Study offers insight into how people judge right from wrong

New research published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE highlights how people decide whether their behavior is moral or immoral. The results could serve as a framework to inform the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies.

"The issue is the intuitive moral judgment, which is the immediate decision to determine whether something is good or bad, moral or immoral," says Veljko Dubljević, principal author of the study and researcher in neuroethics at the North. Carolina State University. cognitive neuroscience of ethics.

"There have been many attempts to understand how people make intuitive moral judgments, but they all have important flaws.In 2014, we proposed a model of moral judgment, called the Agent Deed Consequence (ADC) model – and we now have the first experimental test, results that empirically corroborate the ADC model in realistic situations that are both trivial and dramatic.

"This work is important because it provides a framework that can be used to help us determine when the ends can justify the means or not," said Dubljević. "This has implications for clinical assessments, such as recognition of deficits in psychopathy, and technological applications, such as AI programming."

Moral judgment is a delicate subject. For example, most people would agree that lying is immoral. However, most people would also agree that lying to the Nazis on the location of Jewish families would be moral.

To solve this problem, the ADC model postulates that people take into account three factors when they issue a moral judgment: the agent, which is the character or intent of the person doing something; the act, or what is done; and the consequence, or the result that results from the act.

"This approach allows us to explain not only the variability of the moral status of the lie, but also the other side of the coin: telling the truth can be immoral if done maliciously and if it is detrimental, "said Dubljević.

To test this complexity and the model, the researchers developed a series of logical scenarios, realistic and easy to understand by laymen and professional philosophers. All scenarios were evaluated by a group of 141 professional philosophers trained in ethics.

In one part of the study, a sample of 528 US participants also assessed different scenarios in which the stakes were consistently low. This means that the possible results were not terrible.

In a second part of the study, 786 participants assessed more drastic scenarios, including situations that could result in serious injury or death.

In the first part, when the stakes were lower, the nature of the act was the most determining factor in determining whether an action was moral. Whether the agent lies or tells the truth mattered the most, rather than whether the result was bad or good. But when the stakes were high, the nature of the consequences was the most important factor. The results also show that in case of a good result (survival of the passengers of a plane), the difference between a good or a bad action, although relevant for the moral evaluation, was less important.

"For example, the possibility of saving many lives seems to justify less than salty acts, such as the use of violence, or motivations for action, such as greed, under certain conditions," he said. Dubljević.

"The results of the study showed that philosophers and the general public formed moral judgments in the same way.This indicates that the structure of moral intuition is the same, that one is or not trained in ethics, "says Dubljević. "In other words, everyone takes these moral judgments in the same way."

While the ADC model helps us understand how we formulate judgments about what is good or bad, it can have applications other than informing debates about moral psychology and ethics.

"There are areas, such as AI and autonomous cars, where we have to integrate decision-making on what constitutes moral behavior," Dubljević said. "Frames such as the ADC model can be used as the foundation of the cognitive architecture we build for these technologies, and that's what I'm currently working on."

The paper, "Deciphering Moral Intuition: How Agents, Acts, and Consequences Influence Moral Judgment," is published in the open access journal PLOS ONE.

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More information:
Veljko Dubljević et al. Decipher Moral Intuition: How Agents, Acts and Consequences Influence Moral Judgment PLOS ONE (2018). DOI: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0204631