The Interplay Between Ingroup Bias and the Attributions of Moral Responsibility

Abstract

In this paper, I will begin Chapter 1 by introducing P. F. Strawson’s descriptive account of Moral Responsibility and attribution from his essay, “Freedom and Resentment,” where he presents a new compatibilist version to the argument of determinism and responsibility grounded by human psychology. In Chapter 2, I will introduce and define a descriptive account of ingroup identification and ingroup bias. Then, I will present studies that show an increase in ingroup bias when moral judgments are required during wartime compared to peacetime. In the case of sacrifice, increased ingroup bias during wartime will be shown through participants finding it more morally acceptable to kill an outgroup member to save an ingroup member. As for the case of prosecution, participants demanded less justice for an ingroup member perpetrator against an outgroup member. This tendency was increased when the participants were rated as high glorifiers. Then, I will define identity fusion and explain it as an essential pillar to our understanding of the process that plays within ingroup bias in both sacrifice and prosecution. Subsequently, I will explain increased ingroup bias and the role of identity fusion in the process through motivated reasoning. In Chapter 3, I will showcase Lebanon’s sectarian divisions and present a commonly encountered problem in the Lebanese ecosystem whereby people who identify with sectarian political groups tend to be biased toward their own group members by being morally lenient toward them. Two case studies will be explicated, one that is a personal conversation held and the other is a set of testimonies from the 2019 October Uprising. The heightened ingroup bias and moral leniency are achieved by keeping a war-like status quo within the communities, which is constantly fed through war-reminding and ingroup-glorifying rhetoric by groups. This continuous rhetoric supplements the motivated reasoning driven by identity fusion and ingroup bias, which results in people continuously wanting to protect the group and the self against outside threats. Finally, I will discuss the paper’s argument, the importance of Strawson’s account, the reason to focus on a combined descriptive-normative approach to moral responsibility, the possible implications our understanding of moral responsibility from this scope has on the Lebanese landscape, and the possible questions raised for future studies.