Chapter 9 Exercises

Conceptual Exercises

Exercise 1: Situationist Self-Examination (25 minutes)

The situationist position holds that behavior is far more context-dependent than we typically recognize. This exercise asks you to test that claim against your own experience.

Think of three different social contexts you regularly inhabit: perhaps your workplace or classroom, your family environment, and a group of close friends. For each context, consider:

  • What values do you most commonly express or act on in that context?
  • Are there values important to you that you don't typically act on in that context? Why not?
  • Is there a version of yourself in one context that would surprise people from another context?

Write a paragraph per context, then a final paragraph: to what extent does your behavior vary across these contexts, and what does that tell you about the relative influence of character versus situation in your own moral life?

Exercise 2: The Milgram Prediction Exercise

Before reading the results of Milgram's experiments, most people — including expert psychiatrists — dramatically underestimated how many people would comply. This is sometimes called the "fundamental attribution error" applied to morality: we overweight character and underweight situation when predicting behavior.

Try the following:

  1. Imagine yourself in the Milgram scenario — the pressing prompts, the professional setting, the distressing signals from the learner. At what point do you believe you would have stopped?

  2. Now: knowing what you know about the experimental results, and knowing about the situational pressures involved, do you update your estimate? What specifically would you have needed to stop earlier?

  3. Think of a real situation in your life where you went along with something you were uncomfortable with because of social or institutional pressure. What stopped you from resisting? What would have helped?

This exercise is not about finding yourself deficient. It's about developing accurate self-knowledge.

Exercise 3: Dual-Process Ethics — Sorting Your Intuitions

The dual-process model suggests that moral judgments come from two sources: fast intuitive reactions (System 1) and slow deliberate reasoning (System 2). Neither is always right.

For each of the following moral claims, note: - Your initial gut reaction (System 1): Do you feel this is right or wrong, and how strongly? - Your considered judgment after reflection (System 2): After thinking it through, do you maintain your initial reaction? - What changed (if anything) in the move from System 1 to System 2?

Claims: 1. It is wrong to eat meat raised in factory farming conditions. 2. A company that uses legal tax avoidance to minimize its tax bill is acting wrongly. 3. Sharing a friend's secret to prevent harm to a third party is justified. 4. A surgeon who is emotionally distraught should postpone elective surgery even if she is technically competent to perform it. 5. If someone wrongs you, you have the right to wrong them back. 6. Deliberately excluding someone from a social group is morally equivalent to actively harming them.

After working through all six, reflect: which of your intuitions do you trust most after reflection? Which ones shifted and why?

Exercise 4: Moral Foundations Self-Assessment

Haidt's moral foundations theory identifies six foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, Liberty/Oppression.

Part A: Rank the six foundations in order of their apparent weight in your own moral reasoning (most to least influential). This is harder than it sounds — be honest, not aspirational.

Part B: For each of the following everyday moral judgments, identify which foundation(s) are driving the reaction:

  • You feel strongly that it's wrong to report a friend to the police for a minor crime
  • You feel angry when someone cuts in a queue
  • You feel uncomfortable when someone disrespects a national flag
  • You believe that inheritance taxes are just
  • You feel that certain sexual practices between consenting adults are inherently wrong
  • You think that free-riding on public goods (taking benefits without contributing) is deeply unfair

Part C: Think about a political disagreement you've had with someone whose overall values you respect. Using moral foundations theory, identify which foundations were most active on each side. Does this framework change how you see the disagreement?

Exercise 5: The Structural Injustice Audit

Iris Marion Young argued that structural positions create obligations that go beyond individual intentions. This exercise applies that framework to your own life.

Identify one social structure you're embedded in — a workplace, a university, a neighborhood, a professional network — that produces or sustains some form of disadvantage or inequality, even if no individual in it intends harm.

Write a brief analysis: 1. What is the structure, and what inequality or disadvantage does it produce? 2. What is your position in this structure? Do you benefit from it? Are you harmed by it? 3. What, according to Young's framework, does your structural position require of you? (Not just "feel bad" — specific action or accountability) 4. What objections do you have to Young's argument in this case? Are they philosophical objections or are they rationalizations of inaction?

Application Exercises

Exercise 6: Designing a More Ethical Meeting

You've been asked to redesign the decision-making process in a small organization (a team of 10 people, a committee, a student organization — choose whichever context is most familiar). The current process: the most senior person proposes a course of action, opens the floor briefly, and decisions are made if there's no strong objection.

Using what you've learned in this chapter — about situational power, the bystander effect, diffusion of responsibility, authority effects — propose specific redesign elements that would make ethical failures less likely. For each proposed change, cite the specific psychological mechanism it is designed to counteract.

Exercise 7: The Arendt Test

Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" argument focuses on the danger of thoughtlessness — substituting role performance and institutional compliance for genuine moral agency.

Think of an institution you're currently part of (school, workplace, family, community organization). Identify one practice or norm in that institution that you have simply accepted without examining. Ask the questions Arendt would ask:

  • What are the actual effects of this practice on people inside and outside the institution?
  • If you were not embedded in this institution — if you were an outsider evaluating it — would you endorse this practice?
  • Are you performing a role or making a genuine choice?

This exercise is not designed to produce institutional radicalism. Most institutional practices survive examination. It's designed to develop the habit of examining them.

Synthesis Exercise

Exercise 8: Progressive Project — Moral Psychology Reflection

Add to the Ethics section of your ongoing philosophical self-examination:

Write 500–700 words responding to the following:

  • Which moral foundations seem most active in your own thinking? Which ones do you weight least? What does this asymmetry explain about how you've responded to moral disagreements in the past?
  • Describe a situation in which situational pressure pushed you toward behavior that didn't reflect your stated values. What was the structure of the pressure? How could you design against it in the future?
  • What do implicit bias and structural injustice mean for your specific moral situation — not in the abstract but in the actual structures you inhabit?

The goal is not self-condemnation or performative self-criticism. It's accurate moral self-knowledge — the foundation of genuine moral development.