The influence of war on moral judgments about harm

Abstract

How does war influence moral judgments about harm? While the general rule is "thou shalt not kill," war appears to provide an exception to the moral prohibition on intentional harm. In three studies (n = 263, n = 557, n = 793), we quantify the difference in moral judgments across peace and war contexts, and explore two possible explanations for the difference. The findings demonstrate that third-party observers judge a trade-off of one life for five as more morally acceptable in war than in peace, especially if the one person is from an outgroup of the person making the trade-off. In addition, the robust difference in moral judgments across "switch" and "footbridge" trolley problems is attenuated in war compared to in peace. The present studies have implications for moral psychology researchers who use war-based scenarios to study broader cognitive or affective processes. If the war context changes judgments of moral scenarios by triggering groupbased reasoning or altering the perceived structure of the moral event, using such scenarios to make decontextualized claims about moral judgment may not be warranted.Killing is wrong; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. (Voltaire) 1 Although we generally frame this article as being specifically about war compared to peace, this is partly an incidental result of the fact that the vast majority of moral psychology research is set in a neutral ("peace") context, and this body of research forms a natural comparison, or baseline, for the present study. Another way to view the present article, however, is simply as a comparison between two different contexts; in which case the question of whether war or peace is the "default" may depend on your optimism or pessimism about human nature.

The principle of discrimination: Investigating perceptions of soldiers

“…Another related, possible explanation for the discrepancy between our results and those of earlier work is that participants in the Benbaji et al study were imagining themselves as citizens of the same country as the soldiers and civilians; in the present study, participants were from a third, uninvolved country. Future studies could directly manipulate both the involvement of the participants’ (hypothetical) country and the participants’ role—as either observers or agents of the moral action—and thus further explore these possibilities (see also Watkins & Laham, 2018).…”

“…Moral psychology research provides a great deal of insight into the moral psychology of everyday life (Hofmann, Wisneski, Brandt, & Skitka, 2014), and has mapped out broad domains of moral value and basic principles of moral judgment grounded in religious texts (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009) and legal documents (Mikhail, 2007) from around the world. However, some researchers have also highlighted the context sensitivity of moral judgment (Carnes, Lickel, & Janoff-Bulman, 2015; Simpson, Laham, & Fiske, 2016) and in particular, the potential contrast between the morality of war and the morality of peace (e.g., Fiske & Rai, 2014; Giner-Sorolla, Leidner, & Castano, 2012; Watkins & Laham, 2018). In particular, Fiske and Rai (2014) suggest that the moral matrix of war is governed by a different set of relationships than is our everyday moral matrix.…”

The Morality of War: A Review and Research Agenda

“…And, they perceive soldiers as more dangerous, cold, and brave (Watkins & Laham, 2018). Further, they make divergent judgments of the same actions by soldiers on either side of a (just versus unjust) war (Watkins & Goodwin, 2019), and are more accepting of other people's parochial moral actions in war (Watkins & Laham, 2019). Since moral disengagement theory and similar lines of research focus on processes that are triggered by a (potential) conflict between actions and moral standards, they would have to explain whence this conflict is arising for these external, uninvolved, observers.…”

“…Moral judgments may, for example, depend on the relationships between the people involved in the scenario (e.g., family vs. strangers, Shaw, DeScioli, Barakzai, & Kurzban, 2017; Simpson, Laham, & Fiske, 2016) or the social context (e.g., intimates vs. task groups, Carnes, Lickel, & Janoff-Bulman, 2015). Watkins and Laham (2019) specifically compared moral judgments in war and peace contexts (using trolley problem scenarios) and found that people were overall more likely to accept a sacrifice of one life for many in war compared with in peace. Thus, although the use of a wide range of scenarios in the interest of generalizability might be justifiable or even desirable for some research programs, this approach will tend to obscure potential differences between war and everyday contexts.…”

“…Thus, these processes might be candidates for context-invariant principles. On the other hand, Watkins and Laham (2019) used both footbridge and switch versions of the trolley problems in their studies and found that the usually robust difference in judgments between these two versions was significantly attenuated in a war context compared with in a peace context. Crucially, we cannot know which principles and processes will vary and which will not until we have a better grasp of the morality of war as distinct from the morality of peace.…”