Unpacking How People Reason About the Fairness of Social Solidarity

People disagree over the generosity of (and the need for) targeted social spending in areas such as welfare, unemployment benefits, bank bailouts and student loan forgiveness. Political scientist Charlotte Cavaillé will unpack the moral reasoning underpinning such disagreements. She asks: Do people who view large-scale mutual aid as unfair—because it benefits “free riders”—reason differently about opportunistic, antisocial behavior more generally? She hypothesizes that, when reasoning about targeted social spending, people start from different moral intuitions regarding human nature and cooperation (the moral pluralism hypothesis). Using experimental studies, she will examine the extent to which moral intuitions vary with class, geography and partisanship and the role of socioeconomic hardship in explaining these differences. She will also examine whether differences in moral intuitions about human nature and cooperation help predict how people process ambiguous information about the deservingness of beneficiaries of solidaristic social policy.