• Media type: E-Book
  • Title: Ends versus means : Kantians, utilitarians, and moral decisions
  • Contributor: Bénabou, Roland [Author]; Falk, Armin [Author]; Henkel, Luca [Author]
  • Published: [Bonn]: ECONtribute, January 2024
  • Published in: ECONtribute discussion paper ; 275
  • Issue: This version: January 15, 2024
  • Extent: 1 Online-Ressource (circa 77 Seiten); Illustrationen
  • Language: English
  • Identifier:
  • Keywords: morality ; deontological ; consequentialist ; Kantian ; ends-versus-means ; trolley dilemma ; prosocial ; altruism ; social preferences ; Graue Literatur
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: Choosing what is morally right can be based on the consequences (ends) resulting from the decision - the Consequentialist view - or on the conformity of the means involved with some overarching notion of duty - the Deontological view. Using a series of experiments, we investigate the overall prevalence and the consistency of consequentialist and deontological decision-making, when these two moral principles come into conflict. Our design includes a real-stakes version of the classical trolley dilemma, four novel games that induce ends-versus-means tradeoffs, and a rule-following task. These six main games are supplemented with six classical self-versus-other choice tasks, allowing us to relate consequential/deontological behavior to standard measures of prosociality. Across the six main games, we find a sizeable prevalence (20 to 44%) of nonconsequentialist choices by subjects, but no evidence of stable individual preference types across situations. In particular, trolley behavior predicts no other ends-versus-means choices. Instead, which moral principle prevails appears to be context-dependent. In contrast, we find a substantial level of consistency across self-versus-other decisions, but individuals' degree of prosociality is unrelated to how they choose in ends-versus-means tradeoffs.
  • Access State: Open Access