Bad actions or bad outcomes? Differentiating affective contributions to the moral condemnation of harm.

Abstract

Moral condemnation of harmful behavior is influenced by both cognitive and affective processes. However, despite much recent research, the proximate source of affect remains unclear. One obvious contender is empathy; simulating the victim's pain could lead one to judge an action as wrong ("outcome aversion"). An alternative, less obvious source is one's own aversion to performing the action itself ("action aversion"). To dissociate these alternatives, we developed a scale that assessed individual aversions to (a) witnessing others experience painful outcomes (e.g., seeing someone fall down stairs); and (b) performing actions that are harmless yet aversive (e.g., stabbing a fellow actor with a fake stage knife). Across 4 experiments, we found that moral condemnation of both first-person and third-party harmful behavior in the context of moral dilemmas is better predicted by one's aversion to action properties than by an affective response to victim suffering. In a fifth experiment, we manipulated both action aversion and the degree of expected suffering across a number of actions and found that both factors make large, independent contributions to moral judgment. Together, these results suggest we may judge others' actions by imagining what it would feel like to perform the action rather than experience the consequences of the action. Accordingly, they provide a counterpoint to a dominant but largely untested assumption that empathy is the key affective response governing moral judgments of harm.

The empathy impulse: A multinomial model of intentional and unintentional empathy for pain.

“…Prior research has established that people experience negative affect in response to typically harmful actions, even if the actions do not result in harmful outcomes (Cushman et al, 2012;Miller et al, 2014). To examine whether PIT effects are reducible to affective priming over negative versus neutral stimuli, we manipulated whether target experiences were stipulated to be painful or not (using a manipulation from Lamm et al, 2010).…”

Is utilitarian sacrifice becoming more morally permissible?

“…So, growing endorsement of utilitarian sacrifice may be due, not exclusively to a reduction in the intensity of affect, but also in its relative influence upon moral judgment. Indeed, a diverse body of neuroscientific (Greene et al, 2001;Koenigs et al, 2007;Shenhav & Greene, 2014), physiological (Cushman, Gray, Gaffey & Mendes, 2012;Youssef et al, 2012) and behavioral (Koenigs, Kruepke, Zeier, & Newman, 2012;Miller, Hannikainen, & Cushman, 2014;Patil, 2015) evidence now suggests that affective prohibitions of interpersonal harm are not triggered exclusively-perhaps not even primarily-by an emotional tie to the proximal victim.…”

At the Heart of Morality Lies Neuro-Visceral Integration: Lower Cardiac Vagal Tone Predicts Utilitarian Moral Judgment

“…Similarly, participants perceived actions such as stabbing somebody with a fake knife as aversive even though the action had no aversive outcomes (Cushman et al, 2012). Furthermore, self-rated aversion to such harmless actions is a better predictor of moral judgments on sacrificial moral dilemmas than self-rated aversion to outcomes (Miller et al, 2014). Thus, people seem to base their moral judgments largely on the aversion to performing certain actions.…”