Consequences, norms, and inaction: A comment

Gawronski, Armstrong, Conway, Friesdorf & Hütter (2017, GACFH) presented a model of choices in utilitarian moral dilemmas, those in which following a moral principle (the deontological response) leads to worse consequences than violating the principle (the utilitarian response). In standard utilitarian dilemmas, the utilitarian option usually involves action, and the deontological response, omission. GACFH’s proposed CNI model holds that deontological responses in such dilemmas arise in three different ways, only the first of which reflects deontological thinking: the activity of a psychological process leading to a deontological choice, the inactivity of a different process leading to a utilitarian choice, or a bias toward inaction. GACFH attempt to separate these three processes by presenting new dilemmas in which action and omission are switched, such that action reflects a deontological choice and omission reflects a utilitarian choice. They also present dilemmas in which these two normally opposing processes lead to the same choice. They conclude that utilitarian and deontological responses are indeed separable and independent, and that this has been obscured in past research which has treated them as naturally opposed to one another. We argue that: 1., a bias toward harmful inaction is best understood as an explanation of deontological responding rather than as an alternative explanation; 2., standard utilitarian dilemmas are designed to assess the relative strength of deontological and utilitarian arguments, and the only ways in which a subject could fail to show either response tendency is through being inattentive, reactive, or antisocial; 3., the CNI model and its implementation do not do a good job of answering the empirical question about how a bias toward inaction should be explained; and, 4., previous research has in fact shed considerable light on this empirical question.