Moral dilemmas and moral principles: When emotion and cognition unite

Abstract

Traditional studies on moral judgement used resolutions of moral dilemmas that were framed in terms of acceptability of the consequentialist action promoting a greater good, thus overlooking the deontological implications (choices cannot be justified by their consequences). Recently, some authors have suggested a parallelism between automatic, unreflective emotional responses and deontological moral judgements. In this study, we developed a novel experimental paradigm in which participants were required to choose between two resolutions of a moral dilemma (consequentialist and deontological). To assess whether emotions are engaged in each of the two resolutions, we asked participants to evaluate their emotional experience through the ratings of valence and arousal. Results showed that emotion is involved not only in deontological but also in consequentialist resolutions. Moreover, response times pointed out a different interplay between emotion and cognition in determining a conflict in the dilemma's resolution. In particular, when people were faced with trolley-like dilemmas we found that decisions leading to deontological resolutions were slower than decisions leading to consequentialist resolutions. We propose that this finding reflects the special (but not accepted) permission provided by the doctrine of the double effect for incidentally causing death for the sake of a good end.

Surviving at Any Cost: Guilt Expression Following Extreme Ethical Conflicts in a Virtual Setting

“…This is consistent with the general insight of moral psychology, which has demonstrated that people find the idea of directly harming another person less acceptable than the idea of undertaking an action that will indirectly cause their death, even if the outcomes are the same [6], [7], [34]. The greater importance of emotional justifications for “Immediate” actions, undertaken without preparation as a reaction to a sudden crisis, also confirms the validity of moral psychology findings obtained in laboratory conditions, which suggested that emotional reactions play an extremely important role in ethical decision-making – possibly greater than moral reasoning [35], a finding confirmed by the importance of emotional over utilitarian justifications for the “Immediate” actions in our study – especially when the dilemma involve directly harming someone [7], [10], [36]. However, while previous studies emphasised the role of emotions in moral judgement [37], [38], [39], our findings show evidence of the importance of emotions in the moral judgment-related decision-making process itself, and of the fact that emotions may be a particularly prominent factor when choosing a course of action that could result in direct harm to someone.…”

“…The higher occurrence of expressions of guilt following actions with immediate consequences suggests that those actions had more psychological impact on those who performed them [36]. It is interesting to notice that even in the most drastic conditions, survivors appeared reluctant to kill another human for purely utilitarian reasons, in line with an evolutionary logic of human ethics [24].…”

Behavioral and autonomic reactivity to moral dilemmas in frontotemporal dementia versus Alzheimer’s disease

“…Investigators question the respective roles of emotion and reason and whether they represent deontological and utilitarian decisions, respectively (Borg, Hynes, Van Horn, Grafton, & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2006; Kahane, 2015; Kahane, Everett, Earp, Farias, & Savulescu, 2015; Manfrinati, Lotto, Sarlo, Palomba, & Rumiati, 2013). Others question the immediate vs. delayed aspects of deontological emotional processing compared to rational processing (Christensen, Flexas, Calabrese, Gut, & Gomila, 2014).…”

Two Models of Moral Judgment

“…Second, in terms of the relationship between two types of processes, while Greene et al. suggested competition and conflict between emotional and rational processes, we propose that two processes, implicit and explicit, work together to reach a conclusion (Kunda, ; Manfrinati, Lotto, Sarlo, Palomba, & Rumiati, ), taking into account an individual's motivation. Motivation also affects the degree of reliance on explicit or implicit processes.…”