Sidetracked by trolleys: Why sacrificial moral dilemmas tell us little (or nothing) about utilitarian judgment

Kahane, Guy

doi:10.1080/17470919.2015.1023400

Cited by 166 publications

(183 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…However, the preference for saving five lives in trolley problems should not necessarily be interpreted as indicating support for utilitarianism overall (Conway & Gawronski, 2013;Crone & Laham, 2017;Kahane, 2015;Kahane, Everett, Earp, Farias, & Savulescu, 2015). In the trolley problems used in the present study, acceptance of causing harm (i.e., killing one) is directly contrasted with the desire to save five people, and these two processes have not been disentangled in the present studies.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Directionscontrasting

confidence: 39%

The Influence of War on Moral Judgments about Harm

Watkins¹

2017

Preprint

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How does war influence moral judgments about harm? While the general rule is "thou shalt not kill," war appears to provide an exception to the moral prohibition on intentional harm. In three studies (N = 263, N = 557, N = 793), we quantify the difference in moral judgments across peace and war contexts, and explore two possible explanations for the difference. The findings demonstrate that people judge a trade-off of one life for five as more morally acceptable in war than in peace, especially if the one person is from an outgroup of the person making the trade-off. In addition, the robust difference in moral judgments across "switch" and "footbridge" trolley problems is attenuated in war compared to in peace. The present studies have implications for moral psychology researchers who use war-based scenarios to study broader cognitive or affective processes. If the war context changes judgments of moral scenarios by triggering group-based reasoning or altering the perceived structure of the moral event, using such scenarios to make decontextualized claims about moral judgment may not be warranted. Key words: moral psychology, trolley problems, war, ingroup bias, intergroup conflict THE INFLUENCE OF WAR ON MORAL JUDGMENTS 3 The Influence of War on Moral Judgments about HarmKilling is wrong; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -VoltaireThe moral judgments we make about killing in war differ markedly from the moral judgments we make about killing in times of peace. In an everyday context, the quintessential moral wrong is intentional harm (i.e., murder, Gray & Keeney, 2015), and the most common immoral actions observed in people's everyday lives involve harm (Hofmann, Wisneski, Brandt, & Skitka, 2014). But what about in contexts of war? Although harm is highly relevant in war contexts -in the 20 th century, upwards of 110 million people lost their lives in international and civil wars (Wimmer, 2014) -very little research compares judgments of harm in war to judgments of harm in everyday contexts. Thus, while it is generally assumed that harm is more permissible in war than in peace, this difference in moral judgments has yet to be quantified. In addition, no previous research has investigated how war influences moral judgments. Is it the "large numbers", or "the sound of trumpets" that is driving the effect? Or something else entirely?In the present paper we compare judgments made about harm in a peace context to those made in a war context, to investigate how war influences moral judgments. We also investigate two specific aspects of the war context which may underpin any observed difference: (a) the intergroup nature of war, and (b) the context-specific nature of the construal of causal and intentional event structure. We aim to further our understanding of moral judgments about actions in war -particularly about its core activity, killing. Philosophers of (the ethics of) war have suggested that how we make moral judgments about killing in wa...

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Section: Limitations and Future Directionscontrasting

confidence: 39%

The Influence of War on Moral Judgments about Harm

Watkins¹

2017

Preprint

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“…Although recently a number of criticisms have surfaced that challenge interpreting affirmative response on moral dilemma as utilitarian 83 , we use utilitarian to mean "characteristically utilitarian" as a function of the response content and not the underlying motivation 49 . Thus, if a given individual responds affirmatively on a moral dilemma, we do not take this response to denote explicit endorsement of the utilitarian moral principle ("those acts are better that save more number of lives") on her part, but only to mean that this response coincides with a response that would be endorsed by a typical, card-carrying utilitarian moral philosopher 49 .…”

Section: Text Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Divergent roles of autistic and alexithymic traits in utilitarian moral judgments in adults with autism

Patil¹,

Melsbach²,

Hennig-Fast³

et al. 2017

Preprint

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This study investigated hypothetical moral choices in adults with high-functioning autism and the role of empathy and alexithymia in such choices. We used a highly emotionally salient moral dilemma task to investigate autistics' hypothetical moral evaluations about personally carrying out harmful utilitarian behaviours aimed at maximizing welfare. Results showed that they exhibited a normal pattern of moral judgments despite the deficits in social cognition and emotional processing. Further analyses revealed that this was due to mutually conflicting biases associated with autistic and alexithymic traits after accounting for shared variance: (a) autistic traits were associated with reduced utilitarian bias due to elevated personal distress of demanding social situations, while (b) alexithymic traits were associated with increased utilitarian bias on account of reduced empathic concern for the victim. Additionally, autistics relied on their non-verbal reasoning skills to rigidly abide by harm-norms. Thus, utilitarian moral judgments in autism were spared due to opposite influences of autistic and alexithymic traits and compensatory intellectual strategies. These findings demonstrate the importance of empathy and alexithymia in autistic moral cognition and have methodological implications for studying moral judgments in several other clinical populations.

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“…On sacrificial dilemmas where people must decide whether to sacrifice one person to save more, for instance, people might deliberately imagine the anticipated outcomes of each of the possible actions (e.g. pushing the stranger of the footbridge or not) for the people involved (Kahane, 2015). Then, based on their empathetic reactions to these imagined outcomes, they would judge the proposed action (i.e.…”

Section: Harm Aversion and Moral Judgmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In line with the vast majority of research on moral judgments, we refer to actionbased judgments as deontological, and outcome-based ones as utilitarian. However, it is important to note that both, deontology and utilitarianism, represent extreme philosophical positions, and human morality might be better described as a mixture of both outcome-and action-based judgments (Kahane, 2015).…”

Section: Harm Aversion and Moral Judgmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2015

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To not harm others is widely considered the most basic element of human morality. The aversion to harm others can be either rooted in the outcomes of an action (utilitarianism) or reactions to the action itself (deontology). We speculated that the human moral judgments rely on the integration of neural computations of harm and visceral reactions. The present research examined whether utilitarian or deontological aspects of moral judgment are associated with cardiac vagal tone, a physiological proxy for neuro-visceral integration. We investigated the relationship between cardiac vagal tone and moral judgment by using a mix of moral dilemmas, mathematical modeling and psychophysiological measures. An index of bipolar deontology-utilitarianism was correlated with resting heart rate variability (HRV)-an index of cardiac vagal tone-such that more utilitarian judgments were associated with lower HRV. Follow-up analyses using process dissociation, which independently quantifies utilitarian and deontological moral inclinations, provided further evidence that utilitarian (but not deontological) judgments were associated with lower HRV. Our results suggest that the functional integration of neural and visceral systems during moral judgments can restrict outcome-based, utilitarian moral preferences. Implications for theories of moral judgment are discussed.

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Sidetracked by trolleys: Why sacrificial moral dilemmas tell us little (or nothing) about utilitarian judgment

Cited by 166 publications

References 33 publications

The Influence of War on Moral Judgments about Harm

The Influence of War on Moral Judgments about Harm

Divergent roles of autistic and alexithymic traits in utilitarian moral judgments in adults with autism

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

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