In search for an “alibi”. The role of justification in moral judgment
Andrea Manfrinati1, Enrico Rubaltelli2, Ketti Mazzocco3, Lorella Lotto2, Rino Rumiati2
1Faculty of Psychology, University of Valle d’Aosta, Aosta, Italy;
2Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, DPSS, University of
Padova, Padova, Italy;
3Department of Cognitive Sciences and Education, University of Trento, Rovereto,
Italy
Address for correspondence:
Andrea Manfrinati
Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, University of Padova Via Venezia, 8
35131, Padova (Italy) tel: 0039 (0)49 8276508
fax: 0039 (0)49 8276511 e-mail: [email protected]
Research Report of the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, DPSS, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
June 2008
2
Abstract
This study investigated how people solve moral dilemmas and aimed to show that
their answers are influenced by critical information about the life expectancy of a
person that has to be sacrificed in order to save several others individuals.
We hypothesized that people should have a different reaction and, consequently, a
“different” mental representation of an individual if they known, for example, that this
individual is attempting suicide, has a severe injury or is a terminally ill patient. The
information about the life expectation of a person could provide the decision maker
with a sort of “alibi” allowing him to deem an action as acceptable despite the fact that
he usually judges it inappropriate or immoral. In this respect, we hypothesized that
providing people with a possible justification may induce them to engage on a more
cognitive process of thinking and to overcome the emotional distaste for being the
direct cause of another person suffering. Indeed, we found that providing people with a
good justification induce them to behave more selfishly and to follow an utilitarian
criterion to evaluate whether particular actions is acceptable or not.
Keywords: Moral judgment; Moral dilemmas, Decision-making; Justification
3
What is a moral judgment? For a long time philosophers and psychologists have
endeavored to distinguish moral judgments from other kinds of judgments. However, it
is difficult to provide a formal definition that list the necessary and sufficient features
of moral judgment, therefore we will try, instead, to give a practical definition of moral
judgment that takes into account some behavioral facts about the human psychology
and especially the way people evaluate the actions of other individuals and the
consequences of these evaluations. From a practical point of view, moral judgments are
defined as broad evaluations (good vs. bad) of the actions or character of a person that
are assessed with respect to a set of virtues held to be obligatory by a culture or a
community (Haidt, 2001).
Research on moral judgment has long been dominated by the rationalist model that
draws attention to the fundamental role of moral reasoning in causing the moral
judgment. Rationalist approaches in moral psychology claim that moral knowledge and
moral judgment are achieved by the processes of reasoning and reflection (Piaget,
1932; Kohlberg, 1969). Moral emotions may sometimes be inputs to the reasoning
processes, but they are not the direct cause of moral judgments. The work of Lawrence
Kohlberg was an especially sustained attack on “irrational emotive theories”. He
developed an interviewing method that was appropriate for use with adults and with
children (Kohlberg, 1969). Kohlberg presented participants with moral and non-moral
dilemmas and he then consider how people resolved the conflicts. He found a six-level
progression of increasing sophistication in how people handled such dilemmas.
Kohlberg claims that the moral force in personality is cognitive and that affective
forces are involved in moral decisions, but affect and emotions are neither moral nor
immoral. In this respect, Kohlberg endorsed a Kantian rationalist model in which
4
emotions and affect may have a role but in which reasoning eventually makes the
decisions.
Only in recent years, thanks to the efforts of many researchers like Antonio Damasio
(1994; Koenigs, Young, Adolphs, Tranel, Cushman, Hauser & Damasio, 2007) and
Jonathan Haidt (2001), a new approach to moral judgment have been developed. This
model is intuitionist and claims that moral judgment is the result of quick, automatic
evaluations. The intuitionist approach in moral psychology states that moral intuitions
(including moral emotions) come first and directly cause moral judgments. Moral
intuition is defined as a form of cognition, but not as a form of reasoning. The core of
the intuitionist model gives moral reasoning a causal role in moral judgment but only
when reasoning involves other people. It is hypothesized that people rarely override
their initial intuitive judgments just by reasoning privately to themselves because
reasoning is rarely used to question one’s own attitudes or beliefs. Haidt (2001) claims
that there are four reasons for doubting the causality of reasoning in moral judgment:
First, there are two cognitive processes at work – reasoning and intuition – and the
reasoning has been overemphasized (Epstein, 1994). Second, reasoning is often
motivated. Third, the reasoning process constructs post hoc justifications. Fourth,
moral actions covaries with moral emotions more than it does with moral reasoning.
Therefore, the major claim of the intuitionist model is that moral judgment is caused by
quick moral intuitions and is followed, in some cases, by the slower process of moral
reasoning. The intuitionist model is not an anti-rationalist model. It is a model about the
complex and dynamic ways in which intuitions, reasoning, emotions and social
influences interact in order to yield moral judgment.
Recent experiments conducted by Joshua Greene and his colleagues using the
magnetic resonance technique (fMRI), appear to confirm the importance of the
5
emotional areas of the brain in guiding certain aspects of our moral intuitions. Greene,
Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen (2001) and Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley
& Cohen (2004) suggest that moral judgments are guided by a personal-impersonal
distinction mediated by some sort of emotional processes. The authors consider these
findings as an evidence that emotions are the driving factor behind judgments in
general, and moral judgments in particular (Haidt, 2001; Greene & Haidt, 2002). In this
perspective, and according to Haidt (2001) and Hauser (2006), we can hypothesize a
dissociation between judgment and justification for specific kinds of moral dilemmas.
Greene and collaborators consider a moral violation to be personal if it meets three
principles: First, the violation should cause serious harm. Second, this harm must occur
to a person or a set of persons. Third, the harm must not result from the deviation of an
existing threat onto a different party. Violations that fail to meet these three principles
are classified as impersonal. A classical example of an impersonal moral dilemma is
the “Trolley dilemma” (Thomson, 1986): A runaway trolley is headed for five people
who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. The only way to save them is to
hit a switch that will turn the trolley onto an alternate set of tracks where it will kill one
person instead of five. Should you hit the switch and turn the trolley in order to save
five people at the expense of one? Most people say yes. Now consider a similar
problem, named the “Footbridge dilemma” that represents a case of personal moral
dilemma: As before, a trolley threatens to kill five people. You are standing next to a
large stranger on a footbridge that spans the tracks, in between the oncoming trolley
and the five people. In this scenario, the only way to save the five people is to push this
stranger off the bridge, onto the tracks below. He will die if you do this, but his body
will stop the trolley from reaching the others. Should you save the five others by
pushing this stranger to his death? Most people say no. What makes it morally
6
acceptable to sacrifice one life to save five in the Trolley dilemma but not in the
Footbridge dilemma? Several answers have been proposed. For example, from a
Kantian point of view (Kant, 1785), the difference between these two dilemmas could
that in the Footbridge dilemma one has to literally use a human being as a means to
some independent end, whereas in the Trolley dilemma the human being,
unfortunately, just happens to be in the way. However, from a more general point of
view, is very difficult to characterize a set of consistent and readily accessible moral
principles that express people’s intuitions about which behavior is or is not appropriate
in these two dilemmas.
Some psychologists state that the psychologically most important difference
between the two dilemmas consists in the tendency to engage people’s emotions in
different ways. When people are faced with moral dilemmas that are personal in the
way Greene and collaborators has defined it, they seem driven by emotional responses
whereas moral judgments elicited in response to impersonal dilemmas seem to trigger a
more cognitive or analytical type of process. Greene et al. (2001) claim that personal
moral violations elicit negative emotional responses that induce people to consider
these violations as non-appropriate. In order to judge a moral personal dilemma as
appropriate, people should overcome this emotional response using a sort of “cognitive
control” that permits to respond in a utilitarian manner considering moral personal
violations as acceptable when they serve a greater good. In this way, to turn on the
cognitive control permits people to find a sort of justification to their actions. They
seem “justified”, for example in the Footbridge dilemma, to push the stranger off the
bridge because they are engaged in a sort of abstract reasoning that act as cognitive
regulation overcoming the emotional responses induced by these kind of dilemmas. In
other words, the cognitive control allows people to overcome their negative emotions
7
and rationalize that it is justifiable to push the stranger off the bridge if this is
instrumental to save five people. Greene et al. (2001) find that only few people
consider appropriate to push the stranger off the bridge in the footbridge dilemma
(moral personal condition), and when the behavior (e.g. pushing the stranger) is
morally “incongruent” people’s responses were significantly slower than the responses
– e.g. not pushing the stranger – that are morally congruent with people’s feelings.
Indeed, in the moral personal condition, there is a conflict between an utilitarian view
of the world arguing that morality must promote the “greater good”, and a
deontological perspective based on Kantian categorical imperative – “Act in such a
way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other,
always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end” (Kant, 1785)
– that argue that certain rights or duties must be respected, regardless of the greater
good that might otherwise be achieved.
To further understand the previous reasoning, the principle of double effect seems to
be relevant. This principle states that it might be permissible to harm an individual for a
greater good if the harm is not the necessary means to the greater good but, rather, a
foreseen side effect (Hauser, Cushman, Young, Jin & Mikhail, 2007). In the Trolley
dilemma the man on track dies as a foreseen but unintended consequence of hitting the
switch and deflecting the machine. On the contrary, in the Footbridge dilemma we are
stopping the trolley by killing a person: in this second scenario, the death of the
stranger is not the result of an unintended side effect of the way we brought the
machine to a halt. Indeed, killing the stranger is the very means by which the trolley
came to a stop. Such a point could be the reason – a sort of justification – behind the
different evaluations found in the two dilemmas. However, the central problem is to
establish how such an explanation leads to the differences found in previous studies
8
and why people sometimes feel acceptable to end the life of a person to save several
others and why in a different context they do not feel the same way. Hauser et al.
(2007) claim that subjects generally fail to provide justifications that could account for
the pattern of their judgments. As a consequence, these authors suggest a possible
dissociation between judgment and justification for certain moral dilemmas. Still there
is not conclusive evidence suggesting that people always fail in providing justifications
for their judgments or actions. Therefore, there is the chance that people may use some
critical contextual information in order to justify their behaviors and resolve a situation
that challenges their moral values. In other words, it is possible that people adopt a sort
of Machiavellian perspective, like “the end justifies the means”, when they are facing a
conflict between their moral values and the goal of saving the highest possible number
of individuals?
We created several new dilemmas comparable with those used by Greene et al.
(2001). However, these scenarios have been created accordingly with an additional
hypothesis that permits to shed light on the role of justification in the moral judgments.
For example, suppose that in the Footbridge dilemma you have the additional
information that the stranger is attempting to commit suicide (in the rest of the paper
we call this condition as “Personal Justified”). What’s the role of this critical
information? It’s possible that, in the Footbridge Justified dilemma, people has a
different mental representation of the stranger only for the reason that he attempting to
commit suicide and they perceive him as a person “on his way to die”? We
hypothesized that participants provided with critical information about the short life
expectation of a person they are asked to sacrifice will be more willing to kill him than
participants who were not provided with such information. We believe that the
information about the short life expectancy of the person that have to be sacrificed
9
should induce participants to have a readily available justification to explain their
actions to other people as well as to themselves.
10
Method
Participants and procedure. Sixty students (n = 30 females) recruited at the
University of Padova participated in this study. Their age varied from 19 to 30 years (M
= 23.90, SD = 2,65).
Material. We constructed eight different scenarios representing eight different moral
dilemmas. Many of these dilemmas are or resemble dilemmas that have been discussed
in contemporary moral philosophy (Thomson, 1986) and in a recent psychological
study on moral judgment (Greene et al., 2001; 2004). These dilemmas were rephrased
in three different conditions: “Impersonal”, “Personal” and “Personal Justified”. In the
personal condition, participants are the principal actors of the moral dilemma and are
called to judge their actions in the circumstances described in the scenarios. The
scenarios in the personal justified condition are the same as for the personal condition
with the exception that we manipulated the expectation of life of the person that has to
be sacrificed. In particular, in all scenarios, the person participants are asked to
sacrifice has a short life expectation due to either an intention to commit suicide or a
severe injury. Finally, in a different way respect to Greene et al. (2001) that claimed
that a dilemma is impersonal when it involves the deflection of an existing threat, we
created an impersonal version of each dilemma in which the principal actor is a third
person, and the participants are called to judge how acceptable are the actions of this
person. In our opinion, this manipulation permit to “depersonalize” the situation
described in the scenarios since the participants should not feel themselves involved
personally in the action of killing (or sacrifice) another individual (the eight scenarios
are reported in the Appendix).
11
The dilemmas were presented using E-prime software. Every scenario was formed
by three slides: the first and the second slide presented the particular situation described
in the dilemma. The third slide reported the action that the participants had to judge.
Participants were asked to state how acceptable or unacceptable was the action
described in each scenario using a 8-point scale, ranging from 1 = completely
inappropriate to 8 = completely appropriate.
Participants were provided with verbal instructions before the experiment and, in
order to familiarize with the 8-point scale, they underwent a few practice scenarios.
12
Results
We analyzed all the scenarios by comparing responses across the three conditions
(impersonal, personal, personal justified). A repeated measures ANOVA showed, as a
general trend, a significant differences among the three conditions, confirming our
hypothesis that the actions in the condition personal justified are considered more
acceptable compared to the other two conditions F(2,60) = 54,21; p < .01; η2 = .48, see
Figure 1).
Figure 1. Mean rating of appropriateness provided by the participants in the three conditions
(with higher values indicating a higher level of acceptability of the action).
In a second with-in subjects analysis, we tested, for each scenario, the differences
between the three conditions. We found a two-way interaction between the scenarios
and the three experimental conditions F(14,60) = 18,72; p < .01; η2 = .24 (see Figure
2).
13
Figure 2. Mean rating of appropriateness for each single scenario provided by the participants in the three conditions (with higher values indicating a higher level of acceptability of the action).
The interaction showed that, in addiction to the effect of the conditions, there is also
a difference between the scenarios. Results were different for the first two dilemmas
(Trolley and Tram) compared with the other six. In the Trolley and in Tram scenarios,
participants judged the actions in the impersonal condition as more appropriate than the
actions in the personal and the personal justified conditions. For each of these two
dilemmas we run a series of t-test confronting the experimental conditions. Results
showed that in the impersonal condition people found the action significantly more
acceptable than in the other conditions (for all comparisons: p < .01). In addition, for
each of these two dilemmas, we run another series of t-test confronting the personal
condition and the personal justified condition. Results showed, according with our
hypothesis, that in the personal justified condition people found the action significantly
more acceptable than in the personal condition (for both comparison: p < .01). On the
14
contrary, a series of t-test conducted on the remaining six scenarios supported our
hypothesis. As expected, we found a significant difference between the personal
justified and the personal conditions (p < .01 for all six scenarios), and also between the
personal justified and the impersonal conditions (p < .01 for all six scenarios).
15
Discussion
The aim of the present study was to show that moral judgments are influenced by
some form of utilitarian reasoning when individuals are provided with a reason that can
allow people to justify their judgments. In particular, participants judge the
acceptability of two versions of the personal moral dilemmas, that are identical but for
the presence/absence of the reference to the short life expectation of the person that is
going to be sacrificed.
Consistently with our expectations, participants judge the actions in the scenarios
belonging to the personal justified condition as more appropriate than the actions
described in the other two conditions (impersonal and personal). In particular,
participants rated the actions in the personal moral dilemmas as inappropriate
according with the results of Greene et al. (2001). For example, participants consider
actions like pushing a stranger off the bridge in the Footbridge dilemma as “negative
actions”. They seem to “experience” a moral dilemma between an utilitarian
explanation – 1 person die vs. 5 persons survive – and an emotional and moral
explanation – don’t kill anyone – and to resolve it by judging the action to push off the
stranger as inappropriate. However, in the Footbridge Justified dilemma the situation is
exactly the same but for the life expectation of the person that has to be sacrificed, as
people were told that the stranger is trying to commit suicide. In addition, despite this
version of the dilemma is still a personal dilemma in the way Greene et al. (2001)
define it, participants rated the action of pushing the stranger as more appropriate in
this condition compared with the regular personal condition. Therefore, the addition of
a critical information about the short life expectancy of the person that has to be killed
seem to help the participants finding a justification for their actions. As a consequence,
16
the same “negative behavior” is rated in two significantly different ways. It seems like
people can find a sort of “alibi” to explain and rationalize a behavior that they usually
rate as morally wrong.
It is noteworthy that stating that people find a justification for their action to push
the stranger off the bridge when they know that this person is trying to commit a
suicide, does not mean that they consider the life of a potential suicidal less valuable
than the life of a normal person. Instead, what we suggest is simply that the participants
consider important this kind of information when they are deciding whether to act or
not. We hypothesize that this kind information is used by people to overcome the initial
dilemma between their moral values and the goal of saving the highest possible number
of individuals. It’s possible that people have a “different” mental representation of a
human being if this human being is a potential suicide or has a severe injury. Indeed, it
is plausible that the information about the short life expectation of the persons
participants are asked to sacrifice may induce them to consider this individual as a
“simple” body, therefore reducing their affective reactions. They could think that a
potential suicide or a terminally ill patient is an individual that is “almost dead” as he
wants to kill himself or is suffering from a severe disease. In other words, people may
feel like they are not actually changing that person’s fate. As a consequence, they can
use this critical information to perform a more “cognitive” and utilitarian type of
reasoning that leads them to judge their actions more acceptable in the personal
justified condition.
For two out of eight scenarios (Trolley and Tram, see Figure 2) results are different
from those found for the other six dilemmas. It’s important to specify that these two
scenarios are different compared to the other six. Actually, they are impersonal because
we invited participants to judge the behavior of a third person, but they are impersonal
17
also in Greene et al. (2001) perspective as the protagonist has the chance to deflect an
existing threat that can hurt some people. Results for these two scenarios are similar to
those obtained by Greene and collaborators. Participants judged the action in the
impersonal condition as more appropriate compared with the personal condition. In
contrast, for the other six scenarios there are no significant differences between the
impersonal condition and the personal condition. These results are very interesting
because they confirm that an indirect action allowing to use a means to make the action
(for example, hit a switch, pull a lever, etc.) is considered more appropriate than a
direct action (for example, push a person over a bridge). On the other hand, when the
distinction between the personal and impersonal conditions is based only on who is the
actor that makes the action, results show that participants judge the action equally
acceptable regardless of who makes it. In both conditions, they judge the action of
killing a person as inappropriate. Therefore, what is really important for the participants
is the chance to readily find a justification for their actions. To sum up, when
participants have the possibility to not soil their hands using a means to make the
action, then they consider this impersonal situation as highly acceptable. Differently,
when participants are responsible for the action (or if they are called to judge the
behavior of a third person), they consider indifferent the impersonal and the personal
conditions but judge more appropriate the actions in the personal justified condition
since they are provided with tenable justification (the short life expectancy of the
person who is going to be sacrificed). Therefore, our findings go beyond those of
Greene and colleagues (2001; 2004) showing that it is possible to “help” people solve a
moral dilemma simply providing them some more details about the circumstance in
which they are required to sacrifice someone else’s life. It is worth noting that we
18
choose to manipulate the life expectancy of the person who as to be sacrificed, however
other manipulations, similar to the one used here, might work as well.
Finally, we would like to draw attention to another important characteristic of our
scenarios. Differently from the Trolley and the Tram dilemmas, the remaining six
scenarios have a distinctive characteristic: in these scenarios, when the participant has
to judge the appropriateness of his direct action, she is in a condition in which her life
is under threat. We hypothesized that the instinct of self-preservation could be
considered a further form of alibi that allows people to justify their actions and plays an
important role in the formulation of the moral judgment. Consistently, Figure 2 shows
that people tend, in the personal condition, to judge the action as more appropriate in
the scenarios where their life is endangered. Such a tendency is even greater in the
personal justified condition and this might depend on an additive effect of the actor
being endangered and the sacrificed person having a short life expectancy. Therefore,
people should feel even more willing to sacrifice a person that is attempting to commit
a suicide (or that is sick) if that could help saving several other individuals, including
the decision-maker.
In conclusion, with the present study we aimed to show that the distinction,
mediated by emotional processes, between impersonal and personal scenarios as it has
been described by Greene et al. (2001; 2004) is not sufficient to explain the complexity
of how people deal with moral judgments. There are some situations in which the
presence of additional information may generate a further cognitive process which goes
beyond the initial emotional impact caused by the moral dilemma and leads people to
perform a more cognitive and utilitarian form of judgment.
19
References
Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New
York: Putnam.
Epstein, S. (1994). Integration of the cognitive and psychodynamic unconscious.
American Psychologist, 49, 709-724.
Greene, J.D., & Haidt, J. (2002). How (and where) does moral judgment work? Trends
in Cognitive Science, 6, 517-523.
Greene, J.D., Sommerville, R.B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J.M., & Cohen, J.D. (2001).
An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293,
2105-2108.
Greene, J.D., Nystrom, L.E., Engell, A.D., Darley, J.M., & Cohen, J.D. (2004). The
neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment. Neuron, 44, 389-
400.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to
moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814-834.
Hauser, M.D. (2006). Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of
Right and Wrong. New York: Ecco/Harper Collins.
Hauser, M., Cushman, F., Young, L., Jin, K-X. & Mikhail, J. (2007). A dissociation
between moral judgments and justifications. Mind & Language, 22, 1-21.
Kant, I. (1785). Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Eng. Trans. Foundation of the
metaphysics of morals. Indianapolis. IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959.
Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M. & Damasio
A. (2007). Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgments.
Nature, 446, 908-911.
20
Kohlberg, L. (1969). Stage and sequence: The cognitive-developmental approach to
socialization. In D.A. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of socialization theory and research
(pp. 151-235). New York: Academic Press.
Piaget, J. (1932). The moral judgment of the child (M. Gabain, Trans.). New York: Free
Press, 1965.
Thomson, J.J. (1986). Rights, Restitution, and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
21
Appendix
Impersonal Moral Dilemmas:
1. Trolley
A person is walking beside a railway tracks and she see a train that quickly approaching a group of 5 railway workmen. On the another tracks there is a single railway workman. The machinist of the train hit the switch causing the death of a single workman in order to avoid the deaths of 5 people.
2. Sacrifice
During a trip, a person and his four children inadvertently set up a camp on a local clan’s sacred burial ground. The members of the clan say that this person and his family must put to death, but give him an alternative offering a human sacrifice. The person offers the life of one of his children in order to save him and the other three children.
3. Himalayas
A plane has crashed in the Himalayas and there are only three survivors. They have no food and the first village is about five walking days. One of the survivors has a broken leg and cannot move very quickly. One of the other survivors kills the injured man, eat his remains and they survive for the next five days.
4. Jeep
A jeep overturned in the desert. The three occupants of the car have no food and the first village is about three walking days. One person has a broken leg and cannot move very quickly.
22
One of the other survivors kill the injured man, eat his remains and they survive for the next three days.
5. Vaccine
There is a very dangerous epidemic. A clinical laboratory has developed two substances: a vaccine and a deadly virus. For a mistake, is impossible to distinguish the two substances and the only way to identify the vaccine is to inject it. The chief of the laboratory inject the two substances to two collaborators in order to identify the vaccine. One person will die but the chief will be able to start saving lives of the population with the vaccine.
6. Soldier
While a troop is on way back from a mission, a soldier has stepped in an enemy trap and is badly injured. The enemy will be soon on their way. The soldier implores the comrades not to leave him behind. The captain commands to leave behind the soldier, which will be killed by the enemies, in order to save the troop.
7. Lifeboat
In a cruise ship there is a fire on board and the ship has to be abandoned. The lifeboats are carrying many more people that they were designed to carry. The boat begins to fill with water and it will sink. In the boat there also some people advanced in years. A young man throws these old people overboard in order to save the lives of the remaining passengers.
8. Tram
You are at the tram stop and you see a cyclist running near the tram rail. You see also a tram without control that quickly approaching a group of five people that are crossing the street. The tram driver hit the switch and deflects the tram toward the other rail, killing the cyclist, in order to avoid the death of five people.
23
Personal Moral Dilemmas:
1. Footbridge
You are on a footbridge over the railway and you see a runaway trolley move toward five railway workmen. On the footbridge, next to you, there is a stranger. You push the stranger off the bridge in order to stop the train and saving the five persons.
2. Sacrifice
During a trip, you and your four children inadvertently set up a camp on a local clan’s sacred burial ground. The members of the clan say that you and your family must put to death, but give you an alternative offering a human sacrifice. You offer the life of one of your children in order to save yourself and the other three children.
3. Himalayas
Your plane has crashed in the Himalayas and you and other two persons are the only survivors. You have no food and the first village is about five walking days. One of the survivors has a broken leg and cannot move very quickly. You kill the injured man, eat his remains and you and the other person survive for the next five days.
4. Jeep
Your jeep has overturned in the desert. You and the other two occupants of the car have no food and the first village is about three walking days. One person has a broken leg and cannot move very quickly. You kill the injured man, eat his remains and you and the other person survive for the next three days.
24
5. Vaccine
There is a very dangerous epidemic. Your clinical laboratory has developed two substances: a vaccine and a deadly virus. For a mistake, is impossible to distinguish the two substances and the only way to identify the vaccine is to inject it. You inject the two substances to two collaborators in order to identify the vaccine. One person will die but you will be able to start saving lives of the population with the vaccine.
6. Soldier
While a troop is on way back from a mission, a soldier has stepped in an enemy trap and is badly injured. You are the Captain of this troop. The enemy will be soon on your way. The soldier implores you and the comrades not to leave him behind. You command to leave behind the soldier, which will be killed by the enemies, in order to save the troop.
7. Lifeboat
In your cruise ship there is a fire on board and the ship has to be abandoned. The lifeboats are carrying many more people that they were designed to carry. The boat begins to fill with water and it will sink. In the boat there also some people advanced in years. You throw these old people overboard in order to save the lives of the remaining passengers.
8. Tram
You are at the tram stop and there is a stranger next to you. You see a tram without control that quickly approaching a group of five people that are crossing the street. You push the stranger toward the tram in order to avoid the death of five people.
25
Personal Justified Moral Dilemmas:
1. Footbridge
You are on a footbridge over the railway and you see a runaway trolley move toward five railway workmen. On the footbridge, next to you, there is a stranger that is trying to suicide. You push the stranger that is trying to suicide off the bridge in order to stop the train and saving the five persons.
2. Sacrifice
During a trip, you and your four children, one of this seriously ill, inadvertently set up a camp on a local clan’s sacred burial ground. The members of the clan say that you and your family must put to death, but give you an alternative offering a human sacrifice. You offer the life of your seriously ill child in order to save yourself and the other three children.
3. Himalayas
Your plane has crashed in the Himalayas and you and other two persons are the only survivors. You have no food and the first village is about five walking days. One of the survivors has a broken leg and he has tried many times to suicide because he is very suffering. You kill the injured man, eat his remains and you and the other person survive for the next five days.
4. Jeep
Your jeep has overturned in the desert. You and the other two occupants of the car have no food and the first village is about three walking days. One person has a broken leg and he has tried many times to suicide because he is very suffering. You kill the injured man, eat his remains and you and the other person survive for the next three days.
26
5. Vaccine
There is a very dangerous epidemic. Your clinical laboratory has developed two substances: a vaccine and a deadly virus. For a mistake, is impossible to distinguish the two substances. There are two persons that are infected and you can inject the two substances to these two persons. You inject the two substances to these two persons in order to identify the vaccine. One person will die but you will be able to start saving lives of the population with the vaccine.
6. Soldier
While a troop is on way back from a mission, a soldier has stepped in an enemy trap and is badly injured. You are the Captain of this troop. The enemy will be soon on your way. The soldier implores you to kill him for not being tortured by the enemies. You kill the soldier, which will be tortured and killed by the enemies, in order to save the troop.
7. Lifeboat
In your cruise ship there is a fire on board and the ship has to be abandoned. The lifeboats are carrying many more people that they were designed to carry. The boat begins to fill with water and it will sink. In the boat there also some people advanced in years and that they will freeze to death standing there. You throw these old people overboard in order to save the lives of the remaining passengers.
8. Tram
You are at the tram stop and there is a stranger next to you that is trying to suicide. You see a tram without control that quickly approaching a group of five people that are crossing the street. You push the stranger toward the tram in order to avoid the death of five people.