Skip to content

Is Utilitarianism the Best Framework for Evaluating Lay Moral Judgments?

Is Utilitarianism the Best Framework for Evaluating Lay Moral Judgments? published on

Evidence that individuals who demonstrate utilitarian preferences to moral dilemmas show higher measures of psychopathy and Machiavellianism and life-meaninglessness.

Studies show that the vast majority of people who respond to Thomson’s famous Footbridge dilemma would not choose the utilitarian option (of pushing a large man off the track to stop a train from running over five other people). But what about the approximately 10 percent of people who do favor the utilitarian option—what sort of people are they? To find out, Bartels and Pizarro recruited over 200 undergraduate students and had them respond to several sacrificial moral dilemmas and also answer a battery of questions designed to measure some of their psychological characteristics. Participants were asked to express their levels of agreement/disagreement to statements such as “I like to see fist-fights’’ (psychopathy), “When you really think about it, life is not worth the effort of getting up in the morning’’ (no Meaning), and ‘‘The best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear’’ (Machiavellianism). The researchers found that participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions to the sacrificial moral dilemmas had higher scores on measures of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and life-meaninglessness. These results do not exactly show that utilitarianism is a flawed ethical theory, but they do suggest that there are two types of people attracted to utilitarian thinking: rationalists (i.e. those who favor rational deliberation in ethical decision-making) and psychopaths (i.e. those with a muted aversion to causing a person’s death).

Original Source:
Daniel M Bartels, David A. Pizarro, The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemma, Cognition, October 2011.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027711001351
http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mcgrawp/PDF/BartelsPizarro.2011.pdf