| The current era of increasing economic and technological globalization is rendering human activities increasingly effective and powerful means of altering our lives and environment. Considering the global scope and possible irreversibility of the harms we can now collectively bring about, our widespread, voluntary participation in collective harms is emerging as an especially important and pressing concern. The approach often taken by other ethicists seeking to address the problem of voluntary participation in collective harms, has been to attempt to alter people's beliefs about the morality of their (and others') participation by presenting arguments demonstrating that such behaviour is morally wrong.;Once we recognize how our moral feelings influence our moral decision-making, we can see that addressing the problem of voluntary participation in collective harms will require that we use social influence to alter people's moral feelings about indirect and/or negligible contributions to harms in addition to altering their beliefs about the moral responsibility attaching to such actions. I further argue that social influence can be a legitimate means of moral persuasion, provided it is used in a morally responsible manner. I conclude by outlining some conditions for effective and ethical use of social influence, and show how it could be used to address the problem of marginal participation.;Keywords: Ethics, Cognitive science, Neuroscience, Psychology, Moral reasoning, Rational decision-making, Moral feelings, Moral emotions, Somatic-marker hypothesis, Social influence, Persuasion.;However, I argue that to address the problem of participation in collective harms will require that we also use social influence to alter people's moral feeling about participation. Using evidence from the cognitive and social sciences, I demonstrate that moral decision-making is as much a matter of feelings as it is of logic. From this, I argue that the focus on logic and discursive reasoning prevalent in contemporary moral theory provides an inadequate account of moral choice, and that we need to expand our conception of moral cognition to recognize the role played by feelings. |
