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...

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...

Standard epistemology takes it for granted that there is a special kind of value: epistemic value. This claim does not seem to sit well with act utilitarianism, however, since it holds that only welfare is of real value. I first develop a particularly utilitarian sense of “epistemic value”, according to which it is closely analogous to the nature of financial value. I then demonstrate the promi...

A substantial body of evidence indicates that utilitarian judgments (favoring the greater good) made in response to difficult moral dilemmas are preferentially supported by controlled, reflective processes, whereas deontological judgments (favoring rights/duties) in such cases are preferentially supported by automatic, intuitive processes. A recent neuroimaging study by Kahane et al. challenges...

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, omi...

Despite the widespread adoption of smartphone applications, empirical research that examines the user acceptance on different application types is still scare. This paper empirically compares the effects of perceived enjoyment and perceived risk on hedonic and utilitarian smartphone applications. Our analyses show that perceived enjoyment is a stronger determinant of intention to use a hedonic ...