Course:LIBR559A/ Navarick, D. J. (2013).

Navarick, D. J. (2013). Moral Ambivalence: Modeling and Measuring Bivariate Evaluative Processes in Moral Judgment. Review of General Psychology, 17(4), 443-452. doi:10.1037/a0034527

Purpose:

“Moral judgements often appear to arise from quick affectively toned intuitions rather than from conscious application of moral principles. Sometimes people feel that an action they observe or contemplate could be judged as either right or wrong. Models of moral institution need to specify mechanisms that could account for such moral ambivalence. The basic implication of moral ambivalence is that right and wrong are regions of a bivariate scale rather than a bipolar scale. The former allows for equally strong positive and negative evaluations of stimulus, but the latter requires one evaluation to get weaker as the other one gets stronger (Cacioppo & Bernton, 1994)…(p 443).”

Main argument:

Morality is more accurately measured on a bivariate versus bipolar scale where right and wrong are less factors of instinctual absolutes. Rather right and wrong and structural systems are understood through evaluation of is/ought.

Method:

Revisiting the Milgram personality tests examining morality and group obligations by engaging in “classical animal research on approach-avoidance conflict showing that when rats are both rewarded and punished in the goal region of a runway, their approach and avoidance tendencies both increase as they get closer to the goal” (p 443).

Topics:

System design, belief in morality, Milgram personality test, moral intuition, moral stance,

Novel ideas/weakness:

Navarick revists classic and contemporary interpretions of morality. He proposes that morality is both more complex—it is not an either/or consideration—and less “automatic” and a “gut feeling” than classic philosophers and recent researchers emphasize (p 444). Navarick challenges this view suggesting that reward and punishment have a higher degree of influence on judgments of morality, of right and wrong than evolutionary and/or devine sentiment.

Applying Navarick to systems design and evaluation one may crtically assess the concept of morality to approach-avoidance behaviors. Navarick’s theories may be applied to the ways dominant groups code and normality and structure behavior in socieity. Dominant groups may become or at least maintain dominance by not only assigning of moral and immoral activities and people but by a constant negotiation of morality prescribed by reward and punishment narratives. Navarick reaches back to Hume’s treatise on is/ought—as well as ensuing conceptual discussions—to re-emphaize the world of what is from what ought to be, and that morality derives from a sentiment moving from what is to an “ought” idea about the world. This discussion provides a lens from which to view differing perceptions of is/ought in societal construction.

Page author: Erin Brown