Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised complex moral dilemmas that have been the subject of extensive public debate. Here, we study how people judge a set of controversial actions related to the crisis: relaxing data privacy standards to allow public control of the pandemic, forbidding public gatherings, denouncing a friend who violated COVID-19 protocols, prioritizing younger over older patients when medical resources are scarce, and reducing animal rights to accelerate vaccine development. We collected acceptability judgements in an initial large-scale study with participants from 10 Latin American countries (N = 15 420). A formal analysis of the intrinsic correlations between responses to different dilemmas revealed that judgements were organized in two dimensions: one that reflects a focus on human life expectancy and one that cares about the health of all sentient lives in an equitable manner. These stereotyped patterns of responses were stronger in people who endorsed utilitarian decisions in a standardized scale. A second pre-registered study performed in the USA (N = 1300) confirmed the replicability of these findings. Finally, we show how the prioritization of public health correlated with several contextual, personality and demographic factors. Overall, this research sheds light on the relationship between utilitarian decision-making and moral responses to the COVID-19 crisis.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised complex moral dilemmas that have been the subject of extensive public debate
We replicated a key finding of the original study: individuals with high scores on any of the two dimensions were more likely to support utilitarian decisions in the trolley dilemma both in the impersonal as well as in the personal variants
Consistent with that same previous study, we found that the correlation of utilitarian judgements in trolley-type dilemmas with instrumental harm was higher than the correlation with impartial beneficence
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised complex moral dilemmas that have been the subject of extensive public debate. The COVID-19 pandemic has posed the world an extraordinarily difficult challenge that has brought moral dilemmas to the public sphere Issues such as how to assign scarce medical resources (e.g. ventilators in cases of limited availability [16,17]), or whether it is acceptable to share sensitive private data to effectively trace the virus [18], or the tension between ensuring physical distancing or allowing economic and social activities [19], have shifted moral reasoning from theoretical to practical considerations and became part of public deliberations all the way from lay people to policy makers. Previous research has shown that, while instrumental harm correlates with psychopathic tendencies, impartial beneficence is associated with higher empathic concern [22]
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