Utilitarian Moral Judgments Are Cognitively Too Demanding

Sergio Da Silva, Raul Matsushita and Maicon De Sousa

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We evaluate utilitarian judgments under the dual-system approach of the mind. In the study, participants respond to a cognitive reflection test and five (sacrificial and greater good) dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. There is judgment reversal across the dilemmas, a result that casts doubt in considering utilitarianism as a stable, ethical standard to evaluate the quality of moral judgments. In all the dilemmas, participants find the utilitarian judgment too demanding in terms of cognitive currency because it requires non-automatic, deliberative thinking. In turn, their moral intuitions related to the automatic mind are frame dependent, and thus can be either utilitarian or non-utilitarian. This suggests that automatic moral judgments are about descriptions, not about substance.

Keywords: Cognitive Reflection; Utilitarianism; Moral Judgments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hpe, nep-neu and nep-upt
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Published in Open Access Library Journal 2.3(2016): pp. 1-9

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:69387

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