TITLE:
Utilitarian Moral Judgments Are Cognitively Too Demanding
AUTHORS:
Sergio Da Silva, Raul Matsushita, Maicon De Sousa
KEYWORDS:
Cognitive Reflection, Utilitarianism, Moral Judgment
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.3 No.2,
February
4,
2016
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.