The moral landscape of war: A registered report testing how the war context shapes morality's constraints on default representations of possibility

Abstract

Mental representations of possibility in everyday contexts incorporate descriptive and prescriptive norms. People intuitively think that Mr. X cannot perform an immoral action; even when upon deliberation they realize that the immoral action is in fact possible (Phillips & Cushman, 2017). We replicate this “moral-possibility constraint”, providing further support for the notion that default representations of possibility are - at first pass - limited to moral alternatives. We also test how context affects representations of possibility by asking whether the same findings hold in a war context. This context has different prescriptive norms (e.g., it is permissible to kill combatants, but not non-combatants), and we use Phillips and Cushman's (2017) reaction-time paradigm to test whether these prescriptive norms shape people's representations of what is possible in war. We find that the moral-possibility constraint is sensitive to variation in degree of immorality (e.g., killing a person vs. torturing a child); however the war context did not influence the constraint in the way we expected. The results further advance our understanding of the relationship between morality and domain-general cognition, and provide insight into the moral landscape of war.