The Prospects and Challenges of Measuring Morality, or: On the Possibility or Impossibility of a "Moralometer"
Could we ever build a "moralometer" -- that is, an instrument that would accurately measure people's overall morality? If so, what would it take?
Psychologist Jessie Sun and I explore this question in our new paper in draft: "The Prospects and Challenges of Measuring Morality".
Comments and suggestions on the draft warmly welcomed!
Draft available here:
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/nhvz9
Abstract:
The scientific study of morality requires measurement tools. But can we measure individual differences in something so seemingly subjective, elusive, and difficult to define? This paper will consider the prospects and challenges—both practical and ethical—of measuring how moral a person is. We outline the conceptual requirements for measuring general morality and argue that it would be difficult to operationalize morality in a way that satisfies these requirements. Even if we were able to surmount these conceptual challenges, self-report, informant report, behavioral, and biological measures each have methodological limitations that would substantially undermine their validity or feasibility. These challenges will make it more difficult to develop valid measures of general morality than other psychological traits. But, even if a general measure of morality is not feasible, it does not follow that moral psychological phenomena cannot or should not be measured at all. Instead, there is more promise in developing measures of specific operationalizations of morality (e.g., commonsense morality), specific manifestations of morality (e.g., specific virtues or behaviors), and other aspects of moral functioning that do not necessarily reflect moral goodness (e.g., moral self-perceptions). Still, it is important to be transparent and intellectually humble about what we can and cannot conclude based on various moral assessments—especially given the potential for misuse or misinterpretation of value-laden, contestable, and imperfect measures. Finally, we outline recommendations and future directions for psychological and philosophical inquiry into the development and use of morality measures.
[Below: a "moral-o-meter" given to me for my birthday a few years ago, by my then-13-year-old daughter]
The bibliographic entry for Dahl's "What We Do When We Define Morality" needs fixing.
For me, Section 3 of the Supplemental Material ("Conceptual and Methodological Requirements for Measuring Specific Moral Traits") was much more interesting than anything in the main body of the paper. The idea that we aren't going to figure out a general method for assessing individual "morality" strikes me as rather obvious, to the point of not really being worth arguing for. (I would be wrong about this if there are any influential people claiming such a general method should indeed be possible, but you don't seem to cite any in the paper.)
On the other hand, the prospects and conceptual/methodological challenges of developing a method to assess compassion or honesty strike me as genuinely worth considering. It isn't obvious to me that the challenges involved in assessing such traits would be radically different from those involved in assessing extraversion (for example). Indeed, it strikes me as plausible that such traits would be conceptually and methodologically more straightforward to assess than something like well-being. (I would be interested to see an extended version of Table S2 with additional columns for "extraversion" and "well-being," to clarify where exactly you think the relevant differences lie.)
I've always found it strange that there is so much non-instrumental interest in moral evaluation -- over and above any purpose that moral evaluation might serve in guiding action.