Understanding responses to moral dilemmas: deontological inclinations, utilitarian inclinations, and general action tendencies

The first principle, often associated with the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, emphasizes the irrevocable universality of rights and duties. According to the principle of deontology, the moral status of an action is derived from its consistency with context-independent norms. One of the most prominent examples of such theories is Greene's dual-process theory of moral judgment. The central assumption of the theory is that deontological and utilitarian judgments have their roots in two distinct psychological processes. Applied to moral dilemma research, incongruent dilemmas pit the principle of deontology against the principle of utilitarianism, such that a given action is acceptable from a utilitarian view but unacceptable from a deontological view. To overcome the first problem the nonindependence of deontological and utilitarian judgments Conway and Gawronski developed a process dissociation (PD) model to disentangle the independent contributions of deontological and utilitarian inclinations to overt moral judgments.