Maximilian Theisen

Recent debates have examined epistemic conditions on moral responsibility. A central question is whether ignorance of moral norms can excuse wrongdoing in the same way as factual ignorance. Volitionists link the exculpatory potential of moral ignorance to the fulfillment of procedural obligations. Quality of Will theorists add conditions such as inaccessibility of moral truth or high moral difficulty. In two pre-registered experiments (total N = 500), we tested whether procedural obligations, bias in moral evidence, and moral difficulty affect ascriptions of blame for everyday moral transgressions (act blameworthiness) and for moral ignorance about their wrongness (belief blameworthiness). Confirmatory analyses suggested that moral ignorance resulting from biased moral evidence slightly reduced both act and belief blameworthiness, and that the two types of blame were strongly correlated. High moral difficulty was associated with lower act and belief blameworthiness, but this was independent of any exculpatory effect of moral ignorance. Procedural obligations and their interaction with moral evidence did not show consistent effects on either type of blame. An exploratory analysis restricted to participants who had passed the respective manipulation checks suggested a moderate to large exculpatory effect of moral ignorance under fulfilled obligations combined with biased evidence. Yet, only one third of participants passed both manipulation checks for this combination. We interpret our results as suggesting that exculpation via moral ignorance is in principle possible, but many people are reluctant to accept that moral truth can be inaccessible to conscientious agents. We discuss implications for debates about epistemic conditions on moral responsibility.

People can be uncertain in their moral judgments. Philosophers have argued that such uncertainty can either refer to the underlying empirical facts (empirical uncertainty) or to the normative evaluation of these facts itself (normative uncertainty). Psychological investigations of this distinction, however, are rare. In this paper, we combined factor-analytical and experimental approaches to show that empirical and normative uncertainty describe two related but different psychological states. In Study 1, we asked N = 265 participants to describe a case of moral uncertainty and to rate different aspects of their uncertainty about this case. Across this wide range of moral scenarios, our items loaded onto three reliable factors: lack of information, unclear consequences, and normative uncertainty. In Study 2, we confirmed this factor structure using predefined stimulus material. N = 402 participants each rated eight scenarios that systematically varied in their degree of uncertainty regarding the consequences of the described actions and in the value conflict that was inherent to them. The empirical uncertainty factors were mainly affected by the introduction of uncertainty regarding consequences, and the normative uncertainty factor was mainly affected by the introduction of value conflict. Our studies provide evidence that the distinction between empirical and normative uncertainty accurately describes a psychological reality. We discuss the relevance of our findings for research on moral judgments and decision-making, and folk metaethics.

Even if we know all relevant descriptive facts about an act, we can still be uncertain about its moral acceptability. Most literature on how to act under such normative uncertainty operates on moral realism, the metaethical view that there are objective moral facts. Lay people largely report anti-realist intuitions, which poses the question of how these intuitions affect their interpretation and handling of normative uncertainty. Results from two quasi-experimental studies (total N = 365) revealed that most people did not interpret normative uncertainty as referring to objective moral facts but rather as uncertainty regarding one’s own view, uncertainty regarding the culturally accepted view or as the result of ambivalence. Especially the anti-realist majority of participants interpreted normative uncertainty different to how it is described in the literature on choice under normative uncertainty. Metaethical views were also associated with lay peoples’ choice of uncertainty reduction strategies and with assumptions about the intended aim of such strategies. The current findings suggest that empirical investigations of normative uncertainty might benefit from considering folk metaethical pluralism, as the lay public largely disagrees with the metaethical assumptions underlying the current discourse on choice under normative uncertainty.

The current study introduces the Multi-Motive Grid Mobility in an age-stratified sample that aims to disentangle six motive components – hope of success, hope of affiliation, hope of power, fear of failure, fear of rejection, and fear of power – in mobility-related and mobility-unrelated scenarios. Similar to the classical Multi-Motive Grid, we selected 14 picture scenarios representing seven mobility and seven non-mobility situations. The scenarios were combined with 12 statements from the MMG. Both the MMG-M and MMG were assessed to allow comparability between psychometric criteria. The results of confirmatory factor analyses yielded a good model fit for a six-factor solution with an additional mobility factor for the MMG-M. Internal consistency of the items was similar to the MMG. Lastly, we investigated associations between the motive components and mobility-related variables. We found that risk awareness was positively related to all fear components in both mobility and non-mobility scenarios. Most importantly, physical constraint was positively associated with fear of rejection and fear of power in mobility situations underlining the importance to create support systems to reduce these concerns in people’s everyday lives.