Browsing by Subject "Ethical decision-making"

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Open Access
Arguing to defeat: eristic argumentation and irrationality in resolving moral concerns
(Springer, 2020) Kurdoğlu, Rasim Serdar; Ateş, N. Y.
By synthesizing the argumentation theory of new rhetoric with research on heuristics and motivated reasoning, we develop a conceptual view of argumentation based on reasoning motivations that sheds new light on the morality of decision-making. Accordingly, we propose that reasoning in eristic argumentation is motivated by psychological (e.g., anxiety reduction) or material (e.g., vested interests) gains that do not depend on resolving the problem in question truthfully. Contrary to heuristic argumentation, in which disputants genuinely argue to reach a practically rational solution, eristic argumentation aims to defeat the counterparty rather than seeking a reasonable solution. Eristic argumentation is susceptible to arbitrariness and power abuses; therefore, it is inappropriate for making moral judgments with the exception of judgments concerning moral taboos, which are closed to argumentation by their nature. Eristic argumentation is also problematic for strategic and entrepreneurial decision-making because it impedes the search for the right heuristic under uncertainty as an ecologically rational choice. However, our theoretical view emphasizes that under extreme uncertainty, where heuristic solutions are as fallible as any guesses, pretense reasoning by eristic argumentation may be instrumental for its adaptive benefts. Expanding the concept of eristic argumentation based on reasoning motivations opens a new path for studying the psychology of reasoning in connection to morality and decision-making under uncertainty. We discuss the implications of our theoretical view to relevant research streams, including ethical, strategic and entrepreneurial decision-making.
Open Access
How do consumers self-license themselves in the context of ethical consumption?: a qualitative approach to moral self-licensing
(2022-07) Çelik, Hafize
Ethical decision making processes of people have been a locus of research across disciplines because morality is considered as an important yet complex tenet of social life. The research to date has aimed at exploring the inconsistency in ethical decision-making processes of individuals to comprehensively apprehend the issue. A research stream on moral self-licensing (ML) effect has revealed that individuals are more likely to follow an amoral behavior if they established moral behaviors earlier. Since the ML phenomenon has been investigated mainly via the experimental approaches, the nature of ML has been almost exclusively explained by a single empirical model, called moral credits model, and therefore, the ML effect has remained rather underexplored. As such, the main objective of this thesis is to explore ML in the context of ethical consumption in which the ethical decision-making processes are at the forefront. With a methodological shift from the dominant research stream on the ML effect, this thesis embraces interpretivist approaches based on consumers lived experiences and accounts about moral dilemmas during the ethical consumption behaviors by interviews and projective methods. The findings of the thesis suggest that there are alternative models of moral self-licensing: reversed moral credentials, moral supplement, moral societal position, and moral systemic position. These findings not only expand the definition of ML but also inform some neglected aspects of the attitude behavior gap in ethical consumption. The findings of the thesis are expected to set a scholarly dialogue to enhance the growth and expansion of ethical markets.