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Clinical Trial
. 2021 Oct 22;16(10):e0259110.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259110. eCollection 2021.

Reduced utilitarian willingness to violate personal rights during the COVID-19 pandemic

Rea Antoniou  1 , Heather Romero-Kornblum  1   2 , J Clayton Young  1 , Michelle You  1   3 , Joel H Kramer  1 , Winston Chiong  1
Affiliations
Clinical Trial

Reduced utilitarian willingness to violate personal rights during the COVID-19 pandemic

Rea Antoniou et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic poses many real-world moral dilemmas, which can pit the needs and rights of the many against the needs and rights of the few. We investigated moral judgments in the context of the contemporary global crisis among older adults, who are at greatest personal risk from the pandemic. We hypothesized that during this pandemic, individuals would give fewer utilitarian responses to hypothetical dilemmas, accompanied by higher levels of confidence and emotion elicitation. Our pre-registered analysis (https://osf.io/g2wtp) involved two waves of data collection, before (2014) and during (2020) the COVID-19 pandemic, regarding three categories of moral dilemmas (personal rights, agent-centered permissions, and special obligations). While utilitarian responses considered across all categories of dilemma did not differ, participants during the 2020 wave gave fewer utilitarian responses to dilemmas involving personal rights; that is, they were less willing to violate the personal rights of others to produce the best overall outcomes.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Utilitarian responses—All dilemmas.
This violin plot represents the distribution of utilitarian responses in all three moral categories before (2014 wave) and during (2020 wave) the COVID-19 pandemic. The black dots represent the means with 95% confidence intervals (N = 258).
Fig 2
Fig 2. Utilitarian responses—Personal rights dilemmas.
This violin plot represents the distribution of utilitarian decisions in the personal rights (PR) category of moral dilemmas before (2014 wave) and during (2020 wave) the COVID-19 pandemic. The black dots represent the means with 95% confidence intervals (N = 258).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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