One conclusion, different reasons
What makes a judgment moral?
Mara has prepared an analysis for a team meeting. Her supervisor interrupts her, then presents one of her findings without acknowledging her contribution. Mara can ask to finish her explanation and clarify which work she contributed.
She expects that speaking up will help her receive credit. Her conclusion is familiar: “I should speak up.”
Protecting her career and standing up for herself could lead Mara to the same conclusion. Would the reasons be interchangeable?
Mara’s reasoning
What makes speaking up matter?
The meeting, available response, expected credit, and conclusion remain the same. Choose which concern helps Mara form her judgment.
Standing up for herself
Mara regards herself as someone who matters in her own right. She understands the dismissal as treatment of her, which she can answer. Her self-respect helps make accepting the dismissal objectionable; speaking up is the response she sees as appropriate.
In the specified case, Mara’s relationship to herself contributes to the judgment. NDT classifies the judgment as moral.
Moral describes the judgment’s basis, not its correctness. Nonmoral does not mean bad. These are imagined cases with specified reasoning, not diagnoses of an actual person.
What the comparison assumes
The self-respect case has a qualifying positive-only self-relation. Mara’s worth, operative self-relation, and relevant capacity are sufficient for the relationship conditions in the specified case. The relationship and the correct responder and object representations contribute together to the evaluation supporting the judgment. No other relationship supplies a moral basis in the career-only case.
The diagram summarizes those assignments. The controls select prepared explanations; they do not execute every condition in the Formal Specification or identify cognitive provenance from behavior. The arrows show explanatory support, not measured timing.
Self-reference alone does not make a judgment moral. Mara is understood as both responder and object of concern, with a qualifying relationship connecting those roles. A career objective can coexist with that relationship, and a stored principle can retain its contribution.
Read the exact conditions in Formal Specification §4b.2Mara’s represented relationship to herself
The parts concern the same Mara in the same situation.
Helps make the dismissal something she should resist
Speaking up is the response Mara sees as appropriate.
Speaking up is a means to that advantage.
Self-respect can remain without supplying the reason
Mara need not lose her sense of worth when a practical question is settled by its career implications. In the specified career-only judgment, her self-relation remains represented but does not help form the evaluation. The dashed connection distinguishes having a concern from drawing on that concern now.
The same architecture, a further distinction
Not good is different from bad
Mara once admired a colleague. She might now regard that colleague as useful to a project but attach no value to the person beyond that usefulness. Or she might regard the colleague as bad in their own right. Losing inherent regard is different from acquiring inherent disvalue.
NDT keeps positive and negative inherent value separate. Choose how Mara regards the same colleague within one understanding. The labels concern the colleague’s value as Mara represents it, not a complete moral judgment.
Mara regards the colleague as good in their own right, without also regarding the colleague as inherently bad.
The controls select stipulated profiles. A mixed profile is not a neutral midpoint, and no value profile alone determines a moral judgment or a response.
The larger proposal
Can diversity have a common structure?
The comparisons separate a conclusion from its contributing reasons, a retained relationship from its present contribution, and inherent badness from an absence of inherent value. NDT proposes that such differences can be explained together through the organization of capacities also used outside morality.
The diversity of moral judgments is what a unified account must explain. Showing that outward behavior leaves a distinction unresolved motivates the search. It does not prove that every moral judgment shares one structure or that NDT supplies the only possible account.
The relationship and judgment modules use their own examples. A return link will preserve Mara’s selected comparison.
The challenge from theories of disunity
Some researchers argue that judgments called moral comprise different phenomena without a useful common organization. NDT takes the alternative wager: a specific organization might explain the differences together. That proposal must earn its standing through coverage and constraint, not simply redefine inconvenient cases away.
Read the paper’s discussion of Stich, Sinnott-Armstrong, and Wheatley.