Throwing a bomb on a person versus throwing a person on a bomb: intervention myopia in moral intuitions

Abstract

Most people consider it morally acceptable to redirect a trolley that is about to kill five people to a track where the trolley would kill only one person. In this situation, people seem to follow the guidelines of utilitarianism by preferring to minimize the number ofvictims. However, most people would not consider it moral to have a visitor in a hospital killed to save the lives offive patients who were otherwise going to die. We conducted two experiments in which we pinpointed a novel factor behind these conflicting intuitions. We show that moral intuitions are influenced by the locus ofthe intervention in the underlying causal model. In moral dilemmas, judgments conforming to the prescriptions ofutilitarianism are more likely when the intervention influences the path ofthe agent ofharm (e.g., the trolley) than when the intervention influences the path of the potential patient (i.e., victim).