Moral psychology
Is utilitarian morality just reasoning from facts to 'shoulds'?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
When people were given reasons to doubt that an action would bring about a good outcome, they judged the outcome-based (utilitarian) choice less morally right, but their judgments of the rule-based (deontological) choice barely changed.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Two online vignette experiments manipulating normative conflict plus goal conflict (Exp 1) or causal suppression (Exp 2) between participants, with separate ratings of utilitarian and deontological actions within participants
- N
- Experiment 1: 95 analysed of 116 recruited; Experiment 2: 188 analysed of 235 recruited; no single pooled N
- Population
- English-speaking adult crowd workers on CrowdFlower
- Outcome
- Moral rightness ratings of the utilitarian and the deontological action, and strength ratings for normative conclusions (must, should, may, etc.)
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Key findings
In Experiment 1, adding a harmful outcome made people rate the utilitarian action as less morally right and weakened 'should/must' conclusions about it, while ratings of the deontological action were not significantly affected; highlighting a conflicting professional code produced a similar but weaker pattern. Experiment 2 replicated this with causal manipulations, especially when the action was shown to be insufficient. The one exception was that in Experiment 2 normative conflict also shifted deontological ratings, in the opposite direction.
Methodology
Online participants read moral dilemmas, such as an anthropologist who could cure a religious sect's scurvy by getting them to eat fruit against their beliefs. They separately rated how morally right the utilitarian action (changing the diet) and the deontological action (respecting beliefs) were, and how strongly conclusions like 'he should do it' followed. Between participants, the researchers added text that undermined the reasoning chain: a professional code that conflicted with the action (both experiments), a harmful side effect such as a fruit allergy (Experiment 1), or information that the action was not sufficient or not necessary to cure the scurvy (Experiment 2).
Limitations
The pattern of selective suppression was not perfectly clean, and several follow-up comparisons were only marginal after correction. Only three vignettes were used, and participants were online crowd workers, so it is unclear how well the results generalise to other dilemmas or real decisions. The study shows that utilitarian judgment and is-to-ought inference respond to the same manipulations, but it does not directly show they are one and the same mental process. The authors note that deontological judgments might respond to other factors not tested here.
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