Ends versus Means: Kantians, Utilitarians, and Moral Decisions

Roland Benabou, Armin Falk and Luca Henkel

No 32073, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Choosing what is morally right can be based on the consequences (ends) resulting from the decision – the Consequentialist view – or on the conformity of the means involved with some overarching notion of duty – the Deontological view. Using a series of experiments, we investigate the overall prevalence and the consistency of consequentialist and deontological decision-making, when these two moral principles come into conflict. Our design includes a real-stakes version of the classical trolley dilemma, four novel games that induce ends-versus-means tradeoffs, and a rule-following task. These six main games are supplemented with six classical self-versus-other choice tasks, allowing us to relate consequential/deontological behavior to standard measures of prosociality. Across the six main games, we find a sizeable prevalence (20 to 44%) of nonconsequentialist choices by subjects, but no evidence of stable individual preference types across situations. In particular, trolley behavior predicts no other ends-versus-means choices. Instead, which moral principle prevails appears to be context-dependent. In contrast, we find a substantial level of consistency across self-versus-other decisions, but individuals’ degree of prosociality is unrelated to how they choose in ends-versus-means tradeoffs.

JEL-codes: C91 D01 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-upt
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Working Paper: Ends versus Means: Kantians, Utilitarians, and Moral Decisions (2024)
Working Paper: Ends versus Means: Kantians, Utilitarians, and Moral Decision (2024)
Working Paper: Ends versus Means: Kantians, Utilitarians, and Moral Decisions (2024)
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