How do we distinguish between good and bad?

Washington, Oct. 3: A new research shows how people decide whether someone’s behaviour is moral or immoral. The findings could serve as a framework for furthering the development of artificial intelligence ( AI) and other technologies.

“There have been many attempts to understand how people make intuitive moral judgments, but they all had significant flaws. In 2014, we proposed a model of moral judgment, called the Agent Deed Consequence ( ADC) model — and now we have the first experimental results that offer a strong empirical corroboration of the ADC model in both mundane and dramatic realistic situations,” said lead author Veljko Dubljevi.

Moral judgment is a tricky subject. For example, most people would agree that lying is immoral. However, most people would also agree that lying to Nazis about the location of Jewish families would be moral.

To address this, the ADC model posits that people take three things into account when making a moral judgment: the agent, which is the character or intent of the person who is doing something; the deed, or what is being done; and the consequence.

“This approach allows us to explain not only the variability in the moral status of lying but also the flip side: that telling the truth can be immoral if it is done maliciously and causes harm,” said Dubljevi.

To test this complexity and the model, researchers developed a number of scenarios that were logical, realistic and easily understood by both lay people and professional philosophers.

“The findings from the study showed those philosophers and the general public made moral judgments in similar ways. This indicates that the structure of moral intuition is the same, regardless of whether one has training in ethics. In other words, everyone makes these moral judgments in a similar way,” said Dubljevi. — ANI