Where do nonutilitarian moral rules come from?

Abstract

The article below may or may not contain an abstract. Since Emacs is unable to browse the internet in real-time, it cannot be determined for sure whether an abstract exists for the article. The provided work focuses on human heuristic processing concerning moral judgments and decision-making, known as moral heuristics. This approach emphasizes the comparison of judgments and decisions in laboratory experiments with normative models to identify systematic departures, referred to as biases. It explores how heuristics, such as rules that are used to approximate normative responses, may lead to biases in moral judgments. The research also examines the role of nonutilitarian moral principles, often advocated by philosophers who favor deontology over consequentialism, in shaping people’s moral judgments. The article investigates the potential sources of these principles, including the influence of early childhood experiences, economic constraints on rule-making and enforcement, and the tendency to generalize moral principles based on the structure of laws. The researchers further explore the implications of these findings for understanding and addressing suboptimal outcomes in public policy resulting from omission bias and related principles. – AI-generated abstract.