Recent work shows an important asymmetry in lay intuitions about moral dilemmas. Most people think it is permissible to divert a train so that it will kill one innocent person instead of five, but most people think that it is not permissible to push a stranger in front of a train to save five innocents. We argue that recent emotion-based explanations of this asymmetry have neglected the contribution that rules make to reasoning about moral dilemmas. In two experiments, we find that participants show a parallel asymmetry about versions of the dilemmas that have minimized emotional force. In a third experiment, we find that people distinguish between whether an action violates a moral rule and whether it is, all things considered, wrong. We propose that judgments of whether an action is wrong, all things considered, implicate a complex set of psychological processes, including representations of rules, emotional responses, and assessments of costs and benefits. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
CITATION STYLE
Nichols, S., & Mallon, R. (2006). Moral dilemmas and moral rules. Cognition, 100(3), 530–542. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2005.07.005
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.