The costs of being consequentialist: Social perceptions of those who harm and help for the greater good

Everett, J. A. C., Faber, N. S., Savulescu, J., & Crockett, M. (2017, December 15).
The Cost of Being Consequentialist. Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/a2kx6

Abstract

Previous work has demonstrated that people are more likely to trust “deontological” agents who reject instrumentally harming one person to save a greater number than “consequentialist” agents who endorse such harm in pursuit of the greater good. It has been argued that these differential social perceptions of deontological vs. consequentialist agents could explain the higher prevalence of deontological moral intuitions. Yet consequentialism involves much more than decisions to endorse instrumental harm: another critical dimension is impartial beneficence, defined as the impartial maximization of the greater good, treating the well-being of every individual as equally important. In three studies (total N = 1,634), we investigated preferences for deontological vs. consequentialist social partners in both the domains of instrumental harm and impartial beneficence, and consider how such preferences vary across different types of social relationships.  Our results demonstrate consistent preferences for deontological over consequentialist agents across both domains of instrumental harm and impartial beneficence: deontological agents were viewed as more moral and trustworthy, and were actually entrusted with more money in a resource distribution task. However, preferences for deontological agents were stronger when those preferences were revealed via aversion to instrumental harm than impartial beneficence. Finally, in the domain of instrumental harm, deontological agents were uniformly preferred across a variety of social roles, but in the domain of impartial beneficence, people prefer deontologists for roles requiring direct interaction (friend, spouse, boss) but not for more distant roles with little-to-no personal interaction (political leader).

The research is here.

Are Kantians Better Social Partners? People Making Deontological Judgments are Perceived to Be More Prosocial than They Actually are

Capraro, Valerio and Sippel, Jonathan and Zhao, Bonan and others
(January 25, 2017).

Abstract

Why do people make deontological decisions, although they often lead to overall unfavorable outcomes? One account is receiving considerable attention: deontological judgments may signal commitment to prosociality and thus may increase people's chances of being selected as social partners --- which carries obvious long-term benefits. Here we test this framework by experimentally exploring whether people making deontological judgments are expected to be more prosocial than those making consequentialist judgments and whether they are actually so. We use two ways of identifying deontological choices. In a first set of three studies, we use a single moral dilemma whose consequentialist course of action requires a strong violation of Kant's practical imperative that humans should never be used solely as a mere means. In a second set of two studies, we use two moral dilemmas: one whose consequentialist course of action requires no violation of the practical imperative, and one whose consequentialist course of action requires a strong violation of the practical imperative; and we focus on people changing decision when passing from the former dilemma to the latter one, thereby revealing a strong reluctance to violate Kant's imperative. Using economic games, we take three measures of prosociality: trustworthiness, altruism, and cooperation. Our results procure converging evidence for a perception bias according to which people making deontological choices are believed to be more prosocial than those making consequentialist choices, but actually they are not so. Thus, these results provide a piece of evidence against the assumption that deontological judgments signal commitment to prosociality.

The article is here.

Morality (Book Chapter)

Jonathan Haidt and Selin Kesebir
Handbook of Social Psychology. (2010) 3:III:22.

Here is a portion of the conclusion:

 The goal of this chapter was to offer an account of what morality really is, where it came from, how it works, and why McDougall was right to urge social psychologists to make morality one of their fundamental concerns. The chapter used a simple narrative device to make its literature review more intuitively compelling: It told the history of moral psychology as a fall followed by redemption. (This is one of several narrative forms that people spontaneously use when telling the stories of their lives [McAdams, 2006]). To create the sense of a fall, the chapter began by praising the ancients and their virtue - based ethics; it praised some early sociologists and psychologists (e.g., McDougall, Freud, and Durkheim) who had “ thick ” emotional and sociological conceptions of morality; and it praised Darwin for his belief that intergroup competition contributed to the evolution of morality. The chapter then suggested that moral psychology lost these perspectives in the twentieth century as many psychologists followed philosophers and other social scientists in embracing rationalism and methodological individualism. Morality came to be studied primarily as a set of beliefs and cognitive abilities, located in the heads of individuals, which helped individuals to solve quandaries about helping and hurting other individuals. In this narrative, evolutionary theory also lost something important (while gaining much else) when it focused on morality as a set of strategies, coded into the genes of individuals, that helped individuals optimize their decisions about cooperation and defection when interacting with strangers. Both of these losses or “ narrowings ” led many theorists to think that altruistic acts performed toward strangers are the quintessence of morality.

The book chapter is here.

This chapter is an excellent summary for students or those beginning to read on moral psychology.

Is moral bioenhancement dangerous?

Nicholas Drake
J Med Ethics doi:10.1136/medethics-2015-102944

Abstract

In a recent response to Persson and Savulescu's Unfit for the Future, Nicholas Agar argues that moral bioenhancement is dangerous. His grounds for this are that normal moral judgement should be privileged because it involves a balance of moral subcapacities; moral bioenhancement, Agar argues, involves the enhancement of only particular moral subcapacities, and thus upsets the balance inherent in normal moral judgement. Mistaken moral judgements, he says, are likely to result. I argue that Agar's argument fails for two reasons. First, having strength in a particular moral subcapacity does not necessarily entail a worsening of moral judgement; it can involve strength in a particular aspect of morality. Second, normal moral judgement is not sufficiently likely to be correct to be the standard by which moral judgements are measured.

The entire article is here.

Can self-preservation be virtuous in disaster situations?

By Justin Oakley
Journal of Medical Ethics 
doi:10.1136/medethics-2013-101631

Ordinary moral rules and virtues can be found seriously inadequate in circumstances where natural catastrophes afflict large numbers of people. Satoshi Kodama provides a strong defence of the rule of tsunami-tendenko being invoked as an evacuation policy in these exceptional situations, such as that facing many people in the Tōhoku region of Japan during the severe earthquake and subsequent tsunami there on 11 March 2011.1 As Kodama explains, tsunami-tendenko tells a person in such situations to prioritise self-preservation over attempting to help others, and people living in earthquake-prone and tsunami-prone areas have learned from past experience that acting on such a rule is likely to save more lives overall than is acting on a policy of searching for and attempting to help others escape the disaster.

Tsunami-tendenko seems to be a reasonable general principle for people to follow in such exceptional circumstances, particularly where disasters strike suddenly, and the resulting chaos can make efforts to locate others not only extremely difficult but in some cases suicidal. Kodama provides plausible indirect consequentialist arguments for this principle to be used in these dramatic situations.

The entire article is here.

Should ethics be taught in schools?

By William Isdale
Practical Ethics
Originally published March 4, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Can we teach ethics?

One problem with teaching ethics in schools is that there are many competing theories about what is right and wrong. For instance, one might think that our intentions matter morally (Kantianism), or that only consequences do (consequentialism). Some regard inequality as intrinsically problematic, whilst others do not. Unlike other subjects taught in schools, ethics seems to be one in which people can’t agree on even seemingly foundational issues.

In his book Essays on Religion and Education, the Oxford philosopher R.M. Hare argued that ethics can be taught in schools, because it involves learning a language with a determinate method, “such that, if you understand what a moral question is, you must know which arguments are legitimate, in the same way in which, in mathematics, if you know what mathematics is, you know that certain arguments in that field are legitimate and certain arguments not.”

The entire blog post is here.

A Person-Centered Approach to Moral Judgment

By Eric Luis Uhlman, David Pizarro, and Daniel Diermeier
Perspectives on Psychological Science January 2015 vol. 10 no. 1 72-81

Both normative theories of ethics in philosophy and contemporary models of moral judgment in
psychology have focused almost exclusively on the permissibility of acts, in particular whether
acts should be judged based on their material outcomes (consequentialist ethics) or based on
rules, duties, and obligations (deontological ethics). However, a longstanding third perspective
on morality, virtue ethics, may offer a richer descriptive account of a wide range of lay moral
judgments. Building on this ethical tradition, we offer a person-centered account of moral
judgment, which focuses on individuals as the unit of analysis for moral evaluations rather than
on acts. Because social perceivers are fundamentally motivated to acquire information about the
moral character of others, features of an act that seem most informative of character often hold
more weight than either the consequences of the act, or whether or not a moral rule has been
broken. This approach, we argue, can account for a number of empirical findings that are either
not predicted by current theories of moral psychology, or are simply categorized as biases or
irrational quirks in the way individuals make moral judgments.

The entire article is here.

Core Values Versus Common Sense Consequentialist Views Appear Less Rooted in Morality

By Tamar Kreps and Knight Way
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
November 2014 vol. 40 no. 11 1529-1542

Abstract

When a speaker presents an opinion, an important factor in audiences’ reactions is whether the speaker seems to be basing his or her decision on ethical (as opposed to more pragmatic) concerns. We argue that, despite a consequentialist philosophical tradition that views utilitarian consequences as the basis for moral reasoning, lay perceivers think that speakers using arguments based on consequences do not construe the issue as a moral one. Five experiments show that, for both political views (including real State of the Union quotations) and organizational policies, consequentialist views are seen to express less moralization than deontological views, and even sometimes than views presented with no explicit justification. We also demonstrate that perceived moralization in turn affects speakers’ perceived commitment to the issue and authenticity. These findings shed light on lay conceptions of morality and have practical implications for people considering how to express moral opinions publicly.

The entire article is here.

Religiosity, Political Orientation, and Consequentialist Moral Thinking

By Jared Piazza and Paulo Sousa
Social Psychological and Personality Science April 2014 vol. 5 no. 3 334-342

Abstract

Three studies demonstrated that the moral judgments of religious individuals and political conservatives are highly insensitive to consequentialist (i.e., outcome-based) considerations. In Study 1, both religiosity and political conservatism predicted a resistance toward consequentialist thinking concerning a range of transgressive acts, independent of other relevant dispositional factors (e.g., disgust sensitivity). Study 2 ruled out differences in welfare sensitivity as an explanation for these findings. In Study 3, religiosity and political conservatism predicted a commitment to judging “harmless” taboo violations morally impermissible, rather than discretionary, despite the lack of negative consequences rising from the act. Furthermore, non-consequentialist thinking style was shown to mediate the relationship religiosity/conservatism had with impermissibility judgments, while intuitive thinking style did not. These data provide further evidence for the influence of religious and political commitments in motivating divergent moral judgments, while highlighting a new dispositional factor, non-consequentialist thinking style, as a mediator of these effects.

The entire article is here.

Automated ethics

When is it ethical to hand our decisions over to machines? And when is external automation a step too far?

by Tom Chatfield
Aeon Magazine
Originally published March 31, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Automation, in this context, is a force pushing old principles towards breaking point. If I can build a car that will automatically avoid killing a bus full of children, albeit at great risk to its driver’s life, should any driver be given the option of disabling this setting? And why stop there: in a world that we can increasingly automate beyond our reaction times and instinctual reasoning, should we trust ourselves even to conduct an assessment in the first place?

Beyond the philosophical friction, this last question suggests another reason why many people find the trolley disturbing: because its consequentialist resolution presents not only the possibility that an ethically superior action might be calculable via algorithm (not in itself a controversial claim) but also that the right algorithm can itself be an ethically superior entity to us.

The entire article is here.

What anscombe intended & other puzzles

By Richard Marshall
3:AM Magazine
Originally published March 10, 2012

Richard Marshall interviews Kieran Setiya

Here are some excerpts:

KS: That’s an interesting angle. I would separate two aspects or kinds of philosophical therapy: one aims to change how people live, the other treats philosophical problems not by giving answers but by exposing them as illusory or confused. I am wary of the first ambition, but I cautiously embrace the second. One of the central idea of my first book, Reasons without Rationalism is that a common understanding of the question “Why be moral?” is misconceived.

If you are asking “Why be moral?” you might be asking whether so-called “moral virtues,” such as justice and benevolence, are really virtues, whether they are really ways of being good. That is what Callicles does in Plato’s Gorgias. But it has seemed to many philosophers that the question can be interpreted in another way, as conceding that you have to be just and benevolent in order to be good, and asking “Why be good?” Why should I act as an ethically virtuous person would act, if that is not what I want to do? I argue that the second question makes no sense. It assumes that we can interpret the concept ‘should’ as denoting a standard for action distinct from the standard of ethical virtue or good character, a standard by which they can be challenged. What could this standard be? A while back, I mentioned the ambitious thought that principles of reason might derive from the nature of agency, that a criterion for how we should act might fall out of what it is to act intentionally. In Reasons without Rationalism, I show that we can make sense of “Why be good?” as a substantive question only if this ambitious project can be made to work. And I argue that it can’t. There is no standard for how one should act apart from the standard of ethical virtue or good character. In that sense, the question “Why be good?” is a target for philosophical therapy, not direct response.

(cut)

3:AM: So how do we know what it is to be good, if we can’t use moral theory? What if my model of virtue is Pol Pot, a mass murdering political tyrant? Without moral intuitions to rely on, how can you show that I am making a mistake? Your forthcoming book is called Knowing Right From Wrong. Does it answer this question?

KS: Sort of. The book attempts to show how moral knowledge is possible in the face of radical disagreement. A pivotal thought is that the standards of justification in ethics are “biased towards the truth.” There is no ethically neutral, Archimedean point from which to assess the justification of ethical beliefs. Instead, the basic measure of such beliefs is the standard of correct moral reasoning – a standard that is subject to ethical dispute. When I am confronted with someone who believes that self-interest is the only ethical virtue, it is not just that I am right and he is wrong, but that I am reasoning well about ethics and he is reasoning badly: my beliefs are warranted and his are not. This story doesn’t rest on epistemic egoism, since what justifies me is not that my beliefs are mine, but that they are based on reasoning that tracks the truth.

The entire article is here.

Moral luck: Neiladri Sinhababu

Published on Dec 2, 2013

A talk on moral luck that will examine when blame and virtue can be assigned to human actions through a number of examples. Neil Sinhababu is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. His research is mainly on ethics. His paper on romantic relationships with people from other universes, "Possible Girls", was featured in the Washington Post on Valentine's Day.

Models of Morality

By Molly J. Crockett
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging

Moral dilemmas engender conflicts between two traditions: consequentialism, which evaluates actions based on their outcomes, and deontology, which evaluates the actions themselves.  These strikingly resemble two distinct decision-making architectures: a model-based system that selects actions based on inferences about their consequences; and a model-free system that selects actions based on their reinforcement history.  Here, I consider how these systems, along with a Pavlovian system that responds reflexively to rewards and punishments, can illuminate puzzles in moral psychology.

The entire article is here.

Thanks to Molly for making this journal article public.

Kill Whitey. It’s the Right Thing to Do.

by David Dobbs
Neuron Culture
September 15, 2010

Here is an excerpt:

Researchers generally use these (trolley) scenarios to see whether people hold a) an absolutist or so-called “deontological” moral code or b) a utilitarian or “consequentialist” moral code. In an absolutist code, an act’s morality virtually never depends on context or secondary consequences. A utilitarian code allows that an act’s morality can depend on context and secondary consequences, such as whether taking one life can save two or three or a thousand.

In most studies, people start out insisting they have absolute codes. But when researchers tweak the settings, many people decide morality is relative after all: Propose, for instance, that the fat man is known to be dying, or was contemplating jumping off the bridge anyway — and the passengers are all children — and for some people, that makes it different. Or the guy is a murderer and the passengers nuns. In other scenarios the man might be slipping, and will fall and die if you don’t grab him: Do you save him … even if it means all those kids will die? By tweaking these settings, researchers can squeeze an absolutist pretty hard, but they usually find a mix of absolutists and consequentialists.

As a grad student, Pizarro liked trolleyology. Yet it struck him that these studies, in their targeting of an absolutist versus consequentialist spectrum, seemed to assume that most people would hold firm to their particular spots on that spectrum — that individuals generally held a roughly consistent moral compass. The compass needle might wobble, but it would generally point in the same direction.

Pizarro wasn’t so sure. He suspected we might be more fickle. That perhaps we act first and scramble for morality afterward, or something along those lines, and that we choose our rule set according to how well it fits our desires.

The entire blog post is here.

Morality study finds conservatives show a ‘general insensitivity to consequences’

By Eric W. Dolan
The Raw Story
Originally published Sunday, June 23, 2013

When it comes to topics like abortion or assisted suicide, there seems to be no common ground between conservatives and liberals. Why is there such a noticeable rift between the two political orientations?

Research published June in Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests that religious individuals and political conservatives think about moral issues in a fundamentally different way than liberals.

The study by Jared Piazza of the University of Pennsylvania and Paulo Sousa of Queen’s University Belfast, which included a total of 688 participants, found religious individuals and political conservatives consistently invoked deontological ethics. In other words, they judged the morality of actions based on a universal rule such as, “You should not kill.” Political liberals, on the other hand, consistently invoked consequentialist ethics, meaning they judged the morality of actions based on their positive or negative outcomes.

“Does being religious or being conservative promote a rule-based ethic or does having a rule-based ethic promote religiosity and/or conservatism?” Piazza told PsyPost. “This question is difficult to answer definitively without running a longitudinal study, since you cannot really manipulate religious orientation, or being in possession of a deontological orientation, and then look at the consequences.”

The study’s cross-sectional methodology makes it impossible to say anything more than religion and conservativism are associated with deontological ethics. However, Piazza said prior research suggested that being religious underlies the adherence to deontological ethics,

The entire story is here.

Very Bad Wizards: Trolleys, Utilitarianism, and Psychopaths

Tamler Sommers

Very Bad Wizards Podcast

A philosopher and a psychologist ponder the nature of human morality

Published on October 20, 2012

Notes

Tamler contemplates ending it all because he can't get 'Call Me Maybe' out of his head, and Dave doesn't try to talk him out of it. This is followed by a discussion about drones, psychopaths, Canadians, Elle Fanning, horrible moral dilemmas, and the biggest rivalry in Ethics: utilitarians vs. Kantians.

Episode 6 page: Trolleys, Utilitarianism and Psychopaths

The podcast is here. 

Editorial notes: Very Bad Wizards is a series of podcasts that combine psychological and philosophical perspectives on a variety of topics.   In terms of informed consent, the language is rough and the humor is..........let's just say bawdy, crude and coarse.   Truly, the podcast is not for the faint of heart.

If you like this podcast, there are a variety of Very Bad Wizards podcasts.  While their brand of humor is part of the content, the episodes that I have found as potentially good teaching tools are found in the Audio and Video resource page of this site.

And, I have Tamler's picture on this page to help boost his self-esteem.  Apparently, he feels badly that his TEDx talk has less views that Dave Pizarro's TEDx talk.  Both of their TEDx  talks are also on the Audio and Video resource page.