ABSTRACT
Sacrificial moral dilemmas comprise cases where people decide to cause some harm to prevent greater harm. Hence, they entail a trade-off between moral concerns about avoiding harming others and concerns about maximizing overall wellbeing. Though these dilemmas originated in philosophy, decades of research suggests that dilemma decisions arise from various psychological mechanisms. Here, I review the development of models of intrapersonal moral reasoning and decision-making, examining both traditional analytic approaches—measuring relative preferences for rejecting harm versus maximizing outcomes—and modelling approaches—which disentangle multiple response tendencies underlying relative decisions. Regarding theory, I raise doubts about the classic “hard” dual process model that contrasts rapid affective processing with slower deliberative processing. Instead, I suggest findings are best explained by a “soft” reinterpretation of the dual process model, where multiple processes contribute to each decision, but responses nonetheless reflect a different preponderance of affective and cognitive processing.
