Executive summary: This exploratory and literature-review-based post proposes a research agenda for investigating how attentional processes shape moral learning—particularly how individuals acquire, update, and apply moral judgments—within a utilitarian framework, suggesting that reinforcement learning and attentional biases play key roles in expanding or contracting one’s moral circle.
Key points:
Utilitarianism as a normative model: The author justifies using utilitarianism as a baseline framework for understanding moral decision-making, analogous to expected utility theory in economics, while acknowledging empirical deviations rooted in human psychology.
Reinforcement learning in moral development: Moral learning is portrayed as a reinforcement-driven process wherein individuals update moral weights through personal and social experiences, with mechanisms that can expand or contract the moral circle.
Attention as a moderator of moral learning: Attentional processes determine which outcomes are noticed and learned from, thereby influencing how moral concern is distributed—e.g., toward ingroups vs. distant others—highlighting attention as a potential intervention point.
Parochialism vs. impartiality: Empirical evidence suggests that people often act parochially due to evolutionary, attentional, and cognitive constraints, challenging the impartiality axiom of utilitarianism and creating systematic deviations from welfare-maximizing decisions.
Individual and situational variability: Moral decisions vary with personality traits (e.g., agreeableness, empathy), social value orientation, stress levels, and framing effects, emphasizing the importance of context and individual differences in moral judgment.
Open research questions: The post outlines directions for future research, including how stable moral circle shifts are, how attention interacts with learning strategies, and how cognitive and cultural constraints shape moral progress or regress.
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Executive summary: This exploratory and literature-review-based post proposes a research agenda for investigating how attentional processes shape moral learning—particularly how individuals acquire, update, and apply moral judgments—within a utilitarian framework, suggesting that reinforcement learning and attentional biases play key roles in expanding or contracting one’s moral circle.
Key points:
Utilitarianism as a normative model: The author justifies using utilitarianism as a baseline framework for understanding moral decision-making, analogous to expected utility theory in economics, while acknowledging empirical deviations rooted in human psychology.
Reinforcement learning in moral development: Moral learning is portrayed as a reinforcement-driven process wherein individuals update moral weights through personal and social experiences, with mechanisms that can expand or contract the moral circle.
Attention as a moderator of moral learning: Attentional processes determine which outcomes are noticed and learned from, thereby influencing how moral concern is distributed—e.g., toward ingroups vs. distant others—highlighting attention as a potential intervention point.
Parochialism vs. impartiality: Empirical evidence suggests that people often act parochially due to evolutionary, attentional, and cognitive constraints, challenging the impartiality axiom of utilitarianism and creating systematic deviations from welfare-maximizing decisions.
Individual and situational variability: Moral decisions vary with personality traits (e.g., agreeableness, empathy), social value orientation, stress levels, and framing effects, emphasizing the importance of context and individual differences in moral judgment.
Open research questions: The post outlines directions for future research, including how stable moral circle shifts are, how attention interacts with learning strategies, and how cognitive and cultural constraints shape moral progress or regress.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.