Moral Judgments and Emotions: Exploring the Role of ‘Inevitability of death’ and ‘Instrumentality of harm’ - eScholarship

Moral Judgments and Emotions: Exploring the Role of ‘Inevitability of Death’ and ‘Instrumentality of Harm’ Evgeniya Hristova (ehristova@cogs.nbu.bg) Veselina Kadreva (vkadreva@cogs.nbu.bg) Maurice Grinberg (mgrinberg@nbu.bg) Center for Cognitive Science, Department of Cognitive Science and Psychology, New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria Abstract In the current study, strictly controlled moral dilemmas are used to study intuitions in moral judgments concerning situations in which one human life has to be sacrificed in order to save more human lives. The influence of two factors (inevitability of death and instrumentality of harm) is explored. Both of them are found to influence moral judgments. To study the emotional processing in judgments, response times and skin-conductance reactions are analyzed. It is found that responses to dilemmas involving incidental harm produce longer response times and are accompanied by higher arousal (as indexed by the skin conductance reactions). Reported results imply that when instrumentality of harm is considered, judgment is influenced by emotional reactions. Keywords: moral dilemmas, moral judgments, emotional engagement, skin conductance response Introduction Moral Dilemmas Moral judgments (the judgments of what is right and what is wrong) have been of great interest to philosophers, psychologists and other scientists for centuries. Are there universal laws that should be applied in such judgments? Are they innate? How in fact do people decide what is right and what is wrong? What is the role of reasoning and what is the role of the emotions in making such judgments? These are some of the questions that have been considered for many years and still provoke the interest of the researchers. These questions don’t have an easy answer especially when we are presented with a moral dilemma – situations in which there is a conflict between moral values, rules, rights. Philosophers study moral judgments by looking for general principles that should be followed by humans. Some philosophers (e.g. Kant, 1785/1983) propose the deontological view stating that the rightness or wrongness of an act depends on the principle that this act is representing (and not on the good or bad consequences of that act). In this view, an action could be considered moral if it could represent a universal law that should be mandatory to follow. On the other hand, the utilitarian view on morality states that actions achieving greater good and maximizing utility are the moral ones. Apart from these normative theories, psychologists are interested in the actual moral judgments made by people. To explore the judgments in moral dilemmas, very often the famous ‘Trolley problem’ (Foot, 1978) is used (e.g. Petrinovich et al., 1993; O’Neill and Petrinovich, 1998; Mikhail, 2007; Greene et al., 2001; Greene et al., 2004 ). Usually, the dilemma is presented as follows: “A runaway trolley is headed for five people who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. The only way to save them is to hit a switch that will turn the trolley onto an alternate set of tracks where it will kill one person instead of five. Is it morally appropriate to turn the trolley in order to save five people at the expense of one?” (Greene et al., 2001). Most of the participants, exposed to this dilemma in experiments, find the proposed action to be morally permissible. However, if they are presented with the ‘Footbridge dilemma’ (it describes the same situation but suggests that a bystander is pushed from a footbridge in front of the trolley in order to save the other people present) most participants find the action to be not morally permissible (Greene et al., Different theoretical explanations, emphasizing the role of several factors, have been proposed in order to interpret the behavioral dissociation. The most important ones are summarized below. Factors Affecting Moral Judgments The ‘personal vs. impersonal’ distinction is proposed as one of the factors affecting moral judgment (Greene et al., 2001; Moore et al., 2008). The idea is that when the harm is inflicted ‘up close and personal’ (as in the ‘Footbridge dilemma’) the action is seen as less permissible compared to the cases in which the harm is caused by using mediating mechanical means from a distance (as in the ‘Trolley problem’). The ‘instrumentality of harm’ is also considered a factor that could shape judgment (e.g. Borg et al., 2006; Hauser et al., 2007; Moore et al., 2008). The harm could be either inflicted intentionally as a ‘mean to an end’ (instrumental harm) or it could be a ‘side effect’ from saving more people endangered (incidental harm). It is found that the unintended incidental harm (foreseen but unintended) was judged as more permissible compared to intended instrumental harm (Hauser et al., 2007; Moore et al., 2008).