Moral kinematics: The role of physical factors in moral judgments

Abstract

Harmful events often have a strong physical component-for instance, car accidents, plane crashes, fist fights, and military interventions. Yet there has been very little systematic work on the degree to which physical factors influence our moral judgments about harm. Since physical factors are related to our perception of causality, they should also influence our subsequent moral judgments. In three experiments, we tested this prediction, focusing in particular on the roles of motion and contact. In Experiment 1, we used abstract video stimuli and found that intervening on a harmful object was judged as being less bad than intervening directly on the victim, and that setting an object in motion was judged as being worse than redirecting an already moving object. Experiment 2 showed that participants were sensitive not only to the presence or absence of motion and contact, but also to the magnitudes and frequencies associated with these dimensions. Experiment 3 extended the findings from Experiment 1 to verbally presented moral dilemmas. These results suggest that domain-general processes play a larger role in moral cognition than is currently assumed.Keywords Moral judgments . Causality . Motion . Agency . Physical factorsIn this study, we asked a simple empirical question: Do people take physical factors into account when making moral judgments? At first glance, our ability to distinguish good from bad seems more or less independent from the way that we perceive the physical aspects of our surroundings. Moral principles such as "do no harm" are abstract and largely decontextualized, and many would argue that they have transcendental or sacred aspects embedded in them that go beyond the physical plane. Yet our cognitive system is attuned to the physical aspects of reality

Biasing moral decisions by exploiting the dynamics of eye gaze

“…According to such theories, moral choices are primarily seen as products of specific morally motivated intuitive and rule-governed processes. Our findings instead support alternative views that stress the continuities between the moral and other choice domains (7,8,39,40). If moral decisions are sensitive to sensorimotor interactions and the complex timing of these, then moral cognition might turn out to have more in common with how motor plans are dynamically updated, compared with following a rule, than previously hypothesized.…”

“…By tracking the interplay between individuals, their sensorimotor systems, and the environment, we can influence the outcome of a decision without directly manipulating the content of the information available to them. morality | decision making | eye tracking | visual attention | dynamical systems M oral cognition arises from the interplay between emotion and reason (1)(2)(3)(4)(5), between cultural and personal values (6), and in the competition between different cognitive representations (7)(8)(9). Many studies have explored these tensions, finding that moral decisions can be influenced by priming, highlighting, or framing one factor over another (4)(5)(6)9).…”

The Role of Self-Sacrifice in Moral Dilemmas

“…The self-relative-other pattern highlights the role of agent-relativity in moral judgments, suggesting that both the role of the self as agent, and the relationship of the self to the patients of the action matter. Future analysis of the causal component of moral judgments [36,37] should take into account the unique causal role that the self can have in moral dilemmas. Including the life of decision maker in causal structure and manipulating his relationship to the other parties concerned presents a challenge for some of the main causal distinctions used to analyze the structure of a moral dilemma, such as victim and harm, agent, and patient, or means and ends.…”

Moral Judgment and Decision Making

“…For example, some have argued that the issue is whether an action directly (as in footbridge) or indirectly (as in bystander) causes harm (Royzman & Baron, 2002), whether the causal focus is directed on to the trolley or the people on the track (Waldmann & Dieterich, 2007;Iliev, Sachdeva, & Medin, 2012), whether the action is interpreted as violating a rule in the social contract (Fiddick, Spampinato & Grafman, 2005), and whether the outcomes are viewed as gains or losses (Petrinovich, O'Neill, & Jorgensen, 1993). Below, we will provide expanded descriptions of three interpretations that have received considerable attention.…”