Search

Trolley dilemmas are widely used to elicit moral intuitions.Most people do not think it would be morally right to pusha heavy man from a bridge, thereby killing him, in order toavoid the death of several other people. Here weempirically tested a prediction by Unger (1996) who claimsthat adding more options to this scenario would shiftpeople’s intuition from the normally preferred option ofdoing nothing to the utilitarian option of killing the heavyman. While not finding significant results with Unger’soriginal materials, an experiment with adapted materialsconfirmed the assumption that pushing one person is morelikely to be preferred to not intervening if certain additionaloptions are provided. Moreover, we found that moralintuitions are transferred from several-option cases to twooptioncases (and the other way around). We discuss somepossible psychological explanations for and normativeimplications of these findings

The dual-process model of moral cognition suggests that outcome-focused, consequentialist moral judgment in sacrificial moral dilemmas is driven by a deliberative, reasoned, cognitive process. Although many studies have demonstrated a positive association of consequentialist judgment with measures of cognitive engagement, no work has investigated whether cognitive ability itself is also related to consequentialist judgment. Therefore, we conducted three studies to investigate whether participants' preference for consequentialist moral judgment is related to their intelligence. A meta-analytic integration of these three studies (with a total N = 675) uncovered no association between the two measures (r = –.02). Furthermore, a Bayesian reanalysis of the same data provided substantial evidence in favor of a null effect (BFH0 = 7.2). As such, the present studies show that if consequentialist judgments depend on deliberative reasoning, this association is not driven by cognitive ability, but by cognitive motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several factors have been put forward to explain the variability of moral judgments for superficially analogous moral dilemmas, in particular in the paradigm of trolley cases. In this paper we elaborate on Mikhail's view that (i) causal analysis is at the core of moral judgments and that (ii) causal judgments can be quantified by linguistic methods. According to this model, our moral judgments depend both on utilitarian considerations (whether positive effects outweigh negative effects) and on a representation of the causal structure of the action (whether the negative effects are essentially side-effects rather than main goals). However, the exact contribution of each factor, as well as the precise way in which causal considerations interact with utilitarian considerations, has yet to be quantified and investigated. We present several variations on trolley dilemmas in which subjects had to assess the morality of the action and to evaluate their preference between two competing descriptions of the scene (“acaused the death ofm, thereby savingn” versus “asavedn, thereby causing the death ofm”). Our main finding is that moral judgments are highly correlated with causal judgments in terms of such descriptions, which makes it possible to predict the former from the latter. Furthermore, we observe that the effect of causal judgments on the relative permissibility of actions is felt even inanti-utilitarianscenarios, namely scenarios for which the proposed action diminishes aggregate utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explaining moral intuitions is one of the hot topics of recent cognitive science. In the present article we focus on a factor that attracted surprisingly little attention so far, namely the temporal order in which moral scenarios are presented. We argue that previous research points to a systematic pattern of order effects that has been overlooked until now: only judgments of actions that are normally regarded as morally acceptable are susceptible to be affected by the order of presentation, and this in turn is only the case if the dilemma is immediately preceded by a dilemma in which the proposed action was considered as not morally acceptable. We conducted an experiment that largely confirmed this pattern and allowed us to analyze by what individual level responses it was generated. We argue that investigating order effects is necessary for approaching a complete descriptive moral theory. Furthermore, we discuss the implications of these findings for moral philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When are sacrificial harms morally appropriate? Traditionally, research within moral psychology has investigated this issue by asking participants to render moral judgments on batteries of single-shot, sacrificial dilemmas. Each of these dilemmas has its own set of targets and describes a situation independent from those described in the other dilemmas. Every decision that participants are asked to make thus takes place within its own, separate moral universe. As a result, people's moral judgments can only be influenced by what happens within that specific dilemma situation. This research methodology ignores that moral judgments are interdependent and that people might try to balance multiple moral concerns across multiple decisions. In the present series of studies we present participants with iterative versions of sacrificial dilemmas that involve the same set of targets across multiple iterations. Using this novel approach, and across five preregistered studies (total n = 1890), we provide clear evidence that a) responding to dilemmas in a sequential, iterative manner impacts the type of moral judgments that participants favor and b) that participants' moral judgments are not only motivated by the desire to refrain from harming others (usually labelled as deontological judgment), or a desire to minimize harms (utilitarian judgment), but also by a desire to spread out harm across all possible targets. • Research on sacrificial harm usually asks participants to judge single-shot dilemmas. • We investigate sacrificial moral dilemma judgment in an iterative context. • Sequential decision making impacts moral preferences. • Many participants express a non-utilitarian concern for the overall spread of harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]