Accounting for Some of the Flexibility of Moral Value-Driven Judgment

An influential account of moral choice suggests that one class of moral values—protected values (PVs)—rules like “do no harm” motivate a kind of rigidity in moral cognition: PV-driven choices are sensitive to the difference between doing and allowing harm, but are relatively less sensitive to the amount of harm imposed (Baron & Spranca, 1997). Related work on people’s reasoning about moral dilemmas suggests a kind of flexibility—moral judgment is influenced by many factors. Participants in the current studies evaluated governmental administrators’ decisions to knowingly do harm to a resource to mitigate greater harm or to allow the greater harm to happen. When evaluated in isolation, approval for choices to do harm were interactively shaped by PVs and participants’ tendency to rely on intuition (rather than deliberative thinking). When both choices were evaluated simultaneously, total harm—but not the do/allow distinction— influenced rated approval. These results suggest PV-driven judgment is more flexible than previously supposed and are broadly consistent with an “Affect-Backed Normative Theory” (Nichols, 2002) account of moral judgment.