Cognitive Science Seminar: What we would (but shouldn’t) do for those we love: Universalism and partiality in “punish or protect” dilemmas

Laura Soter, U-M Department of Philosophy, will give a talk titled "What we would (but shouldn’t) do for those we love: Universalism and partiality in 'punish or protect' dilemmas."

ABSTRACT
After a long history of focusing primarily on judgments about anonymous strangers, moral psychologists have increasingly begun to study how social relationships influence people’s moral judgments. Weidman et al. (2020), for instance, found that in “punish or protect” dilemmas, people are more likely to say they would lie to protect a close other (vs. a distant other) who commits a crime, particularly when the transgression is severe. But do people believe it is morally right to behave this way? On the one hand, impartiality and universalism are key tenets in all three major philosophical ethical theories. On the other, there are philosophers who argue in favor of moral partiality, and there is increasing empirical evidence that social relationships matter for moral evaluations. In the context of Weidman et al.’s “punish or protect” dilemmas, these considerations deliver two competing hypotheses: either people think it is right to preferentially protect close others, suggesting that people believe moral norms are importantly sensitive to context; or people think they should treat close and distant others equally, revealing an inconsistency between judgments of what is right and how they would behave in the context of close relationships. I will present a series of studies that adjudicate between these hypotheses by exploring the relationship between what people think they would and should do in “punish or protect” dilemmas.