Developmental research has revealed that caring for others is early-emerging, with infants crying in response to others’ distress and toddlers working to help others (, for a review see ). Cross-cultural research has revealed that people across a wide variety of societies are willing to share some of a pool of money with a stranger (e.g., ). Judgments in the idealized case of switching a trolley away from a larger group and towards a smaller group presumably reflect the motivations to increase others’ welfare that appear in many behavioral studies. This case, and many variations on it, have been the focus of much recent work in moral psychology, with the majority of people judging that it is morally acceptable to maximize overall welfare, switching the trolley to the track with only one person (e.g., ). Many moral decisions seem aimed at maximizing overall welfare (i.e., minimizing harms and maximizing benefits), consistent with an ethical theory called “utilitarianism.” A classic example from moral philosophy involves a runaway trolley that can be switched from a track where it will kill five people to an alternative track where it will kill only one person. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The data consist of 400 dichotomous responses (50 responses for each of 8 questions), and the percent of participants choosing each response (which can be directly translated back into raw numbers) are reported.įunding: This work was supported by ANR-11-0001-02 PSL* and ANR-10-LABX-0087 funding to the institution. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All data are within the paper. Received: JAccepted: JPublished: August 9, 2016Ĭopyright: © 2016 Sheskin, Baumard. PLoS ONE 11(8):Įditor: Jean Daunizeau, Brain and Spine Institute (ICM), FRANCE
Citation: Sheskin M, Baumard N (2016) Switching Away from Utilitarianism: The Limited Role of Utility Calculations in Moral Judgment.
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