It's personal: The effect of personal value on utilitarian moral judgments

Abstract

We investigated whether the personal importance of objects influences utilitarian decision-making in which damaging property is necessary to produce an overall positive outcome. In Experiment 1, participants judged saving five objects by destroying a sixth object to be less acceptable when the action required destroying the sixth object directly (rather than as a side-effect) and the objects were personally important (rather than unimportant). In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that utilitarian judgments were not influenced by the objectsâ[euro](TM) monetary worth. Together these findings suggest that personal importance underlies peopleâ[euro](TM)s sensitivity to damaging property as a means for utilitarian gains.