A Subjective Utilitarian Theory of Moral Judgment

Current theories hypothesize that moral judgments are difficult because rational and emotional decision processes compete. We present a fundamentally different theory of moral judgment: the Subjective Utilitarian Theory of moral judgment. The Subjective Utilitarian Theory posits that people try to i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. General 2016-10, Vol.145 (10), p.1359-1381
Main Authors: Cohen, Dale J, Ahn, Minwoo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Choice Behavior
Decision Making
Dual Process Models
Emotions
Ethical Theory
Experiments
Human
Humans
Judgment
Judgment - physiology
Morality
Morals
Psychology
Reaction Time
Signal Detection (Perception)
Social Behavior
Theories
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Summary:Current theories hypothesize that moral judgments are difficult because rational and emotional decision processes compete. We present a fundamentally different theory of moral judgment: the Subjective Utilitarian Theory of moral judgment. The Subjective Utilitarian Theory posits that people try to identify and save the competing item with the greatest "personal value." Moral judgments become difficult only when the competing items have similar personal values. In Experiment 1, we estimate the personal values of 104 items. In Experiments 2-5, we show that the distributional overlaps of the estimated personal values account for over 90% of the variance in reaction times (RTs) and response choices in a moral judgment task. Our model fundamentally restructures our understanding of moral judgments from a competition between decision processes to a competition between similarly valued items.
ISSN:0096-3445
1939-2222
DOI:10.1037/xge0000210