2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Researchers at Cologne, Texas, and Wilfrid Laurier University have found a correlation between gender and the moral principles on which people approach ethical dilemmas. The article was published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
The experiment was conducted on the basis of a meta-analysis of 40 studies, which involved 6100 participants of both genders. Participants were asked 20 questions that presented moral dilemmas of varying complexity. Among them were questions about murder, torture, lies, abortion and animal experiments: for example, can a police officer torture an extremist demolitionist in order to obtain information about the planted bombs? Would it be more correct to kill Adolf Hitler while he was a young Austrian artist to prevent World War II and save millions of lives?
The experiment was designed to oppose two philosophical approaches to ethics. In deontology (normative ethics), the permissibility of an action depends on the moral norm taken as a point of reference. Utilitarianism, on the other hand, insists that action is in accordance with the moral norm, if it is possible to squeeze out the maximum benefit, the common good. From the point of view of utilitarianism, the same action can be moral in one situation, and immoral in another, depending on the potential result.
Using a special statistical procedure, it was possible to determine the subconscious tendency to make certain decisions. It turned out that women are more likely than men to adhere to deontological principles (d = 0.57, that is, the difference between the means is about half the standard deviation). At the same time, men and women are equally guided by utilitarianism. From this, the authors conclude that women have a stronger emotional rejection of harm, which explains the difference in attitudes towards deontological and utilitarian approaches.
This is not the first time the influence of gender on ethics has been explored. Researchers at the University of Quebec recently tried to establish the effect of intrasexual competition on moral principles (for example, "If you have a choice - to save three of your sex or one of the opposite, who will you choose?"). It turned out that in most cases, men will save the opposite sex, and women will leave the representatives of the same sex.
