two indicators are not considered as premises in completing overall moral evaluation of ethical stories. The result of the differentiation process is in distinguishing among the indicators of morality which play a dominant role in competing the overall moral evaluation of moral stories, and those which are only connected with this evaluation. The dominant positions were taken by: the application indicator (A) in the IAO schemas and the concordance indicator (C) in the KCR schemas.

The main mental process related to conducting an overall moral evaluation is integration , which allows a generalizing value to be assigned for each group of three indicators in the IAO and KCR schemes. As a result of this process, seven regularities were identified that describe the generalized patterns of indicator sign in the premises and the inferred overall conclusion for each group of ethical stories. The relationship discovered between each of the particular groups of indicator signs as premises and the overall moral evaluations of the moralities constitutes a psychological connection for moral inference in our experiment on moral evaluations of ethical stories. Formally, this relationship can be expressed in the formal logic syllogism modus ponendo ponens as follows:

where the symbols of inference connection (p⇒q) denote the particular regularities formulated in ( 17 )–( 21 ) as the first premise for conducting the moral evaluation, where p denotes the conditional sentence concerning the particular group of indicators signs of moral valuation and q denotes the result of the overall moral evaluation of ethical story.

In conclusion, we have described the novelty of the two-phase experiment conducted on moral reasoning, which included ethical stories modeling phase and an overall moral evaluation phase where the subjects were psychology students. The ethical stories modeling phase developed by the students gave them the chance to learn what moral reasoning about youth behavior is in an attractive way, and what role the indicators of morality of their experimentally modeled ethical stories play in overall moral assessment of human performance. This phase of the experiment enabled the subjects to take a large step towards the process of internalization of moral norms regulating human behavior in social situations. In addition, this process was of a multidimensional nature and a structured character, leading to the overall moral evaluation of human action.

Reflecting on our theoretical analyses and experimental studies of moral reasoning, we can draw the following conclusions: (a) moral reasoning is a multi-faceted psychosocial phenomenon, where its mutually linked factors constitute the moral existence of the individual human person; (b) there is a need to distinguish and differentiate the following components of moral reasoning processes for both theoretical and practical purposes: cognitive, volitional, emotional, motivational (intentional) and behavioral processes–which the literature refers to as indicators of morality; (c) psychology is still far from determining the external validity of its psychometric and experimental instruments for studying moral reasoning in natural experiment circumstances with a higher ecological validity.

The uniqueness of our experiment lies in the fact that the students of psychology themselves, properly prepared by the ethical story modeling program during the first stage of the experiment, called modeling, developed the content of complex matter story schemas for the second stage of the experiment, using the indicators of moral evaluation of their own youth social performance. On the other hand, new students who were just applying for psychology at the same university participated in the second stage of the experiment, and had not yet had any contact with their older colleagues who were the subjects in the first stage of the experiment. Thus, the contexts of ethical storytelling schemas, modeled by the students of psychology, received an overall moral evaluation by their slightly younger (a year or two) colleagues. In this way, a satisfactory ecological validity of the results of our experimental research on moral reasoning was achieved.

It is for these reasons, we may say that this experiment took place in closer proximity to real-life thinking processes than other research methods previously used in experimental psychology. Such a conclusion is justified both on the basis of the meta-analysis of the psychological literature from 1940–2020 on morality (see: [ 11 ]) as well as our own analysis of publications from the last three years (e.g. experiments made by Sudić & Ćirić, [ 21 ]; by Awad, [ 25 ]; and by Rhim, Lee & Lee, [ 22 ]) what was presented earlier in our paper. This means that we achieved significantly higher ecological validity in the presented experiment than has been achieved thus far in other experiments on moral reasoning. However, this does not mean that the level of ecological validity in our experiment is already totally satisfying.

Let us now try to indicate the philosophical and social significance of our experiment on moral reasoning and the obtained results. This has already been signaled in formula ( 6 ) of our article which, according to Immanuel Kant [ 32 ], defines the existence of moral norms articulated by the voice of conscience, which declares, in the mode of the categorical imperative, one must act or not act in a certain way in order for a given action to be able to become a universal law.

We are now prepared to carry out a psychological interpretation of the experimental results obtained from the point of view of the assumptions of Kant’s philosophy, especially concerning the categorical imperative and the a priori structures of the human mind in relation to the moral sphere. The analysis of the indicators of morality constituting the ethical stories according to the scheme of IAO and KCR shows that in each of these schemes the students studied quite easily differentiated the indicators important for the inference of moral judgments from the indicator creating only the situational context for such an assessment. Thus, in the IAO scheme, subjects immediately distinguished the moral inferential indicators (I and A) from the contextual indicator (O), while in the KCR scheme, subjects unerringly recognized the two moral inferential indicators (C and R) as opposed to the contextual indicator (K). This became apparent in the process of integrating just indicators I and A in the conclusion evaluating the entire IAO ethical story, as well as just indicators C and R in the moral evaluation of the KCR schemes.

By perceiving such empirical regularities in the behavior of the subjects under study, one can venture a direction of interpretation that integrates strategies of moral indicators, i.e., logical-syntactic models of moral evaluation of ethical stories in the IAO and KCR schemes are treated as a priori forms of the human mind of this moral evaluation. Under this interpretive assumption, the degree of descriptiveness of the logical-syntactic model of the correctness of the moral judgment of each ethical story in the experiment indicates a priori its potentiality as a moral regulator of the human mind in situations of moral judgment. On the other hand, the respondents assessing ethical stories in a manner consistent with the model moral evaluations, create a situation that can be defined as a “natural Kantian society”(The authors express their gratitude to Jeff White for inspiration regarding the interpretation of the obtained results of empirical research in terms of the natural Kantian society) .

Supporting information

S1 appendix.

https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14703495.v1 .

S2 Appendix

https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14703504.v1 .

Funding Statement

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Data Availability

• PLoS One. 2021; 16(6): e0252721.

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Reviewer #1: The trouble with the paper is that it is not coherent, as a paper. There are some interesting parts, mostly that second half of the paper. This is written well, and makes sense, at least. Short advice: cut the first 15 pages, and recompose an introduction grounding the IAO and KCR etc. Then, rewrite the stuff from 16 onwards accordingly. The current introduction is a flurry of references, with which few are substantively engaged. Yes, Piaget and Kohlberg are important thinkers, but why in this context are their references so important? This is is not established, only presumed. At the same time, necessary references are missed, and important assertions are oddly not grounded. Where there are references, these are mostly "drive-by" style. There is little substantial and fruitful engagement with any of these works. Though a "drive-by" reference can be useful sometimes, in general, references should ground assertions in common literature, and in specific ways that distinguish the present reseach from others. The basic idea of the first half of the paper should be to focus in on the second half. However, the first half of the paper doesn't do that, and in the end it is not clear that the first half of the paper is necessary, at all. See the attached edited draft PDF for comments. Some comments from the PDF: "One sentence paragraphs are to be avoided." (page 2) "Are these points in time, or periods in the more or less normal biological development of human beings?" (page 3) "Maybe this is a better first sentence for this paragraph>" (page 5) "Can you write this more simply, perhaps as multiple sentences?" (page 5) "Task in?" (page 5) "Certainly? This is not clear. And moreover, you do not explain what these terms mean, and why they may be important for others." (page 9) "Now, this use of “moral” is sensible, as a distinction from what may be cnsidered the “ethical” or social, here your “external”. However, it is not clear that Grac is originally responsible for such a distinction, and still, the three special terms have not been clarified." (page 9) "As your study relies on the work of Grac, the preceding discussion should set this theory out in greater detail. Rather, now the methods section begins by assuming that this is an adequate theory, with which the reader is adequately acquainted. However, the introductory pages are deficient in this regard." (page 10-11). "This doesn’t sound much like Kant’s CI." (page 13) "Does Kant base his CI in personhood?" (page 14) "“precisely stated” - You might cite and perhaps quote relevant examples." (page 14) "Why would these be “weaker”?" (page 15) "Though there is some semblance of a review, there is no systematic exposure of “indicators”." (page 15) "Are these lifted from those resources, or are they products of your assay, or…? " (page 15) "Advice: recompose the first 15 pages as 8 or 10, and better introduce Grac and this approach in the same." (page 16) There are more comments on the PDF, but I will stop here. Ultimately, this would be my advice. Whatever happens, the paper should directly introduce exactly those ideas making the focal experiment and its results transparently significant and informative. Right now, the paper does not do that. Note that to get the current paper to do that qwould require radical re-composition and is in no way an acceptance of the paper for publication. The paper as it has been submitted is clearly not publishable, and I do not see it easily becoming so. Rather, this reviewer feels that there are redeeming aspects to the paper. The authors appear to have taken themselves seriously enough to present the paper, but as a single paper it fails and this reviewer sees no way to make it into a coherent paper within any practical period of time. Some parts of the paper are more easily dismissed than others, for instance, too many controversial claims remain unsubstantiated, including some regarding the moral language specific to certain linguistic groups and what leads from that, i.e. an apparent moral superiority. Why this is necessary in this paper is a mystery to this reviewer. Nothing is done with the references, and the meanings of the terms are never revealed. Still, if it is necessary, then this necessity should be supported in argument. This is not done, and moreover the discussion doesn't add to the paper. Many other sections seem similarly to detract from the paper rather than add. Other big problems are the English grammar throughout the first half, of course. It needs to be proofed by a patient English language editor before resubmission. it is not publishable as presented. There are in the paper some worrisome assumptions (some noted in the PDF, search "assume"). And, there are some problem over-generalizations. As it stands, this is not Q1 research. It might be radically revised and resubmitted, but as a new submission. I would be willing to see such a resubmission. This would - for me - have to better set up and better interpret materials beginning at about page 15 of the present paper. As for the rest, my advice would be to break it into sections, determine what each one is trying to say, and decide how and what it contributes to the message of the paper, overall. As it is, the paper does not show us how its most interesting parts have anything special to do with Piaget, or why the formaulaic Venn representations are useful, ... and more. My advice as a writer and advisor to students would be that, if something does contribute to your message, then you need to show us why. If you can't do that, then you should cut that part. Given the amount of work that I would expect necessary to adequately revise this paper in a timely manner, this reviewer recommends rejection of the present submission with encouragement to resubmit after radical revisions. Although, this reviewer does not expect that the authors will be able to undertake adequate revisions in a reasonable time, ultimately, deadlines depend on the timeline established by the publishers and editors of this issue. With a suitable extension, such radical revisions may be possible.

Reviewer #2: The paper proposes an experimental method on moral reasoning with a control over multi-indicators such as intention, concordance, application, outcome, knowledge, and realization; each with three possible values (+, -, ∅). The method consists of two phases: the creation of model ethical stories and an overall assessment of each of these stories. The moral assessment of these stories, in order to uncover the regularities, are determined by three processes: selection, differentiation, and integration. As the result of applying these three processes, seven regularities are identified, providing a pattern in the form of implication, whose premises are indicators and their corresponding values and the conclusion is the overall moral evaluation of the constructed ethical stories. Such a pattern can thus be applied in moral inference as in the formal logical inference of modus ponens.

The paper is well-written in English (despite some inconsistencies, detailed below) and the whole content can be generally followed. The introduction details existing works in moral reasoning. To some extent, I find that the introduction is too wide in its coverage and it could focus more on existing works on similar experimental methods so as the contribution and the novelty of this paper can easily be distinguished from the existing ones.

In terms of materials and methods, I really appreciate that the methods are written systematically, built from the basic ingredients from introducing class norms to enumerating all configurations for constructing ethical stories. Nevertheless, here are some comments that may improve the paper:

- The idea of mathematically formalizing the method by using sets is a good one. But the way it is formalized is rather non-standard and thus can be confusing if this paper is read by mathematically-related researchers (e.g., computer scientists), e.g., if they want to computationally model your results. One confusion comes from mixing up the logical conjunction notation (∧) and set intersection (∩). Though they are closely related, their use should be distinguished. At first, the paper seems to choose set notation (e.g., intersection for conjunction), but then in formula (6), the logical disjunction notation (∨) is used. Mixing this up renders some formalization superfluous, e.g., (3) - (5) and others. I would suggest all formulas to be rewritten in accordance to a standard formal notation.

- One concern, and this is perhaps because the paper is unclear on the procedure, is whether the same individual subject conducts the first and the second phase. Or, whether these two phases are performed by different individual subjects? If both phases are performed by the same individual subject, my concern is on potential bias in the assessment of the stories (given that the subject is also the one who constructs the stories). This may need clarification in the paper as the integration process relies on the results of the second phase. Perhaps a kind of cross validation in conducting the second phase (evaluation by different subjects, run several times) can be considered as a procedure in order to derive more convincing regularities.

- While the IAO schema is supplemented by matrices that confirm the regularities, unfortunately this is not the case for the KCR schema. I just wonder whether there is no anomaly at all in both schemas and this concern is actually related to my previous point on the procedure. The matrices themselves are not sufficient, but data and relevant statistical analysis from the experiment (particularly from phase 2) are required to justify the seven regularities that come from the experiments.

Minor comments:

- In page 11, the first subclass that is formalized in (2) is not a subclass of CN (formula 1), since CN only contains objects from the intersection of M with E or L. The first subclass requires that it belongs only to M and does not belong to E or L.

- Formula 7, it should be IAO instead of IAR.

The third regularity of the IAO schema is called “the principle of preferring the intention indicator (I) over the *non-zero application indicator (A)*. But Table 9 shows that this principle comes from cases where the application indicator (A) is always zero.

- Formula 19 is inconsistent with the regularity described: the premise should be C≠R instead of I≠R.

Reviewer #3: The paper reports the results of an experiment where 147 educational psychology students were asked to create model ethical stories and then make an overall moral assessment of each of these stories.

The stories fall into two cognitive schemas: IAO and KCR.

I = Intention. This is understood as a motive or intent of the individual’s ethical behavior.

A = Application. This answers the question of whether the intention which is moral is or is not obtained by moral means.

O = Outcome is a possible or an accompanying outcome. The outcome can be understood in the given scheme exclusively as non-causal, i.e. as a consequential circumstance which is related to cause and effect, but which cannot be identified with it.

K = Knowledge. This refers to knowledge about moral norms, which regulates human behavior in a given situation.

C = Concordance. This means the actor’s personal attitude to the particular moral norm regulating human performance in this situation.

R = Realizing. This refers to whether and how the requirements of the moral norm regulating human behavior are fulfilled.

In the article there are some examples of stories fitting these schemas.

An IAO example

I (+) John found a new flat to create better conditions for his siblings to study.

A (-) He did it regardless of the disapproval of his mother, who felt almost mortally hurt by his decision.

O ( Ø ) After having moved to his new flat John found out that the signal for his cell phone was the same quality as in the previous location.

A KCR example

K (+) Igor knew that cruelty to animals is immoral.

C (-) He was not opposed to ill treatment of animals.

R ( Ø ) However, he has never even been in a situation where he watched cruelty inflicted on animals by others.

Each value in the schemas has three possible answers (+ - Ø). Thus each schema has 27 possible combinations (3 x 3 x 3)

In the experiment, the students have been asked to create (or “model”) stories that fit into these two cognitive schemas (IAO and KCR). Then they have been asked to evaluate these stories.

Examples of the actual stories and their evaluations are presented in Appendix 1.

An IAO story

I (+) When Jack got his driving license, he decided that he would never drive a car after drinking alcohol.

A (-) Once, when he was drinking with his friends, he picked up a call from his mother asking him to go pick her up at the station.

O (+) When he came to the garage to get the car, he noticed that his father had already gone to get his mother.

The overall moral evaluation of the ethical story is: [ - ]

A KCR story

K (-) Isidore, a candidate for psychology, did not know about confidentiality in counseling under the psychologist's code of ethics.

C (-) Isidore is against keeping secrets because, according to him, everyone has a right to information.

R (Ø) He has not completed his psychological studies, as it is forbidden for a psychologist to pass on such information to third parties.

The overall moral evaluation of ethical story is: [ - ]

This “two-phase design” is the novelty of the approach of the authors: (1) modelling of ethic-dilemma stories based on logically structured cognitive schemas, and (2) overall ethical evaluation of the modeled morality schemas.

This process produced a database of 536 stories.

The authors claim some patterns emerge from this analysis such as the principle of univocal values of intention and application indicators, the principle of preferring application (A) indicator over intention indicator (I) and the principle of preferring the intention indicator (I) over the non-zero application indicator (A) in the IAO schema.

There are four patterns in the KCR schema. Formalisations of these seven patterns are provided.

Major Points

I like the general idea of doing experiments to analyse moral stories and to investigate exactly what is involved in moral reasoning. I also like the idea of formalising patterns in moral reasoning. So I commend the authors for their work in this area. My view is that the paper should be published with some minor revisions.

I feel rather uneasy about the IAO/KCR schemas. It seems to me these schemas are a somewhat limiting template to impose on moral stories.

Consider this well-known moral problem, Switch. One might write the classic “trolley problem” thus:

1. When Bill joined the railway, he decided he would keep everybody safe and kill or harm no one.

Comment: It seems to me this could be K or I. K would result from reading the workplace health and safety manual. I would be Bill’s intention to do what the safety manual said.

2. Once Bill was standing by the switch, when a runaway trolley raced towards him. Five of his fellow workers were in the main line tunnel. One was in the branch line tunnel. All Bill could do was a) nothing or b) throw the switch. If he did nothing five would die. If he threw the switch one would die.

Comment: It seems to me this could be a story about means and ends and so (at a stretch) a question of Application.

3. Bill threw the switch and killed one to save five.

Comment: This is a causal result (so not O = outcome as I described by the authors). At a stretch it could be Realizing.

Thus, as I analyse it, Switch does not obviously fit into either of the IAO or KCR schemas. To be candid, I think I am “shoehorning” Switch into the IAOKCR categories somewhat. It could be IAR or KAR but this observation alone does not invalidate the experiment. It merely suggests there are more experiments and observations that could (and should) be done. However, I am concerned that having three elements in the schema is a somewhat arbitrary choice. Some language dealing with these objections (if only to say more experiments like this need to be done) would be a good idea.

One the other hand, I found the paper interesting to read. Even though I ended up disagreeing with much of it, this alone is not a reason not to publish it. Morality is massive complex and inherently controversial. More experimental work of this pattern should be done and variations on the themes raised in the paper should be attempted.

Minor Points

If the students have been "carefully instructed" to write stories with the IAO and KCR schemas in mind, how can the experiment be said to be natural? It would seem to be heavily prompted to me. It might be a better idea to have students apply the IAOKCR schemas to well-known moral dilemmas from the ethics literature or to student-authored dilemmas, where the students are not prompted to express a story in a restrictive schema like IAO or KCR. However, this would be a quite different research project. In a revision I would simply avoid the claim the experiment is “natural.”

The difference between executive, moral and legislative norms was a little unclear to me. What an executive norm is should be clarified in a revision.

I was puzzled on the use of the term "moral norm" which sometimes in the paper seemed to refer to a character trait (i.e. a “virtue” or disposition to act) rather than a normative rule or a moral principle. Courage is certainly a “virtue” on Aristotle’s list. I would use virtue instead or character trait rather than moral norm in these cases.

References to GE Moore were incomplete (not all references in the text appeared in the References section). Also statements made about Moore’s ethical position were somewhat inaccurate. It is not quite right to describe GE Moore’s philosophy as emotivism. Emotivism is more closely associated with figures such as AJ Ayer and CL Stevenson and is the view that moral sentences such as “murder is wrong” express speaker’s feelings rather than objective truth. The claim is that such sentences do not refer to anything “objective” and thus are not truth apt. Emotivism is thus a non-cognitivist moral theory.

It is true that GE Moore’s attack on ethical naturalism did give rise to non-cognitivist moral theories such as emotivism, prescriptivism and expressivism but Moore is a moral realist and a cognitivist who holds the “good” is a non-natural property that can be directly perceived by people. He holds the “naturalistic fallacy” results from trying to equate “good” with a natural property such as “pleasure” but this is not the extreme “boo/hooray” view of morality found in AJ Ayer’s emotivism.

The characterisation of the Categorial Imperative provided by the authors was a little too distant from Kant’s three formulations to be accurate. I would drop the reference to Kant and find another term for Categorial Imperative in the formalisation.

The article mentioned three Slovak words mravnost’, moralnost’ and etika. Some explanation of the difference in Slovak between mravnost’ and moralnost’ should be offered for the benefit of non-Slovak speakers. Alternatively, the point could be cut as it does not seem essential to the argument made in the paper.

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Reviewer #1:  Yes:  Jeffrey White

Reviewer #3: No

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Submitted filename: PONE-D-20-37673_reviewed WHITEpdf.pdf

Author response to Decision Letter 0

19 Feb 2021

ANSWERS FOR THE REVIEWERS

For Reviewer #1

Your comments were, indeed, a well-chosen remedy for the first part of the article. I treated them as good indicators for improving the internal consistency of this part of the study in terms of its substantive coherence. Hence, at your suggestion, Part One has generally been reorganized as follows:

1. The main goal of the paper is stated at the very beginning, i.e. the presentation of Jan Grác’s (2008) experimental approach to the study of moral reasoning with the possibility of controlling some indicators of morality as independent variables. This methodological approach is presented first in the context of the classic approaches to moral reasoning, and then in the latest contemporary research, with particular emphasis on the possibility of experimental exploration of this research field.

2. After pointing to some contemporary authors known in the literature on the subject, I turned my attention to Piaget and Kohlberg as the classic authors of research on moral reasoning. At the same time, I indicated the relationship between their concepts and methodologies and Grác’s proposed methodology.

3. At the same time, a significant number of paragraphs have been completely removed from the text of the article as being inconsistent with the main goal of our analysis.

4. I consider the meta-analysis to be an essential part of the introduction. However, I have limited myself (in accordance with your recommendation) to relations with those items which directly concern experimental research on moral reasoning.

5. After these preliminary analyses, J. Grác's theoretical and methodological statements on moral reasoning are presented in more detail (pp.10-14 of the reedited manuscript).

6. Regarding your comments on Kant's CI, I have decided to refer to his fundamental work in this area for his own definition (E. Kant (1966). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in I. Kant, Practical Philosophy, translated by Mary Gregor, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, Chapter 4, page 421).

7. Regarding the “no systematic exposure of indicators,” the corresponding paragraph in the text has been reformulated.

8. The use of the Venn diagram in the analysis of the range relations between three different names of standards (moral, legal, executive) is justified by the necessity to strictly distinguish them in research practice. In this spirit, an appropriate paragraph explaining this issue was added to the text.

For Reviewer #2

1. As the first remarks of Reviewer # 2 are in harmony with the remarks of Reviewer # 1, we respond that the introductory part has been reworked towards making it more coherent and shorter.

2. Thanks for your attention regarding mixing the use of symbols in formalization formulas. In the end, I decided to standardize the symbolism in accordance with the notation of set theory, as these formalizations basically relate to the range relations between set names designates (e.g. moral, legal, executive norms in a Venn diagram, or in moral evaluation, which is also based on set operations).

3. You are right about the ambiguity of the experimental procedure presented in the first version of our manuscript and of the tested persons. Your objections on this matter are of vital importance. Hence, our work required clarification of such issues as: 1) the studied groups of students; 2) specification of which part of the experiment they participated in; and 3) presentation of the results of research on the strategies used by the respondents to evaluate ethical stories in the second part of the experiment. For this reason, the authors of this study decided to select two other groups of young people applying to study psychology for the second part of the experiment, i.e. for overall evaluation of the ethical stories (modeled in the first part of the experiment) as subjects. They had just completed secondary school and were taking their entrance exams for psychology at the University of Trnava. These subjects are called Subject Group 2.Their number is - 450 (N=450). The relevant fragments entered in the manuscript are marked in red.

4. Your comments related to the Formula (1). I decided to precise the notion of this formula as follows:

CN = {E, M, L, (E ⋂ M), (L ⋂ M), (E ⋂ L) (E ⋂ M ⋂ L)}

I am operating with the symbol Ṁ ( and also with M) which denotes the subclass of moral norms that do not belong conjunctively either to executive norms or to legislative ones. This symbol refers to the moral norms which I have called pure or context-free moral norms. I have marked these items in red. The symbol M in our analysis denotes the universal class of moral norms.

5. Thank you very much for the very insightful remarks on formal defects in the records of some symbols (as in Formula 7 and formulations concerning the third regularity of general moral evaluation according to the third rule of the IAO scheme). Appropriate adjustments have been made.

For Reviewer # 3

1. Your first critical remark concerns whether the IAO / KCR schemes used in the experiment are a kind of limiting template imposed on ethical stories. You also gave interesting and inspiring comparisons of our experiments with other paradigms of research on moral reasoning. An example may be the classic "trolley problem" with references to indicators of morality in moral schemes of the IAO / KCR. Thank you for this suggestion, as the classic "trolley problem" could be positioned within the moral framework of our experiment in future research.

It is true that in every experiment the research scheme, often called a paradigm, and in our experiment a cognitive schema (IAO and KCR), limits the freedom of the experimenter and the subjects. This is the downside to all experiments by definition. However, this limitation ensures in our experiment both the possibility for the experimenter to control the independent variables (IAO morality indicators in one scheme and KCR indicators in the other scheme) as well as the precision of this control by significantly reducing the contaminating influence of uncontrolled factors on the dependent variable – which is the general moral evaluation of the ethical story. As you noticed in your reporting part of the review, the design of the experiment provides for precise control within one cognitive schema, combinatorically defined 27 values of three indicators of morality. Due to the bounded rationality of the human mind, more indicators of morality cannot be included in one framework. The selection of only two morality indicators for experimental control gives the possibility of precise control of 9 values of these variables (+, -, O), but the two-indicator moral schemas seemed to have too little context. Therefore, it was decided to choose Aristotle's "golden mean" in our experiment.

2. We have simply avoided the claim that our experiment is “natural.” Your arguments convince us.

3. What characterizes executive norms? They are unambiguous regulators of the behavior manifested in specific situations, e.g. in contact with nature, with other people, with oneself. They are oriented towards the hic et nunc point of view, which is the optimum performance of certain activities. For example, in a sport, a sports record can be quickly replaced by another sports record (ski jumping hill record marked in green to be visible to the jumpers). Another clear feature of this type of normative regulation is that although they improve human activities and accompany various mental experiences (e.g. attitudes, motives), the content of these experiences themselves is not subject to assessment by these norms. Thus, it can be said that neither the views nor the feelings accompanying the performance of these activities are subject to regulation within the framework of moral norms.

4. Your critical remark concerns the use of the term "moral norm" in two different senses: (a) as a virtue (e.g., courage) in the sense of Aristotle's list of virtues; and (b) as a normative rule or moral principle. We would like to clarify that in the first sense we are referring to moral content by basically discussing some items from the subject literature in the introductory part of the article. In its revised version, many of these items have been abandoned and therefore are not included in the text. However, we cannot take advantage of your suggestion to replace the meaning (b) of the term with the meaning (a), because it is fundamental to Grác’s concept and necessary in the conceptual-methodological system of our entire experiment.

5. We agree with the comments on G.E. Moor, and therefore we have excluded these text fragments from the revised manuscript as unrelated to the merit of this article.

6. In our revised version of the article you can find the appropriate formulation of Categorical Imperative based on Kant’s (E. Kant (1966) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in I. Kant, Practical Philosophy, translated by Mary Gregor, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, Chapter 4, page 421).

7. As far as the concepts “mravnost” and “moralnost” are concerned, a special short paragraph has been prepared which synthetically explores the novelty of these concepts.

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx

Decision Letter 1

22 Mar 2021

PONE-D-20-37673R1

==============================

ACADEMIC EDITOR: The two reviewers have provided further comments on the revised version. It is agreement that improvements have been made and the work has good merit. However,  there are still several issues of the paper that require addressing. Please carefully consider them in the revision of your manuscript.

Please submit your revised manuscript by May 06 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at gro.solp@enosolp . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

The two reviewers have provided further comments on the revised version. It is agreement that improvements have been made and the work has good merit. However, there are still several issues of the paper that require addressing. Please carefully consider them in the revision of your manuscript.

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

6. Review Comments to the Author

Reviewer #1: There are some big problems with the paper, as it is now, and these forbid its recommendation for publication in its current form.

One problem is the specious use of resources, for instance the use of Sternberg, the use of Cushman, the use of Biela, the use of Sudic and Ciric, and for example the use of von Grundherr which is a paper about school bullying from 2017 used in reference to "Analyzing the logical foundations of Kohlberg's research paradigm" on page 5 of the review PDF. In the end, the scholarship is not at a standard that this reviewer can recommend for publication.

Another problem, related with the first, is that the paper does not tie into established and ongoing research well. It goes out of its way to suggest the "novelty" of Grac's research, with most reference to a rather obscure (for most readers) Slovakian publication. At the same time, there is little effort to relate this work with other work in complementary areas, besides some rather erudite 'grounding' in Kohlberg, for instance, and some pointing to some possibly related work without these relationships ever becoming significant for the paper or its results. As such, the paper does not make its importance clear to the reader, perhaps outside of the general approach, because these relationships are not provided.

A third problem has to do with the paper as a paper. It does not hang together well, for one thing, with reference to Kant then none, and like this many ideas come and pass by but are not well integrated. The paper has a "conclusion" and a "final remarks" section... In the conclusion, there is substantial discussion, introducing new ideas and new resources right up to the final paragraphs. This is typically not the role of a conclusion in a technical paper. This is a structural problem, but these problems with the integrity of the paper as a paper go farther than such road-map issues. For instance, how is Dewey and conscience important, exactly? This comes, and is forgotten in the paper, but why bother running through these concepts if only to reduce them to the internalization of norms? This may have been a part of Grac's original thinking, but why should we think about conscience here? Because conscience is educated?

There are other reasons for rejecting this paper for publication, too many to list. The abstract, for example, begins with a 'paragraph' that is one sentence long. It ends by suggesting that experimental results herein described can be useful in education. How is this the case? The issue is not considered again, even in conclusion, so there is a feeling of disjunct, here, and this contributes to the sense that this paper is not one integrated whole developed thought, and rather still requires updating to bring it into context of relevance for contemporary researchers. Then, there is the use of terms of art and technical terms, like "cognitive", or the "multidimensional field of moral reasoning", and phrases like "moral reasoning is a multi-faceted phenomenon where its mutually linked factors constitute the moral existence of the individual human person". Sure, such expressions are understandable, but not exactly clear. And after all that, this statement iabout moral reasoning is not an obvious summary of "above research findings" which include considerations about self-driving cars, for example.

Finally, I have added some comments to the PDF of the draft (attached). Authors may attend to, for example, comments such as on page 4 of the text, concerning a short single-sentence paragraph pointing to "new authors" that only leads to immediate discussion of work from 1973. it is from here that the paper jumps to grounding Kohlberg's "logical foundations" in a paper on school bullying. Why is this paper relvant here, exactly? This should be made clear, or the reference removed.

In the end, it is too much to expect of a reviewer that s/he attend to every infelicity in a paper like this one. The logical notation may be readable, and easily, mostly used to restate what is given in Venn diagrams. These sections are especially plodding, and this speaks to a general consideration. In general, I cannot recommend a paper for publication that I could not also recommend to a student or colleague interested in such issues. Though the general approach may bear some merit, I cannot imagine an situation in which I would recommend that anyone read this paper. Is there something worthwhile in the paper? I think yes. But, it is not presented in a form that I can recommend for publication.

Reviewer #3: I am satisfied all the points I raised have been addressed.

I thank the authors for enlightening me on the difference between mravnost and moralnost. The former seems to point more precisely to the idea of "virtue is its own reward" whereas the latter points to "going through the (moral) motions" or obeying moral rules without appreciating them or even believing in them. I would hesitate to accept the difference cannot be articulated in other languages such as English - even though you need a phrase not a single word to do it. Personally I would be disinclined to draw the conclusion "This certainly means that psychologically, the users of these two languages operate with more developed cognitive and behavioral structures for the moral domain than the users of other European languages" which could be interpreted as a claim of Czech and Slovak moral supremacy!

People with a thinner skin than this reviewer might be offended. Many such people exist in these febrile times! It seems to me the entire discussion is tangential to the main line of argument and could be cut. However, I leave this decision to the authors.

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article ( what does this mean? ). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Submitted filename: PONE-D-20-37673_R1 WHITE EDITED.pdf

Author response to Decision Letter 1

27 Apr 2021

1. Thanks for your immense work on our manuscript, which is evident both in formal review comments and particularly in your red color comments on the PDF manuscript version. What did we do? We decided to make our manuscript more coherent and took your points of criticism concerning the presence of J. Dewey and I. Kant in our paper more seriously.

2. You can see from the actual version of the manuscript that J. Dewey and I. Kant are now discussed in our paper after your inspirative remarks.

For Reviewer #3

1. We are also grateful to Reviewer 3 for a creative discussion of the concepts of mravnost and morality and for making his own suggestion as to the distinction between the two. We have taken the liberty of securing these comments in an appropriate footnote in our article.

2. After considering your points about the evaluation sentence regarding Slovak and Czech language users, this sentence has been removed from the text of the article.

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers 2.docx

Decision Letter 2

13 May 2021

PONE-D-20-37673R2

ACADEMIC EDITOR: The paper has been significantly improved with the revisions. There remain some minor issues that are required to ensure that all the conclusions are supported by the data. Please carefully consider the reviewer’s suggestions in the revision of your manuscript.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 27 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at gro.solp@enosolp . When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

The paper has been significantly improved with the revisions. There remain some minor issues that are required to ensure that all the conclusions are supported by the data. Please carefully consider the reviewer’s suggestions in the revision of your manuscript.

Reviewer #1: When consulting the guidelines for publication in this journal, one finds difficulty only with number 4: Conclusions are presented in an appropriate fashion and are supported by the data. In general, claims are supported. New additions which make clear the relationship between experimental findings and Kantian moral reasoning go a long way to bringing the paper together, in the end. One claim, however, stands out as unsupported by data/argument, and this is the following: "Thus, we may say that this experiment took place in closer proximity to real-life thinking processes than any other research method previously used in experimental psychology." For one thing, this "Thus" is the first word of a new paragraph, when generally "thus" and "therefore" for example are used at the ends of paragraphs, to indicate the conclusion of an argument rather than the beginning of a new one. But most importantly, this "any" is hyperbole. The assertion distinguishing the present research from "any other research method previously used in experimental psychology" is not established by sufficient review of extant psychological literature, at least not in this paper. The paper does not establish this assertion, clearly, in fact. Thus, in consideration of guideline 4, this claim must either be substantiated, deleted as hyperbole, OR modified to accord with what this paper is able to establish (perhaps that experimenters were sensitive to ecological validity in the design of the experiment, and that future experiments may benefit through adoption of a similar method, ... something like this may be warranted).

Recent revisions improve the paper, and the current presentation is professional enough. Though some claims remain ... excessive, personally ampliative, over-reaching,... these are matters of style and clarity that may impede reader interest but maybe not publication. In the end, this depends on competitiveness of submissions and expectations of editors. If the changes above specified are exacted, given publications guidelines for this journal, this paper can be made publishable with minor revisions.

Reviewer #1:  Yes:  Jeff White

Author response to Decision Letter 2

15 May 2021

ANSWER TO REVIEWER#1

1. The authors express their gratitude to Reviewer # 1 for inspiration regarding the interpretation of the obtained results of empirical research in terms of the natural Kantian society. This has been expressed in footnote # 5.

2. In the last part of our paper, we have made the appropriate changes in the manuscript in accordance with your suggestions.

3. However, we cannot agree with your argumentation where you are claiming that our assertion concerning “any” is of a hyperbolic kind:” The assertion distinguishing the present research from "any other research method previously used in experimental psychology" is not established by sufficient review of extant psychological literature, at least not in this paper.”

4. We think that our statement can be seen as quite well documented as we considered in our paper, first of all, a monumental meta-analysis by Ellemers et all, 2019 who analyzed positions on the morality of 1940-2020 from where such conclusion can de drown directly. Moreover, our own analysis of articles from the last three years ( e.g. experiments made by Sudić & Ćirić, 2019; by Awad, 2019; and by Rhim, Lee & Lee, 2020) are also supporting the statement on the novelty of the presented in our paper research method.

Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers 3.docx

Decision Letter 3

21 May 2021

PONE-D-20-37673R3

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Additional Editor Comments (optional):

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Acceptance letter

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Ethics Case Study – 7: Moral Dilemma

Rajiv is an IAS aspirant. He studied in two premier institutions and worked for a while in an IT company. He quit the job and started preparing for the civil services exams. In his first attempt he wrote mains but could not qualify for the personality test. In next two attempts, however, he gave interviews but fate had it that his name did not appear in the final list. In all three attempts he had scored less in Mains and in two interviews his score was average if not bad.

Coming under General Merit, Rajiv had only four attempts to get into IAS. For the last attempt, he decided to take a break of one year and prepare extremely well giving no chance to fate. By then he had spent five years just for preparing for this exam with no job in hand.

He did prepare well and easily sailed through the Preliminary and Mains exam. For his final interview, Rajiv, prepared himself very well. He read widely. He contacted his peers and well wishers, talked to them extensively and took feedback on his body language and communication skills. He took mock tests at prominent institutions and got a very positive feedback.His confidence was at an all time high. By the time interview call letter came, Rajiv was fully ready to face his final test to realize the dream of becoming an IAS officer.

On the previous day of his interview, Rajiv talked to his parents, girlfriend and teachers and sought their wishes. He had a sound sleep too.

His interview was scheduled in the second session i.e in the afternoon. On the day of his interview, in the morning Rajiv was calm, composed and had a friendly chat with fellow aspirants who had stayed together in a friend’s room.

He had his lunch and left room in his bike half an hour before the scheduled time of his appearance at UPSC office.

Rajiv was riding his bike with lots of thoughts in his mind. The road was almost empty. As he was riding, just in front of him, a speeding bike collided with the road divider. Seeing this, Rajiv stopped his bike for a minute and went near the accident scene. A man, crying with pain, was lying in a pool of blood and a girl child, around 5 year old, was lying unconscious next to the man. Rajiv looked around for help, but two or three cars sped away without stopping by.

Rajiv had to be at UPSC office in 10 minutes. If not he would forever lose his dream of becoming an IAS officer.

In this situation, what should Rajiv do? Justify your answer.

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