Utilitarian Moral Judgment Exclusively Coheres with Inference from Is to Ought.

ABSTRACT: Faced with moral choice, people either judge according to pre-existing obligations (deontological judgment), or by taking into account the consequences of their actions (utilitarian judgment). We propose that the latter coheres with a more general cognitive mechanism - deontic introduction, the tendency to infer normative ('deontic') conclusions from descriptive premises (is-ought inference). Participants were presented with vignettes that allowed either deontological or utilitarian choice, and asked to draw a range of deontic conclusions, as well as judge the overall moral rightness of each choice separately. We predicted and found a selective defeasibility pattern, in which manipulations that suppressed deontic introduction also suppressed utilitarian moral ju

SUBMITTER: Elqayam S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5480028 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature