Moral Values, Behaviour, and the Self: An empirical and conceptual analysis

Detection of Hidden Moralities in the Energy Transition: An explorative study for the development of a research method

In light of recent failures in policy dossiers with regard to the identification of need claims of citizens, participatory procedures have been made mandatory for municipalities in the constitution of a carbon-neutral energy system. However, the legitimacy of mainstream participatory procedures is limited because guidelines for public...

Moral foundations theory and the narrative self: towards an improved concept of moral selfhood for the empirical study of morality

Within the empirical study of moral decision making, people’s morality is often identified by measuring general moral values through a questionnaire, such as the Moral Foundations Questionnaire provided by Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). However, the success of these moral values in predicting people’s behaviour has been disappointing. The...

The Quarrel of Local Post-hoc Explainers for Moral Values Classification in Natural Language Processing

Although popular and effective, large language models (LLM) are characterised by a performance vs. transparency trade-off that hinders their applicability to sensitive scenarios. This is the main reason behind many approaches focusing on local post-hoc explanations recently proposed by the XAI community. However, to the best of our knowledge,...

Why Are General Moral Values Poor Predictors of Concrete Moral Behavior in Everyday Life? A Conceptual Analysis and Empirical Study

Within moral psychology, theories focusing on the conceptualization and empirical measurement of people’s morality in terms of general moral values –such as Moral Foundation Theory- (implicitly) assume general moral values to be relevant concepts for the explanation and prediction of behavior in everyday life. However, a solid theoretical and...

Evaluating catastrophic forgetting of state-of-the-art NLP models for predicting moral values

Personal moral values represent the motivation behind individuals' actions and opinions. Understanding these values is helpful both in predicting individuals' actions, such as violent protests, and building AI that can better collaborate with humans. Predicting moral values is a challenging problem due to the abstract and subjective essence of...

Evaluating interpretability of state-of-the-art NLP models for predicting moral values

Understanding personal values is a crucial aspect that can facilitate the collaboration between AI and humans. Nonetheless, the implementation of collaborative agents in real life greatly depends on the amount of trust that is built in their relationship with people. In order to bridge this gap, more extensive analysis of the explainability of...

Estimating the transferability of state-of-the-art models in predicting moral values

Moral values play a crucial role in our decision-making process by defining what is right and wrong. With the emergence of political activism and moral discourse on social media, and the latest developments in Natural Language Processing, we are looking at an opportunity to analyze moral values to observe trends as they form. Recent studies have...

How Do Technological Artefacts Embody Moral Values?

According to some philosophers of technology, technology embodies moral values in virtue of its functional properties and the intentions of its designers. But this paper shows that such an account makes the values supposedly embedded in technology epistemically opaque and that it does not allow for values to change. Therefore, to overcome...

Does morality predict aggressive driving? A conceptual analysis and exploratory empirical investigation

Risky and aggressive driving is an important cause of traffic casualties and as such a major health and cost problem to society. Given the consequences for others, risky and aggressive driving has a clear moral component. Surprisingly, however, there has been little research on the relation between morality and risky and aggressive driving...

A comprehensive approach to reviewing latent topics addressed by literature across multiple disciplines

This paper proposes an approach to capturing and reviewing scientific literature addressing latent topics across multiple scientific fields. As latent topics like moral values are affected by word polysemy and synonymy, a traditional keyword-based approach is often ineffective and therefore inappropriate. As a result, scientific literature...

Agency perception and moral values related to Autonomous Weapons: An empirical study using the Value-Sensitive Design approach

The purpose of this empirical study is to gain insight in how Autonomous Weapons are perceived by the general public and the military and which moral values they consider important when Autonomous Weapons are deployed in the near future. The Value-Sensitive Design method is used to structure the study. This thesis proposes a design for a Moral...

A Review of Value-Conflicts in Cybersecurity: An assessment based on quantitative and qualitative literature analysis

Cybersecurity is of capital importance in a world where economic and social processes increasingly rely on digital technology. Although the primary ethical motivation of cybersecurity is prevention of informational or physical harm, its enforcement can also entail conflicts with other moral values. This contribution provides an outline of value...