Sacrificial moral dilemmas, in which opting to kill one person will save multiple others, are definitionally suboptimal: Someone dies either way. Decision-makers, then, may experience regret about these decisions. Past research distinguishes , negative feelings about a decision, from , thoughts about how a decision might have gone differently. Classic dual-process models of moral judgment suggest that affective processing drives characteristically deontological decisions to reject outcome-maximizing harm, whereas cognitive deliberation drives characteristically utilitarian decisions to endorse outcome-maximizing harm. Consistent with this model, we found that people who made or imagined making sacrificial utilitarian judgments reliably expressed relatively more affective regret and sometimes expressed relatively less cognitive regret than those who made or imagined making deontological dilemma judgments. In other words, people who endorsed causing harm to save lives generally felt more distressed about their decision, yet less inclined to change it, than people who rejected outcome-maximizing harm.
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Is It Fair to Kill One to Save Five? How Just World Beliefs Shape Sacrificial Moral Decision-making.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull
October 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK.
Article Synopsis
- The study explores how people's ethical decisions in sacrifice dilemmas (sacrificing one to save many) relate to two different ethical frameworks: deontological ethics, which opposes causing harm, and utilitarian ethics, which focuses on maximizing overall good.
- Researchers conducted four studies with a total of 1,116 participants, manipulating the perceived moral character of the sacrificial target to see how this affected ethical decision-making.
- Results indicated that participants were less likely to reject harm (consistent with utilitarianism) when the target was perceived as guilty rather than innocent, while general beliefs about justice and fair treatment influenced both ethical perspectives, though these effects were diminished when psychopathy traits were taken into account.
Deontologists are not always trusted over utilitarians: revisiting inferences of trustworthiness from moral judgments.
Sci Rep
January 2023
Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium.
Recent research has looked at how people infer the moral character of others based on how they resolve sacrificial moral dilemmas. Previous studies provide consistent evidence for the prediction that those who endorse outcome-maximizing, utilitarian judgments are disfavored in social dilemmas and are seen as less trustworthy in comparison to those who support harm-rejecting deontological judgments. However, research investigating this topic has studied a limited set of sacrificial dilemmas and did not test to what extent these effects might be moderated by specific features of the situation described in the sacrificial dilemma (for instance, whether the dilemma involves mortal or non-mortal harm).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUtilitarianism in minimal-group decision making is less common than equality-based morality, mostly harm-oriented, and rarely impartial.
Sci Rep
August 2020
Department of Developmental, Personality, and Social Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
In the study of utilitarian morality, the sacrificial dilemma paradigm has been the dominant approach for years. However, to address some of the most pressing issues in the current research literature, the present studies adopt an alternative approach by using a minimal group paradigm in which participants have to make decisions about the allocation of resources. This approach allows not only to pit utilitarianism against equality-based morality, but also to study these modes of morality for both harm and benefit, and to directly address the role of group identity affecting the (im)partial nature of 'utilitarian' (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA genetic profile of oxytocin receptor improves moral acceptability of outcome-maximizing harm in male insurance brokers.
Behav Brain Res
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Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy. Electronic address:
In recent years, conflicting findings have been reported in the scientific literature about the influence of dopaminergic, serotonergic and oxytocinergic gene variants on moral behavior. Here, we utilized a moral judgment paradigm to test the potential effects on moral choices of three polymorphisms of the Oxytocin receptor (OXTR): rs53576, rs2268498 and rs1042770. We analyzed the influence of each single polymorphism and of genetic profiles obtained by different combinations of their genotypes in a sample of male insurance brokers (n = 129), as compared to control males (n = 109).
View Article and Find Full Text PDF(How) Do You Regret Killing One to Save Five? Affective and Cognitive Regret Differ After Utilitarian and Deontological Decisions.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull
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Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA.
Sacrificial moral dilemmas, in which opting to kill one person will save multiple others, are definitionally suboptimal: Someone dies either way. Decision-makers, then, may experience regret about these decisions. Past research distinguishes , negative feelings about a decision, from , thoughts about how a decision might have gone differently.
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