Although most people acknowledge the moral virtue in sacrificing oneself to save others, few actually endorse self-sacrifice. Seven experiments explored the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that underlie such endorsements. Participants responded to 1 of 2 moral dilemmas in which they could save 5 members of their country only by sacrificing themselves. Over 90% of participants acknowledged th...

We introduce a new class of rules for resolving quasilinear social choice problems. These rules extend those of Green [6]. We call such rules multi-utilitarian rules. Each multi-utilitarian rule is associated with a probability measure over the set of weighted utilitarian rules, and is derived as the expectation of this probability. These rules are characterized by the axioms efficiency, transl...

Research into moral decision-making has been dominated by sacrificial dilemmas where, in order to save several lives, it is necessary to sacrifice the life of another person. It is widely assumed that these dilemmas draw a sharp contrast between utilitarian and deontological approaches to morality, and thereby enable us to study the psychological and neural basis of utilitarian judgment. Howeve...

Biodiversity plays an integral role in the livelihoods of subsistence-based forest-dwelling communities and as a consequence it is increasingly important to develop quantitative approaches that capture not only changes in taxonomic diversity, but also variation in natural resources and provisioning services. We apply a functional diversity metric originally developed for addressing questions in...

Online shopping value involving perceived utilitarian value and perceived hedonic value affect consumer behaviour intention. Studies on the effects of Web site characteristics on online group buying behavior through online shopping value are scant. Thus, this study investigates the effects of information richness and navigation of GROUPON Taiwan Web site characteristics on online group buying i...

Present study examines the effect of incidental haptic sensations on acceptance of utilitarian judgment—seeking greater happiness in exchange for a few victims—under personal and impersonal moral dilemmas. Recently, Nakamura et al. (2014) indicated that physical coldness reduced empathic concern and facilitated utilitarian judgment in personal moral dilemma. It is also shown that tactile sensat...

Individuals are increasingly using hedonic systems for utilitarian purposes. While IS research has thoroughly investigated the ability to derive hedonic pleasure from utilitarian systems, the need has arisen to research utilitarian gains from hedonic systems. This study describes the shift from hedonic to utilitarian as a spiritual adaptation, derived from Desanctis and Poole’s (1994) Adaptive ...

Our moral motivations might include a drive towards maximizing overall welfare, consistent with an ethical theory called "utilitarianism." However, people show non-utilitarian judgments in domains as diverse as healthcare decisions, income distributions, and penal laws. Rather than these being deviations from a fundamentally utilitarian psychology, we suggest that our moral judgments are genera...

Three studies tested the conditions under which people judge utilitarian harm to be authority dependent (i.e., whether its right or wrongness depends on the ruling of an authority). In Study 1, participants judged the right or wrongness of physical abuse when used as an interrogation method anticipated to yield useful information for preventing future terrorist attacks. The ruling of the milita...