Full quote
‘Moral dilemmas engender conflicts between two traditions:
consequentialism, which evaluates actions based on their outcomes, and
deontology, which evaluates actions themselves.’
Greene et al’s theory
(Greene, 2015, p. 203)
Key bit of the evidence is to do with the effects of time pressure which,
apparently, make people less inclined to utilitarian responses where
there is a conflicting deontological response ...
High vs low conflict: ‘We distinguished personal dilemmas according to whether harm caused was depicted as a side-effect (low-conflict) or as intended as the means to an end (high-conflict).’
personal vs impersonal: ‘Personal dilem- mas—for instance, picture an overcrowded lifeboat in which a crew member throws someone out to keep it afloat—tend to engage emotional processing to a greater extent than dilemmas necessitating less personal agency (e.g., the crew member only needs to hit a switch to re- move the passenger).’
‘In the time-pressure condition, participants had no more than 8 s to read the question, consider it, and enter their judgment.’
Suter & Hertwig, 2011 figure 1
caption: ‘Fig. 1. Average proportion of deontological responses separately for conditions and type of moral dilemma (high- versus low-conflict personal and impersonal dilemmas) with data combined across the fast (i.e., time- pressure and self-paced-intuition) and slow conditions (no-time-pressure and self-paced-deliberation) in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. Error bars represent standard errors. Only responses to high-conflict dilemmas differed significantly between the conditions’
Rosas & Aguilar-Pardo (2020)
This is just one example: they did various time intervals
and also re-run the data just for participants who passed
all comprehension questions.
Turning to theoretical considerations ...
fast is deontological
... because being utilitarian requires computing utility—the value of possible consequences—which demands effort.
Further inspiration for this might be taken from Kurzban el at’s finding that people
are quite willing to sacrifice one Friend or Brother to save five Friends or Brothers.
This is inspired by Kurzban et al. (2012) rather than something those authors endorse.
Kurzban et al. (2012) argue that the
greater-willingness-to-kill-a-family-member-to-save-five-family-members
effect is due to people showing greater altruism towards kin (and
friends) than strangers: they are more willing to risk condemnation by
others[^attack] in order to gain aggregate benefits. If this is right,
the difference between responses to dilemmas with all kin vs with all
strangers might work as a (probably group-level) measure of tribalism.
[^attack]: people avoid breaking moral rules to avoid ‘a coordinated moral attack against themselves’ (p. 333)
More carefully, Kurzban et al. (2012) say the effect arises because:
i. there are at least two ‘decision processes’ involved, one that is sensitive
to rules like ‘do not kill’ and one that just seeks ‘to maximize utility’
with no prohibitions;
ii. it is costly for people to break the moral rules---doing so risks ‘a
coordinated moral attack against themselves’ (p. 333);
iii. it is altruistic to ignore the rules to obtain the best aggregate outcome;
iv. people are more altruistic towards kin than strangers.
[Interesting case to think through as a potential contrast to ethical decoupling:
because the different questions (would you ...? vs is it wrong to ...?) bring out different answers.
there appear to be multiple, conflicting attitudes to pushing a Brother in the footbridge case.
The ‘Is it wrong?’ question might be prompting people to think about laws,
about what others will say, or about their own feelings of guilt.]
image source: ai
caveat