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Using Visual and Narrative Methods to Achieve Fair Process in Clinical Care

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Published on: February 16, 2011

A person-centered approach to moral judgment.

Eric Luis Uhlmann¹, David A Pizarro², Daniel Diermeier³

¹Organisational Behaviour Area, INSEAD, Singapore eric.luis.uhlmann@gmail.com.

Perspectives on Psychological Science : a Journal of the Association for Psychological Science

|April 25, 2015

Summary

Virtue ethics offers a person-centered view of moral judgment, focusing on character over acts. This approach better explains lay moral evaluations than consequentialist or deontological ethics.

Keywords:

informational value moral character moral judgments signaling virtue ethics

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Area of Science:

Moral Psychology
Philosophy of Ethics
Social Cognition

Background:

Traditional ethics and psychology focus on act permissibility (consequentialism vs. deontology).
Virtue ethics, a longstanding perspective, offers an alternative framework for understanding moral judgments.
Existing models inadequately explain diverse lay moral evaluations.

Purpose of the Study:

To propose a person-centered account of moral judgment rooted in virtue ethics.
To shift the unit of analysis from acts to individuals.
To provide a richer descriptive model for lay moral judgments.

Main Methods:

Conceptual analysis integrating philosophical virtue ethics with psychological models.
Focus on social perceivers' motivation to assess moral character.
Reinterpretation of empirical findings within a person-centered framework.

Main Results:

Person-centered moral judgment prioritizes information about an individual's character.
Character evaluations often outweigh considerations of consequences or rule adherence.
This approach accounts for findings previously labeled as biases.

Conclusions:

A virtue ethics-based, person-centered model offers a more comprehensive account of moral judgment.
Understanding moral evaluations requires focusing on the individual's character.
This perspective reconciles empirical data with ethical theory.