Hot utilitarianism and cold deontology: Insights from a response patterns approach to sacrificial and real world dilemmas

ABSTRACT

Research on moral judgment with moral dilemmas suggests that “utilitarian” responses (UR) to sacrificial high-conflict dilemmas are due to decreased harm aversion, not only in individuals with clinical conditions, but also in healthy participants with high scores in antisocial personality traits. We investigated the patterns of responses to different dilemma types in healthy participants and present evidence that some URs to sacrificial dilemmas are morally motivated, as indicated by their empathic concern (EC) or primary psychopathy (PP) scores. In study 1 (N = 230) we tested students with four categories of sacrificial dilemmas featuring innocent victims. In study 2 (N = 590) we tested students with two categories of sacrificial dilemmas and two “real-world” moral dilemmas, where the agent can improve the lot of strangers by making a personal sacrifice. Results in both studies showed no decreased harm aversion in a pattern where the only UR is to the sacrificial dilemma where the number of saved people is very high, and significantly lower harm aversion only in the pattern of all-deontological respondents in Study 2. The analysis by response patterns allowed a better discrimination of the moral motivations of participants and showed that at least some of them express moral concerns in their URs.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral judgment
• moral dilemmas
• empathic concern
• primary psychopathy
• utilitarianism

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by scholarships to Alejandra Arciniegas and Esteban Caviedes, under the Program “Young Researchers”, sponsored by Colciencias and the National University of Colombia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ SPSS runs the Point Biserial Correlation as a special case of the Pearson Correlation; thus “Pearson Correlation” appears in the generated table.

² As we revised this paper, Kahane and collaborators proposed and published a thorough analysis of utilitarian morality as consisting in two dimensions: instrumental harm for the greater good (this is measured with sacrificial dilemmas), and self-sacrificing impartial beneficence (this is measured with the “real-world” dilemmas from Kahane et al., 2015). With these two dimensions they constructed and validated the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale (OUS) (Kahane et al., 2017). They use the OUS, among other things, to estimate a proportion of the lay population that endorses both dimensions of utilitarian morality. This is important, because it tells us whether the two dimensions cohere only in virtue of a philosophical construct or alternatively point towards some pre-theoretical psychological reality, as a “natural kind” so to say. Kahane et al. (2017) come to an estimate of around 4% to 5%, and doubt whether both dimensions compose a unitary, stable pre-theoretical phenomenon. Our study 2 provides preliminary evidence for the rival view: of the 160 participants that give URs to at least one of two sacrificial and one of two self-sacrificial items, all answered “yes” to 100K; 79 scored a noncommittal 2 in Sacrifice Comfort (the neutral midpoint in a 5 point scale from 0 to 4) while the remaining 81 participants – 15% of our sample – scored 3 or 4, suggesting that 15% of the lay population endorses both dimensions of utilitarianism, when the utilitarian “rate of return” is large. Moreover, the mean EC and PP scores of this subgroup are not statistically different from the mean EC and PP scores of participants endorsing only self-sacrificial dilemmas for the good of strangers, supporting the view that both dimensions of utilitarianism have some probability of being a natural kind in this subgroup. These diverging results might arise because we measured utilitarian inclinations with vignettes representing concrete situations rather than with abstract propositions as in the OUS. Another factor possibly explaining divergence is that 3 of the 4 items of the Instrumental Harm OUS subscale suggest practices of militarism and political conservatism (items 2, 3 and 4: (“political oppression”, “torture” and “collateral damage”) (Kahane et al., 2017, p. 16). These items could prove specially unappealing to participants who would endorse instrumental harm for the greater good preferably in non-ideological contexts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Departamento Administrativo de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Colciencias [617, 2013];