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"Utilitarianism Moral and ethical aspects."
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Of Mice, Men, and Trolleys: Hypothetical Judgment Versus Real-Life Behavior in Trolley-Style Moral Dilemmas
Scholars have been using hypothetical dilemmas to investigate moral decision making for decades. However, whether people’s responses to these dilemmas truly reflect the decisions they would make in real life is unclear. In the current study, participants had to make the real-life decision to administer an electroshock (that they did not know was bogus) to a single mouse or allow five other mice to receive the shock. Our results indicate that responses to hypothetical dilemmas are not predictive of real-life dilemma behavior, but they are predictive of affective and cognitive aspects of the real-life decision. Furthermore, participants were twice as likely to refrain from shocking the single mouse when confronted with a hypothetical versus the real version of the dilemma. We argue that hypothetical-dilemma research, while valuable for understanding moral cognition, has little predictive value for actual behavior and that future studies should investigate actual moral behavior along with the hypothetical scenarios dominating the field.
Journal Article
The Making of an Authentic Leader’s Internalized Moral Perspective: The Role of Internalized Ethical Philosophies in the Development of Authentic Leaders’ Moral Identity
This paper explores the impact of ethical philosophies on developing an authentic leader’s internalized moral perspective. It builds on prior research on moral identity, proposing that ethical philosophies such as deontology, rule utilitarianism, and virtue can be internalized over time to form an authentic leader’s internalized moral identity. The paper argues that while virtues and altruism are discussed in the authentic leadership literature, the relevance of other ethical philosophies to authentic leadership has been largely overlooked. These ethical philosophies embedded in business settings can be internalized and become integral to the content of a leader’s moral identity rather than merely being lenses for moral reasoning. Authentic leaders’ moral identities regulate their moral motivation and actions. In addition, the paper posits that internalized ethical philosophies can be activated by triggering events or changing the domain of moral issues. Authentic leaders with highly internalized moral identities are also encouraged to be morally modest, reflecting on different ethical philosophies when facing new challenges and internalizing them as needed while staying committed to their virtue-centric moral identity. This interdisciplinary paper proposes a framework and presents theoretical propositions to further understand the role of ethical philosophies in shaping an authentic leader’s internalized moral perspective.
Journal Article
The price of our values : the economic limits of moral life
\"The economic case for self-interest at the outer limits of being morally good. Modern life is an exercise in discomfort. In the face of endless injustice, how much selfishness is permissible? How do we square suffering elsewhere with our hope to thrive at home? How does one strive for the greater good while guarding one's personal interests? The Price of Our Values argues that the answers to these questions are economic: by weighing our sense of the personal costs associated with the outer limits of our moral beliefs. These tradeoffs-the want to be good, the personal costs of being good, and the points at which people abandon goodness due to its costs-are somewhat unsettling. But as economists Augustin Landier and David Thesmar show, they are highly predictable, even justified. Our values guide us, but we are also forced to consider economic costs to settle decisions. The Price of Our Values is an economic reckoning with the universal unease of contemporary moral life. Wielding insights from the philosophical founders of the field, Landier and Thesmar provide frameworks for thinking about the place of values-justice, freedom, beauty- in the decisions of modern life. They do so in terms that seek to be consistent with both our good intentions and their limits\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Low Levels of Empathic Concern Predict Utilitarian Moral Judgment
Is it permissible to harm one to save many? Classic moral dilemmas are often defined by the conflict between a putatively rational response to maximize aggregate welfare (i.e., the utilitarian judgment) and an emotional aversion to harm (i.e., the non-utilitarian judgment). Here, we address two questions. First, what specific aspect of emotional responding is relevant for these judgments? Second, is this aspect of emotional responding selectively reduced in utilitarians or enhanced in non-utilitarians? The results reveal a key relationship between moral judgment and empathic concern in particular (i.e., feelings of warmth and compassion in response to someone in distress). Utilitarian participants showed significantly reduced empathic concern on an independent empathy measure. These findings therefore reveal diminished empathic concern in utilitarian moral judges.
Journal Article
Online Moral Conformity: how powerful is a Group of Strangers when influencing an Individual’s Moral Judgments during a video meeting?
People make moral decisions every day. When making such decisions, they may be influenced by their companions (a so-called moral conformity effect). Increasingly, people make decisions in online environments, like video meetings. In the current preregistered experiment, we studied the moral conformity effect in an online context. We applied an Asch conformity paradigm by asking participants (
N
= 120) to reply to sacrificial moral dilemmas through the online video communication tool Zoom either when sitting in a “virtual” room with strangers (confederates instructed on how to answer; experimental condition) or when sitting alone (control condition). We found that people displayed a moral conformity effect on half the dilemmas included in our study as well as in the aggregate.
Journal Article
Moral Judgments of Human vs. AI Agents in Moral Dilemmas
Artificial intelligence has quickly integrated into human society and its moral decision-making has also begun to slowly seep into our lives. The significance of moral judgment research on artificial intelligence behavior is becoming increasingly prominent. The present research aims at examining how people make moral judgments about the behavior of artificial intelligence agents in a trolley dilemma where people are usually driven by controlled cognitive processes, and in a footbridge dilemma where people are usually driven by automatic emotional responses. Through three experiments (n = 626), we found that in the trolley dilemma (Experiment 1), the agent type rather than the actual action influenced people’s moral judgments. Specifically, participants rated AI agents’ behavior as more immoral and deserving of more blame than humans’ behavior. Conversely, in the footbridge dilemma (Experiment 2), the actual action rather than the agent type influenced people’s moral judgments. Specifically, participants rated action (a utilitarian act) as less moral and permissible and more morally wrong and blameworthy than inaction (a deontological act). A mixed-design experiment provided a pattern of results consistent with Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 (Experiment 3). This suggests that in different types of moral dilemmas, people adapt different modes of moral judgment to artificial intelligence, this may be explained by that when people make moral judgments in different types of moral dilemmas, they are engaging different processing systems.
Journal Article
Small-scale utilitarianism: High acceptance of utilitarian solutions to Trolley Problems among a horticultural population in Nicaragua
Researchers often use moral dilemmas to investigate the specific factors that influence participants’ judgments of the appropriateness of different actions. A common construction of such a dilemma is the Trolley Problem, which pits an obvious utilitarian solution against a common deontological dictum to not do harm to others. Cross-cultural studies have validated the robustness of numerous contextual biases, such as judging utilitarian decisions more negatively if they require contact with other individuals (contact bias), they force others to serve as a means to an end (means bias), and if they require direct action rather than inaction (omission bias). However, such cross-cultural research is largely limited to studies of industrialized, nation-state populations. Previous research has suggested that the more intimate community relationships that characterize small-scale populations might lead to important differences, such as an absence of an omission bias. Here we contribute to this literature by investigating perceptions of Trolley Problem solutions among a Mayangna/Miskito community, a small-scale indigenous population in Nicaragua. Compared to previously sampled populations, the Mayangna/Miskito participants report higher levels of acceptance of utilitarian solutions and do not exhibit an omission bias. We also examine the justifications participants offered to explore how Mayangna/Miskito culture might influence moral judgments.
Journal Article
When You Think of and Identify Yourself as a Nurse, You Will Become More Deontological and Less Utilitarian
This study aims to examine how the activation of the role of nursee and professional identification as a nurse can influence moral judgments in terms of deontological and utilitarian inclinations. In Study 1, a priming technique was used to assess the impact of activating the nursing concept on moral reasoning. Participants were randomly assigned to either a nursing prime or neutral prime condition. By using a scrambled-sentence task, participants were prompted to think about nursing-related or neutral thoughts. Following the priming task, participants were asked to respond to 20 moral dilemmas. The process dissociation approach was employed to measure the degree of deontological and utilitarian tendencies in their moral reasoning. In Study 2, participants completed the nursing profession identification scale and the moral orientation scale before engaging in moral judgments similar to those in Study 1. The findings revealed that priming the concept of being a nursee resulted in an increase in deontological clinical inclinations while having no significant effect on utilitarian inclinations. Additionally, a positive correlation was observed between identification with the nursing profession and deontological clinical inclinations, whereas a negative correlation was found with utilitarian inclinations. Deliberation orientation acted as a complete mediator in the relationship between nursing professional identification and deontological tendencies and as a partial mediator for utilitarian tendencies.
Journal Article