Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 4, No. 6, October 2009, pp. 476–491
The motivated use of moral principles
Eric Luis Uhlmann
∗
Northwestern University
David A. Pizarro
Cornell University
David Tannenbaum and Peter H. Ditto
University of California, Irvine
Abstract
Five studies demonstrated that people selectively use general moral principles to rationalize preferred moral conclu-
sions. In Studies 1a and 1b, college students and community respondents were presented with variations on a traditional
moral scenario that asked whether it was permissible to sacrifice one innocent man in order to save a greater number
of people. Political liberals, but not relatively more conservative participants, were more likely to endorse consequen-
tialism when the victim had a stereotypically White American name than when the victim had a stereotypically Black
American name. Study 2 found evidence suggesting participants believe that the moral principles they are endorsing are
general in nature: when presented sequentially with both versions of the scenario, liberals again showed a bias in their
judgments to the initial scenario, but demonstrated consistency thereafter. Study 3 found conservatives were more likely
to endorse the unintended killing of innocent civilians when Iraqis civilians were killed than when Americans civilians
were killed, while liberals showed no significant effect. In Study 4, participants primed with patriotism were more likely
to endorse consequentialism when Iraqi civilians were killed by American forces than were participants primed with
multiculturalism. However, this was not the case when American civilians were killed by Iraqi forces. Implications for
the role of reason in moral judgment are discussed.
Keywords: moral judgment, motivated reasoning, consequentialism, deontology.
1 Introduction
Most people believe that harming innocent children is
wrong, as is cheating on an exam or breaking a promise.
More controversially, some people believe that abortion
is wrong, that the death penalty is unjust, or that animals
should not be killed and eaten. These moral judgments
are unlike other social judgments in an important way.
Not only do we believe that our moral judgments are cor-
rect, but we believe that (unlike our attitudes toward, say,
chocolate ice cream) everyone else should agree with us.
This has not only been pointed out by philosophers as a
key component of moral beliefs (e.g., Hare, 1952), but
also confirmed by psychologists as an important feature
of lay moral intuition (Haidt, Rosenberg, & Hom, 2003;
Skitka, Bauman, & Sargis, 2005; Turiel, 1998). How-
ever, a problem arises when defending moral judgments.
Defending a moral judgment by appealing to our subjec-
tive preferences (e.g., “abortion is wrong because I don’t
like it”) is unpersuasive, inasmuch it fails to provide a
compelling reason why others should agree. Yet, as some
philosophers have argued, moral claims seem to lack an
obvious set of objective criteria to demonstrate their truth
∗
The contribution of the first two authors was equal. The au-
thors would like to thank Jonathan Baron, Jonathan Haidt, an anony-
mous reviewer, Anna Smialek, and Malavika Srinivasan for their
helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Address:
David Pizarro, Department of Psychology, Cornell University. Email:
dap54@cornell.edu.
(Mackie, 1977). These features make disagreement in
the moral domain a tricky problem (Pizarro & Uhlmann,
2006; Sturgeon, 1994; Sunstein, 2005).
What individuals often do, however, is defend a spe-
cific moral judgment by appealing to a general moral
principle. Principles are defined as general rules that can
guide judgment across a wide variety of situations
1
, mak-
ing moral judgments appear to be less like ad hoc prefer-
ences and more like rational facts. In moral reasoning, a
principle serves as a first step toward drawing a specific
conclusion. Once there is agreement about a principle,
assessing whether a specific moral claim is an instantia-
tion of the principle is all that remains.
Of course, there has been significant debate within
moral philosophy as to what principles should be en-
dorsed (i.e., the most defensible normative ethic; e.g.,
Smart & Williams, 1973). One of the central debates in
normative ethics has been between advocates of conse-
quentialism and deontology. Consequentialism holds that
acts are morally right or wrong to the degree that they
maximize good consequences. Many deontologists, on
the other hand, while accepting that consequences are im-
1
For the purposes of this paper, we take moral principles to mean ex-
plicit normative standards that participants, upon reflection, are willing
to endorse. This definition can be contrasted with other ways in which
the term moral principle is used, such as a description of the (often tacit)
rules that actually do guide moral judgments (e.g., Cushman, Young, &
Hauser, 2006).
479
Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 4, No. 6, October 2009 Motivated moral reasoning
480
portant, believe that there are constraints against certain
actions independent of their consequences — some acts
are wrong in-and-of themselves. These constraints gen-
erally include duties and obligations such as injunctions
not to break promises, not to lie, and not to harm innocent
others. The debate between these two camps has gener-
ated a number of well-known thought experiments where
the two broad principles are pitted against each other in
one moral decision (e.g., the “Trolley” and “Footbridge”
dilemmas; Foot, 1967; Thompson, 1986). Adopting these
scenarios for use in the laboratory, psychological research
has suggested that lay persons find the distinction be-
tween consequentialist and deontological considerations
meaningful (Greene, Somerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Co-
hen, 2001; Spranca, Minsk, & Baron, 1991). Indeed,
research utilizing these scenarios has demonstrated that
certain features of an act (e.g., whether the harm is direct
or indirect) can reliably influence moral judgments to be
consistent with either a consequentialist or a deontologi-
cal moral ethic.
What we propose here, however, is that, even when
utilizing scenarios that have been shown to reliably
elicit consequentialist or deontological intuitions, peo-
ple’s moral judgments are often affected by a set of other
motivations, such as the desire to protect their ideological
beliefs. This is consistent with a large body of evidence
showing that reasoning processes are heavily influenced
by motivational factors, and that people are flexible in the
principles they apply to justify their decisions (Bartels &
Medin, 2007; Ditto & Lopez, 1992; Kunda, 1987; Ehrich
& Irwin, 2005; Paharia & Deshpandé, 2009; Pyszczyn-
ski & Greenberg, 1987; Simon, Krawczyk, & Holyoak,
2004; Simon, Snow & Read, 2004).
2 Current studies
Political orientation and moral beliefs are deeply con-
nected, particularly in the contemporary American po-
litical environment. As many scholars have argued, the
so-called culture war between “Blue” (liberal) and “Red”
(conservative) America often boils down to a difference
in moral views (Haidt & Graham, 2007; Lakoff, 2002).
In the current studies we sought to demonstrate the moti-
vated use of moral principles by comparing the judgments
of political liberals and conservatives to scenarios that ei-
ther meshed or conflicted with their political leanings.
2
2
In the present studies we used self-reported political orientation on
the liberal-conservative continuum as a way of capturing differences in
political beliefs. However, the terms “conservative” and “liberal” have
had shifting meanings throughout the history of American politics. Fur-
thermore, many scholars have argued persuasively that political beliefs
are multidimensional, and we do not mean to imply political beliefs are
reducible to a single, invariant dimension. Still, the liberal-conservative
distinction does have predictive validity, explaining 85% of the variance
Anecdotal evidence of a seemingly flexible reliance on
moral principles is not difficult to find in current polit-
ical discourse. Many political conservatives, for exam-
ple, have staked out a clear deontological position in their
moral evaluation of embryonic stem cell research, argu-
ing that the potential lives saved by any technology gen-
erated by this research do not justify the sacrificing of
innocent (embryonic) life. In their moral assessments of
the extensive civilian death toll caused by the invasion
of Iraq, however, conservatives have been more conse-
quentialist in tone, arguing that civilian casualties are a
necessary cost to achieve a greater good. Many political
liberals, on the other hand, have argued against the Bush
Administration’s decision to invade Iraq based (among
other reasons) on a principled stance against US military
involvement in the internal affairs of foreign countries.
Such a principled non-interventionist stance was not ev-
ident in the favorable attitude of many liberals toward
military intervention during the Clinton administration in
their attempt to quell ethnic violence in Bosnia. In each
of these cases it would seem as if the moral principle in-
voked to justify (or oppose) an action depends on how
one feels about the individuals who are on the delivering
and receiving end of that action.
The goal of the current studies was to examine people’s
moral judgments with a greater degree of experimental
control so that stronger inferences could be drawn about
the motivated and flexible use of moral principles. In or-
der to do this, we first constructed scenarios designed to
pit consequentialist and deontological principles against
each other. While it is not always the case that these
two ethical approaches conflict, using cases where par-
ticipants must pick one principle over the other to arrive
at a moral judgment provides a simple and clear mea-
sure of which principle an individual favors. We then
created two versions of these scenarios that were care-
fully matched (based on findings from an initial pre-test)
in their morally-relevant content (e.g., the sacrificing of
innocent lives), but that differed in whether the deon-
tological or consequentialist option was most consistent
with politically liberal or conservative sensibilities. Fi-
nally, we asked participants to rate the scenarios along a
series of scales designed to capture their reliance on con-
sequentialist versus deontological principles. Our gen-
eral prediction was that political partisanship would lead
to a reliance on whichever general principle supported
politically-consistent moral judgments. Selectively en-
dorsing a general moral principle to support a desired
moral conclusion would constitute evidence of motivated
moral reasoning.
in voting in Presidential elections over the past three decades (see Jost,
2006).
Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 4, No. 6, October 2009 Motivated moral reasoning
481
Table 1: Pre-test results
Not Relevant (%) Relevant (%)
Birthday 92 8
Weight 90 10
Race 87 13
Nationality 87 13
Gender 80 20
Health 51 49
Social Distance 46 54
Age 38 62
3 Pre-test: What characteristics
count as morally relevant?
We first sought to establish the features participants ex-
plicitly endorsed as morally relevant or irrelevant with
regards to victims of harm. To do this, students at the
University of California, Irvine (n = 238) were presented
with the following instructions:
Moral philosophers argue and debate all sorts
of things. One long-standing debate is whether
harming other people is permissible if it pro-
motes a greater good. For example, military
leaders are often faced with this dilemma —
going to war inevitably leads to civilian ca-
sualties, but not going to war can also poten-
tially put many more innocent people at risk
(such as by not capturing terrorists or dictators
that would likely harm many innocent civil-
ians in the future). Some people believe that
certain acts, such as causing harm to innocent
people, are never justified under any circum-
stances. Others believe that if the consequences
are great enough, then even undesirable acts
(such as harming other people) may be morally
justified.
While this issue is definitely debatable, there
are also certain factors that come into play that
may make it OK to harm others in certain sit-
uations. For example, some people believe
that harming other people is usually wrong, but
if someone is guilty of a serious crime (such
as murder) then this should be taken into ac-
count when deciding to harm (such as giving
the death penalty). We are interested in find-
ing out if the following facts should reason-
ably influence a person’s moral judgment in de-
ciding whether to harm others in order to pro-
mote greater consequences. That is, what fac-
tors below should be considered when a person
is making a moral judgment like the ones de-
scribed above?
Participants were asked to respond either “yes” or “no”
to each of the following features about the victim: race,
nationality, gender, age, weight, health, social distance to
the respondent, and the victim’s date of birth. For each
feature participants were also provided with an example
to help make sense of question (e.g., for the race item,
participants read, “The victim’s race, such as if the victim
was a White or Black person?”).
As shown in Table 1, there was a wide range in partic-
ipants’ judgments of whether or not a feature should be
morally relevant. The most irrelevant feature, with 92%
of participants indicating so, was the victim’s day and
month of birth, and the least irrelevant feature (with only
38% of participants granting irrelevancy) was the victim’s
age. Of greatest interest for us were the items assess-
ing the moral relevance of race and nationality. In both
cases, the overwhelming majority of participants (87%)
reported that these features were morally irrelevant. Fur-
thermore, none of the item responses were reliably corre-
lated with political orientation at the p < .05 level, sug-
gesting that liberals and more conservative participants
were not in strong disagreement about whether such fea-
tures were morally relevant or irrelevant.
We take the results from this pre-test survey as an
initial starting point for our motivated reasoning frame-
work. Participants who differed in their political orienta-
tion overwhelmingly agreed that a victim’s race or nation-
ality should not be factored into their judgments about the
appropriateness of consequentialism or deontology as a
basis for making a moral judgment.
4 Study 1a: Trolley with a twist
In Study 1a we tested our hypotheses about the moti-
vated and flexible use of moral principles using a mod-
ified version of the widely used footbridge dilemma. In
this dilemma, an individual must decide whether or not
to sacrifice one innocent person in order to save a group
of people who will be killed by a trolley headed in their
direction. This dilemma is often utilized in thought ex-
periments by philosophers concerned with determining
whether consequentialism is an appropriate normative
ethical theory (Foot, 1967; Thompson, 1986), and has
also been used in a number of psychological experiments
on the nature of moral judgment (e.g., Cushman et al.,
2006; Greene et al., 2001; Spranca, Minsk, & Baron,
1991).
Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 4, No. 6, October 2009 Motivated moral reasoning
482
It is known that there is a strong disdain among Amer-
ican college students and politically liberal Americans
more generally for harboring feelings that may be consid-
ered prejudiced against Black Americans (Czopp & Mon-
teith, 2003; Monin & Miller, 2001; Norton et al., 2004;
Plant & Devine, 1998; Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, &
Lerner, 2000). Therefore, we varied the race of the char-
acters in the scenarios to see whether this would influence
participants’ judgments concerning the appropriate moral
action. As indicated in the pre-test, race is a variable that
most of our sample deemed morally irrelevant when de-
ciding to save lives.
4.1 Method
Participants. Eighty-eight undergraduate students at the
University of California, Irvine participated for course
credit.
Materials and procedure. Participants received one of
two scenarios involving an individual who has to decide
whether or not to throw a large man in the path of a trol-
ley (described as large enough that he would stop the
progress of the trolley) in order to prevent the trolley from
killing 100 innocent individuals trapped in a bus.
3
Half of
the participants received a version of the scenario where
the agent could choose to sacrifice an individual named
“Tyrone Payton” to save 100 members of the New York
Philharmonic, and the other half received a version where
the agent could choose to sacrifice “Chip Ellsworth III”
to save 100 members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra. In
both scenarios the individual decides to throw the person
onto the trolley tracks. While we did not provide specific
information about the race of the individuals in the sce-
nario, we reasoned that Chip and Tyrone were stereotyp-
ically associated with White American and Black Ameri-
can individuals respectively, and that the New York Phil-
harmonic would be assumed to be majority White, and
the Harlem Jazz Orchestra would be assumed to be ma-
jority Black.
All participants were then provided with the following
items intended to assess endorsement of the general prin-
ciple of consequentialism, on 7-point scales:
(1) “Is sacrificing Chip/Tyrone to save the 100 members
of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra/New York Philharmonic
justified or unjustified?” (1 = completely unjustified, 7
= completely justified)
(2) “Is sacrificing Chip/Tyrone to save the 100 members
of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra/New York Philharmonic
3
Typically, the footbridge dilemma involves a trade-off of 1 life in
order to save 5 (and not 100). We increased the potential number of lives
saved by making the consequentialist decision in order to get more vari-
ation in responses, as participants show a strong preference for the de-
ontological decision in the original 1-for-5 version (Greene et al., 2005).
moral or immoral?” (1 = extremely immoral, 7 = ex-
tremely moral)
(3) “It is sometimes necessary to allow the death of an
innocent person in order to save a larger number of inno-
cent people.” (1 = completely disagree, 7 = completely
agree)
(4) “We should never violate certain core principles, such
as the principle of not killing innocent others, even if in
the end the net result is better.” (reverse coded; 1 = com-
pletely disagree, 7 = completely agree)
(5) “It is sometimes necessary to allow the death of a
small number of innocents in order to promote a greater
good.” (1 = completely disagree, 7 = completely agree)
Finally, participants were asked to report their political
orientation on a scale ranging from 1 (very liberal) to 5
(very conservative). Participants were on average politi-
cally left of center (M = 2.57).
4.2 Results and discussion
All of the dependent variables were highly correlated and
were combined to form an index of consequentialism
(Cronbach’s α = .78). Higher scores indicated greater
endorsement of consequentialism — that it was morally
justified to sacrifice a human life in order to save the lives
of many others.
We conducted a linear regression to test for both the
independent and interactive effects of scenario condition
and self-reported political orientation on endorsement of
consequentialism. Scenario condition (−1 = Chip, 1
= Tyrone), political orientation (converted to standard
units), and the interaction term were simultaneously en-
tered as predictors in the model. There was one reliable
lower-order effect: participants were less willing to en-
dorse consequentialism when Tyrone Payton was sacri-
ficed than when Chip Ellsworth III was sacrificed, b =
−.19, SE = .09, t(84) = 2.24, p = .03. However, this was
qualified by the expected condition x political orientation
interaction, with liberals (but not relatively more con-
servative participants) showing differential endorsement
of moral principles across scenarios, b = .20, SE = .09,
t(84) = 2.26, p = .03 (see Figure 1). Specifically, liberals
(defined as 1 SD below the mean; Aiken & West, 1991)
were more likely to endorse a consequentialist justifica-
tion when the victim had a stereotypically White name
than when the victim had a stereotypically Black name,
b = −.40, SE = .12, t = 3.27, p = .002. More conserva-
tive participants (1 SD above the mean) did not give re-
liably different endorsements of consequentialism across
scenario versions, b = .01, SE = .13, t = .09, p = .93.
Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 4, No. 6, October 2009 Motivated moral reasoning
483
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
Political orientation
Consequentialism
Tyrone
Chip
Chip
Tyrone
1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 6.5 7
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Political orientation
Consequentialism
Tyrone
Chip
Chip
Tyrone
Figure 1: Results from Experiments 1a and 1b. Data points are “stacked” horizontally to indicate density. Lines are
the best-fitting linear regressions for each group.
5 Study 1b: Race and the lifeboat
dilemma
Study 1a confirmed our initial predictions about the mo-
tivated and flexible endorsement of moral principles, at
least for political liberals. In Study 1b we attempted to
replicate the basic finding with a scenario that did not
rely on the explicit comparison between the single mem-
ber of one race and 100 members of another race, thus
offering a cleaner manipulation. To do this, we used a
scenario that manipulated only the race of the individual
to be sacrificed. In addition we added a follow-up ques-
tion asking participants to infer the victim’s race from
their name, to directly examine whether cues about race
were motivating differential use of moral principles. Fi-
nally, to collect further evidence that race was not seen to
be morally relevant, we asked participants whether their
responses would have been different if the target person
were of another race. Even if participants agreed that race
should not be factored into their moral judgments (as they
indicated in our pre-test data), they still might be will-
ing to admit such considerations unfortunately do influ-
ence their judgments. We expected to replicate the same
pattern of motivated and flexible endorsements of moral
principles as in Study 1a, and that participants would ex-
plicitly deny that race factored into their judgments.
5.1 Method
Participants. The sample included 176 participants,
composed of Cornell University undergraduates (n = 96)
and adults from a public area in Southern California (n =
80). As described in greater detail below, participants in
the community sample completed several additional mea-
sures not administered to the college student sample.
Materials and procedure. Participants read about an
individual who must decide whether or not to throw a
severely injured person (so injured that he would not sur-
vive) off of a crowded lifeboat in order to prevent the
lifeboat from sinking, thereby drowning all of the indi-
viduals aboard. As in Study 1a, we indirectly manipu-
lated the race of the person who was to be sacrificed —
either an injured man named “Chip Ellsworth III” or an
injured man named “Tyrone Payton.”
Immediately after reading the scenario, participants re-
sponded to four questions assessing their endorsement of
consequentialism. They were asked to rate, using 7-point
scales, the items:
(1) “Is sacrificing Chip/Tyrone to save the other members
on board acceptable or unacceptable?”
(2) “Is sacrificing Chip/Tyrone to save the other members
on board moral or immoral?”
(3) “We should never violate certain core principles, such
as the principle of not killing innocent others, even if in
the end the net result is better.”
(4) “It is sometimes necessary to allow the death of inno-
cents lives in order to promote a greater good.”
Participants also reported their political orientation for
both social and economic issues on a scale ranging from
1 (very liberal) to 7 (very conservative). The social and
economic items were combined to form an index of gen-
eral political orientation (r = .63). Participants were on
average slightly left of center (M = 3.59).
