Do you offer any recommendations for communicating utilitarian ideas based on Everett’s research or someone else’s?
For example, in Everett’s 2016 paper the following is said:
“When communicating that a consequentialist judgment was made with difficulty, negativity toward agents who made these judgments was reduced. And when a harmful action either did not blatantly violate implicit social contracts, or actually served to honor them, there was no preference for a deontologist over a consequentialist.”
I imagine more or less anything which expresses conflictedness about taking the ‘utilitarian’ decision and/or expresses feeling the pull of the contrary deontological norm would fit the bill for what Everett is saying here. That said, I’m not convinced that Everett (2016) is really getting at reactions to “consequentialism” (see here ( 1 , 2 )
I think that this paper by Uhlmann et al, does show that people judge negatively those who take utilitarian decisions though, even when they judge that the utilitarian act was the right one to take. Expressing conflictedness about the utilitarian decision may be a double-edged sword, therefore. I think it may well offset negative character evaluations of the person taking the utilitarian decision, but plausibly it may also reduce any credence people attached to the utilitarian act being the right one to take.
My collaborators and I did some work relevant to this, on the negative evaluation of people who make their donation decisions in a deliberative rather than explicitly empathic way. The most relevant of our experiments for this looked at the evaluation of people who both deliberated about the cost effectiveness of the donation and expressed empathy towards the recipient of the donation simultaneously. The empathy+deliberation condition was close to the empathy condition in moral evaluation (see figure 2 https://osf.io/d9t4n/) and closer to the deliberation condition in evaluation of reasonableness.
Do you offer any recommendations for communicating utilitarian ideas based on Everett’s research or someone else’s?
For example, in Everett’s 2016 paper the following is said:
“When communicating that a consequentialist judgment was made with difficulty, negativity toward agents who made these judgments was reduced. And when a harmful action either did not blatantly violate implicit social contracts, or actually served to honor them, there was no preference for a deontologist over a consequentialist.”
I imagine more or less anything which expresses conflictedness about taking the ‘utilitarian’ decision and/or expresses feeling the pull of the contrary deontological norm would fit the bill for what Everett is saying here. That said, I’m not convinced that Everett (2016) is really getting at reactions to “consequentialism” (see here ( 1 , 2 )
I think that this paper by Uhlmann et al, does show that people judge negatively those who take utilitarian decisions though, even when they judge that the utilitarian act was the right one to take. Expressing conflictedness about the utilitarian decision may be a double-edged sword, therefore. I think it may well offset negative character evaluations of the person taking the utilitarian decision, but plausibly it may also reduce any credence people attached to the utilitarian act being the right one to take.
My collaborators and I did some work relevant to this, on the negative evaluation of people who make their donation decisions in a deliberative rather than explicitly empathic way. The most relevant of our experiments for this looked at the evaluation of people who both deliberated about the cost effectiveness of the donation and expressed empathy towards the recipient of the donation simultaneously. The empathy+deliberation condition was close to the empathy condition in moral evaluation (see figure 2 https://osf.io/d9t4n/) and closer to the deliberation condition in evaluation of reasonableness.