The Continuity of Utilitarianism: Disposition, Behavior, And Harm Avoidance

To understand a person’s moral judgment, one could measure their behaviors or their dispositions toward behaving when faced with a moral dilemma. We hypothesized that moral dispositions would be predictive of moral behavior. Specifically, we measured individuals’ utilitarian moral disposition toward instrumental harm and impartial beneficence together to model how well disposition predicted harm avoidance on a novel behavioral task that framed a spatial decision as a moral dilemma. We found that utilitarian disposition alone does not predict harm-avoidant moral behavior, but it interacts with the effect of cost (i.e., cues to harmful losses associated with an action decision outcome) and this interaction remains significant when considering cognitive factors related to decision-making style.