Making moral tradeoffs when facing a dilemma

What is it about?

Intuitions about right and wrong clash in moral dilemmas. This paper is about how our mind makes judgments when that happens. It shows we have a cognitive system that handles dilemmas very well, producing intuitive judgments that are rational *and* coherent *and* strike a balance between conflicting moral values. We reported evidence that dilemmas activate a moral trade-off system: a cognitive system that is well designed for making trade-offs between conflicting moral values. When asked which option for resolving a dilemma is morally right, many people made compromise judgments, which strike a balance between conflicting moral values by partially satisfying both. Furthermore, their moral judgments satisfied a demanding standard of rational choice: the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preferences. Deliberative reasoning cannot explain these results, nor can a tug-of-war between emotion and reason. The results are the signature of a cognitive system that weighs competing moral considerations and chooses the solution that maximizes rightness.

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Why is it important?

Many psychologists underestimate the sophistication and rationality of human cognition. They argue that we can reason deliberatively (which is obviously true), but that evolved emotions, heuristics, or inferences pre-empt, interfere with, or bias our reasoning. A case in point involves sacrificial moral dilemmas (in which saving the most lives requires harming innocents--as in trolley problems). According to an influential theory, these moral dilemmas elicit a tug-of-war between emotions and reasoning, which prevents us from making judgments that strike a balance between conflicting moral values by partially satisfying both. But this makes no sense from an evolutionary perspective. Moral dilemmas are, and always have been, part of the human condition. Our ancestors lived in dense, interdependent social groups, and had obligations and duties to children, parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, coalitional allies and others. In many (most?) cases, it was impossible to fully satisfy all of these obligations. Sometimes the best you can do is partially satisfy several of them. This suggests that natural selection would have built computational machinery that is good at weighing various obligations, and producing compromise judgments (ones that partially satisfy two or more conflicting values). Our research provides evidence of a cognitive system that does just that, producing intuitive judgments systematically and rationally, while maintaining moral coherence (i.e., the judgments vary sensibly with changing conditions). Across situations, people consistently chose the resolution to a dilemma that was *most right*, given how their mind weighed the competing moral values. In fact, their judgments satisfied a standard of rationality from microeconomics that implies the existence of an optimizing algorithm.

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