Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many actions have both an intended primary effect and unin-tended, but foreseen side effects. In two experiments we inves-tigated how people morally evaluate such situations. While anegative side effect was held constant across conditions in Ex-periment 1, we varied features of the positive primary effect.We found that judgments of moral justification of actions weresensitive to the numerical ratios of helped versus harmed enti-ties as well as to the kind of state change that was induced byan agent’s action (saving entities from harm versus improvingtheir status quo). Judgments of moral responsibility for sideeffects were only sensitive to the latter manipulation. In Ex-periment 2, we found initial support for a subjective utilitarianexplanation of the moral justification judgments.