“Lean not on your own understanding”: Belief that morality is founded on divine authority and non-utilitarian moral judgments

By Jared Piazza, Justin F. Landy. Judgment and Decision Making, 2013

107 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent research has shown that religious individuals are much more resistant to utilitarian modes of thinking than their less religious counterparts, but the reason for this is not clear. We propose that a meta-ethical belief that morality is rooted in inviolable divine commands (i.e., endorsement of Divine Command Theory) may help explain this finding. We present a novel 20-item scale measuring a belief that morality is founded on divine authority. The scale shows good internal reliability and convergent and discriminant validity. Study 1 found that this scale fully mediated the relationship that various religiosity measures had with a deontological thinking style in our sample of American adults. It also accounted for the link between religiosity and social conservative values. Furthermore, the relationship between the scale and these outcome variables held after statistically controlling for variables related to actively open-minded thinking and the Big Five. Study 2 replicated the results using naturalistic moral dilemmas that placed deontological and utilitarian concerns in conflict, and showed that the results of Study 1 cannot be explained by differences in moral foundations (e.g., concern for authority more generally) or differences in the perceived function of rules. Quite the contrary, endorsement of the divine origins of morality fully mediated the relationship religiosity had with the so-called “binding” foundations (i.e., Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity). Our findings highlight the importance of meta-ethical beliefs for understanding individual differences in moral judgment.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a54b83f85628777dce2eadfc29d28f02c42a962

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Citations in the corpus

Believing, Bonding, Behaving, and Belonging: The Cognitive, Emotional, Moral, and Social Dimensions of Religiousness across Cultures (2020, background): “These findings suggest a somewhat conservative, moralistic view of religion; or confirm the idea that religious morality is closer to normative deontology rather than prosocial consequentialism (Deak & Saroglou, 2015; Piazza & Landy, 2013).”
Why does the Cognitive Reflection Test (sometimes) predict utilitarian moral judgment (and other things) (2015, background): “(–) Items from Piazza and Sousa (2013).”