How moral verdicts are formed, and why they may resist revision
Research on human and AI judgement, from whether an act counts as wrong to whether understood context can still change the verdict.
Emile Boullineau, CFA, FRM. Independent researcher, with twenty-five years in global financial services building and leading risk functions.
Published
Moral violations are made, not found
Moral psychology usually treats a violation as something observers detect and then judge. Motivated Violation Construction proposes that, for ambiguous behaviour, motivation acts earlier, at the point where behaviour is classified as wrong at all.
Boullineau, E. (2027). Moral violations are made, not found: A theory of motivated violation construction. New Ideas in Psychology, 84, 101313. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2026.101313
The research programme
One judgement, three stages
Each paper places the verdict at a different point in the same judgement. The ordering is a proposal, not an established architecture.
- Classification · PublishedMotivated Violation Construction
Is it a violation at all?
- Attribution · PreprintMoralised Essentialism
Does the act come to define the person?
- Revision · PreprintTrait Judgmentalism
Does understood context change the verdict?
NeurIPS 2026 workshop
Language models as evaluators
The Screen Decides the Verdict: Operating Characteristics of Model‑Exclusion Rules in LLM Evaluation
With José Daniel Muñoz Arciniegas. Peer-reviewed poster, TAE workshop (Trust‑AI‑Eval), NeurIPS 2026, Sydney. Non-archival.
Also in this line of work: Same Prompt, Not the Same Instrument (preprint) and The Cell, Not the Call (preprint, under review).
About
From risk to judgement
Emile Boullineau has spent twenty-five years in global financial services, building and leading risk functions in banking and digital assets, and came to psychological research recently.
CFA charterholder · Financial Risk Manager (FRM) · BA Applied Psychology (cum laude) · MSc Psychology candidate, Northumbria University