Utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people? Harming animals and humans for the greater good

Abstract

Most people hold that it is wrong to sacrifice some humans to save a greater number of humans. Do people also think that it is wrong to sacrifice some animals to save a greater number of animals, or do they answer such questions about harm to animals by engaging in a utilitarian cost-benefit calculation? Across 10 studies (N = 4,662), using hypothetical and real-life sacrificial moral dilemmas, we found that participants considered it more permissible to harm a few animals to save a greater number of animals than to harm a few humans to save a greater number of humans. This was explained by a reduced general aversion to harm animals compared to humans, which was partly driven by participants perceiving animals to suffer less and to have lower cognitive capacity than humans. However, the effect persisted even in cases where animals were described as having greater suffering capacity and greater cognitive capacity than some humans, and even when participants felt more socially connected to animals than to humans. The reduced aversion to harming animals was thus also partly due to speciesism—the tendency to ascribe lower moral value to animals due to their species-membership alone. In sum, our studies show that deontological constraints against instrumental harm are not absolute but get weaker the less people morally value the respective entity. These constraints are strongest for humans, followed by dogs, chimpanzees, pigs, and finally inanimate objects.

Trust is good, control is better: The role of trust and personal control in response to threat

“…We focused on moral risk to increase the salience of social trust, given that individuals draw especially on integrity and benevolence attributions relative to ability attributions in moral contexts (Earle et al, 2010;Wojciszke et al, 1998). Specifically, we employed the domain of animal production for meat consumption, which is a moralized topic (Feinberg et al, 2019;Hartmann & Siegrist, 2020) that involves moral uncertainty (MacAskill et al, 2020), such as in evaluating the moral status of farmed animals and their suffering (Caviola et al, 2019(Caviola et al, , 2020Weathers et al, 2020). In particular, individuals can feel exposed to moral risks when endorsing meat consumption and accepting the possibility of animal suffering in meat production (Bastian et al, 2012;Bastian & Loughnan, 2016;Hartmann & Siegrist, 2020).…”

Sequential decision-making impacts moral judgment: How iterative dilemmas can expand our perspective on sacrificial harm

“…Even if participants are tempted by both options, eventually, their judgment settles wholly on one or 3 It could be noted that many of the dilemmas we studied involved making decisions about harming animals. Prior research (Caviola et al, 2021) has established that people tend to be more utilitarian when making decisions involving animals. While some of our results might be biased in this regard, the conclusions we reach are not related to the specific level of utilitarian preference people display.…”

How scientists can optimise their impact on pressing societal problems: Commentary on Chater and Loewenstein (2022)’s argument for research on systemic change

“…Accordingly, cause prioritisation research involves a variety of methods, including descriptive accounts of how individuals prioritise causes (Berman et al, 2018;Caviola et al, 2020;Lieder et al, 2022;Weathers et al, 2020), collective judgments and forecasts of impactful research topics (Lieder et al, 2021), and cost-effectiveness analysis and philosophical arguments (e.g., Global Priorities Institute, 2022; Nielsen et al, 2021;Ord, 2013;Open Philanthropy, 2022). Notably, Chater and Loewenstein (2022) contribute to prioritisation research by arguing that, all else being equal, s-frame solutions are neglected by behavioural scientists despite their potential scalability and tractability.…”