Abstract
Recent research in empirical moral psychology attempts to understand (rather than place judgment on) the salient normative differences that laypeople have when making moral decisions by using survey methodology that is based on the operationalized principles from moral theories. The PPIMT is the first measure designed to assess respondents’ preference for the precepts implied in the three dominant moral theories: virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. The current study used a latent modeling approach to determine the most theoretically and psychometrically-sound model for the PPIMT using a combined sample of college students from a southeastern university in U.S. and MTurk respondents. The PPIMT model fit was acceptable (χ2 = 84.125, df = 40, p = 0.001; RMSEA = 0.052, 90%CI = 0.037 to 0.068; CFI = 0.980; SRMR = 0.035) with four items for Virtue, four items for Deontology, and three items for Consequentialism.
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Data Availability Statement
The datasets generated for this study can be found in the Dryad Repository https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.xgxd254ff
Notes
Our approach is best understood as a form of abductive inference, as it combines theoretical and (lay) intuitive underpinnings of moral judgment. Abduction, which originates in the philosophical work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1934), combines the strengths of deductive validity and inductive generalizations. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for constructive comments which prompted us to make this point clear.
It should be noted here that PCA is a type of EFA, though the EFA being utilized in the current study is unique-variance EFA, whereas PCA is common-variance EFA. In other words, PCA examines the factor structure assuming no error in the items representing the latent factors (i.e., all variance is assumed to be accounted for by the items), whereas EFA assumes error in the items representing the latent factors. We are grateful to the editor for constructive comments that prompted us to make this clear.
It could be objected here that cross-loadings violate the theoretical assumptions of the measure and underlying constructs. However, since morality is a single phenomenon, being explored with different approaches and measures with understandable overlap (after all, they are trying to explain the the same phenomenon), there is sufficient justification to retain an orthogonal, divergent structure of the three factors within the PPIMT, and that cross-loadings between factors would violate these theoretical assumptions. We are grateful to anonymous reviewers and the editor for constructive comments that prompted us to make this point clear.
It is important to note here that we are making the argument that the measure, while modified using the suggested item reduction of the empirical data, still must fit to the theoretical structure of three divergent, orthogonal latent factors of ethical theories. The four and five-factor models had significantly more cross-loadings than the three-factor model, and also did not align to the constructs of the theoretical model (that is, the items proposed by the four and five-factor models did not adhere, sufficiently, to the theoretical proposition of the three latent factors – thus, while statistically significant, departed from the theoretical structure of the PPIMT). We are grateful to anonymous reviewers and the editor for constructive comments that prompted us to make this clear.
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This work has been partially supported by a Faculty Research and Professional Development (FRPD) grant from NC State University (awarded to VD).
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Dubljević, V., Cacace, S. & Desmarais, S.L. Surveying Ethics: a Measurement Model of Preference for Precepts Implied in Moral Theories (PPIMT). Rev.Phil.Psych. 13, 197–214 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00530-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00530-z