Individual attitudes towards moral costs and benefits drive responses to moral dilemmas

We review some processing assumptions that underlie the currently used measures of moral judgement with moral dilemmas, contrasting them with the overlooked possibility that the primary mechanism consists in assessing a net balance of the costs versus benefits of the sacrificial action. Different dilemmas scenarios present different net balances of cost versus benefits, and participants usually change between them from disapproval to approval motivated by what appears to be a larger positive balance of moral benefits. The thresholds for such change are personal and vary. For the instrument to reliably estimate the individual differences in approval thresholds, there can be no disagreement on the facts affecting the balances and the ranking order of the items. We designed an instrument targeting three different balances with five indicators each and ran an exploratory factor analysis to prove that the different balances operate cleanly as separate factors. The expected three-factor solution and a stable ranking of the balance points were obtained across three samples from three different continents in three languages, suggesting the activation of cross-culturally stable cognitive processes. The strength ratio of utilitarian (U) to deontological (D) sensitivity was calculated for each participant and corrected using the scores of a balance-point with no net benefits. This instrument overcomes validation difficulties burdening the existing measures and offers good prospects for further development.