Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 108, Issue 1, July 2008, Pages 281-289
Cognition

Brief article
Moral appraisals affect doing/allowing judgments

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.02.005Get rights and content

Abstract

An extensive body of research suggests that the distinction between doing and allowing plays a critical role in shaping moral appraisals. Here, we report evidence from a pair of experiments suggesting that the converse is also true: moral appraisals affect doing/allowing judgments. Specifically, morally bad behavior is more likely to be construed as actively ‘doing’ than as passively ‘allowing’. This finding adds to a growing list of folk concepts influenced by moral appraisal, including causation and intentional action. We therefore suggest that the present finding favors the view that moral appraisal plays a pervasive role in shaping diverse cognitive representations across multiple domains.

Introduction

It is widely agreed that there is an important relationship between people’s moral judgments and their judgments about causation and intention, but there remains considerable uncertainty about precisely how that relationship works. The traditional view was that people first make judgments about causation and intention and then use those judgments as input to the process of moral appraisal (Shaver, 1985, Weiner, 1995). But recent research indicates a more complex relationship (for review, see Alicke, 2000, Knobe, 2006). Specifically, it appears that there is also an effect in the opposite direction: people’s moral appraisals can actually influence judgments of causation and intention.

Much of this recent research has focused on the surprising ways in which people’s moral appraisals can affect their intuitions as to whether a given behavior was performed intentionally or unintentionally (Knobe, 2006, Leslie et al., 2006, Nadelhoffer, in press, Young et al., 2006). Many different theories have been offered to explain this effect, but for present purposes, we can distinguish two basic approaches. Some researchers hold that the effect is due to a special property of the attribution of intentional action in particular (Machery, in press, McCann, 2005, Meeks, 2004, Nichols and Ulatowski, in press), while others suggest that the effect reflects some more general phenomenon, which should apply to the attribution of other concepts as well (Alicke, 2000, Cushman, in preparation, Knobe, 2006). On the former view we would be surprised to discover an effect of moral appraisal in new and different cognitive domains, whereas on the latter view this is precisely what we would expect.

Our aim is to contribute to this debate by examining the influence of moral considerations on a very different aspect of cognition: the folk-conceptual distinction between doing and allowing (Bennett, 1998, Talmy, 1988). In ordinary English, this distinction is marked by the use of phrases like ‘breaking’ vs. ‘allowing to break,’ ‘raising’ vs. ‘allowing to rise’ and (most famously) ‘killing’ vs. ‘allowing to die.’ This conceptual distinction is sometimes held to be morally relevant. Hence, the American Medical Association holds that it is sometimes morally acceptable for doctors to let their patients die but that it is never acceptable for doctors to kill their patients (Rachels, 1975), and evidence from numerous studies suggests that ordinary folk judge doing harm much more immoral than allowing harm to occur (e.g., Baron and Ritov, 2004, Spranca et al., 1991).

Paralleling work on the concepts of intentional action and causation, what we want to know now is whether the causal arrow also goes in the other direction. That is, we want to know whether people’s moral appraisals can influence their judgments as to whether a given act counts as ‘doing’ or ‘allowing.’ Such an effect would provide additional evidence that there is a quite general phenomenon whereby moral appraisals influence various other aspects of human cognition.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

Experiment 1 tested whether people are more likely to view morally bad actions that result in death as actively ending a life, as opposed to passively allowing a life to end. Subjects read about a doctor who removed life support from an anonymous, unconscious and terminally ill patient. In the ‘morally bad’ version of the case, the doctor ended the patient’s life as a matter of convenience, while in the ‘morally ambiguous’ version, the doctor ended the patient’s life in order to preserve the

Experiment 2

In the second experiment, subjects were presented with a single scenario describing a pregnant woman, Sarah, who discovers that her fetus has a vitamin deficiency and deliberately abstains from eating foods with the vitamins necessary to sustain the pregnancy. Attitudes regarding abortion were predicted to influence subjects’ construal of Sarah’s behavior as actively causing or passively allowing the death of her fetus. Additionally, Experiment 2 probed whether attitudes towards abortion

General discussion

The present studies suggest that people’s moral appraisals affect their application of the doing/allowing distinction. This effect was consistent across two different methodologies, one experimental and the other correlational. Moreover, it arose both for the use of terms with an inherent moral connotation (“made/allowed the fetus to die”) and for terms without an inherent moral connotation (“decreased/allowed the vitamins to decrease”).

This finding contributes to a broader debate about the

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