How Utilitarian Is Your Moral Thinking?
Harming one to save many, and caring about strangers as much as friends, are not the same question
Moral psychology spent years asking people whether they would push one person to their death to stop a runaway train from killing five, and calling the ones who said yes utilitarian. A team at Oxford pointed out that this captures only half of the idea. Utilitarianism is also, and mainly, the demand that you care about a stranger on another continent as much as about your neighbour. The two halves turn out to be almost unrelated in ordinary people, and most of us sign up to one and not the other.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
There are no right answers here, and philosophers still disagree about all of them. Answer with what you actually believe, not what you think a good person should say.
What it measures
The two dimensions of the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale - instrumental harm, your acceptance of harming someone as a means to a greater good, and impartial beneficence, how far you think everyone's wellbeing counts equally - plus a related tendency to prefer doing nothing when every option hurts someone. Our moral compass test asks which moral concerns you feel; this one asks how you weigh outcomes against rules.
Based on: Oxford Utilitarianism Scale (Kahane, Everett, Earp, Caviola, Faber, Crockett & Savulescu, 2018)
Possible results
Instrumental harm
How willing you are to accept harming someone when it produces a greater good.
Impartial beneficence
How far you believe everyone's wellbeing counts equally, near or far.
Preference for inaction
Whether you lean towards doing nothing when every option harms someone.
Common questions
What is the difference between utilitarianism and deontology?
Utilitarianism judges an act by its consequences for everyone's wellbeing, counted equally. Deontology holds that some acts are right or wrong in themselves - lying, using a person as a tool - whatever they produce. Most people mix the two, and this test shows where your mix leans rather than placing you in a camp.
Does a high instrumental harm score mean I am cold?
Not necessarily. In the original studies, acceptance of instrumental harm was somewhat linked to lower empathic concern, but the effect was modest and many people score high for carefully reasoned reasons. What the researchers stressed is that this bar is not the whole of utilitarian thinking: without the second bar, it says little about caring for the greater good.
Do answers to trolley-style dilemmas predict what people really do?
Only loosely. These scenarios are deliberately artificial, and what people say about them in a questionnaire is shaped by wording, mood and the wish to look decent. They are useful for mapping how moral intuitions are organised, but they are a poor guide to how a particular person would act in a real crisis.
Sources
- Kahane, G., Everett, J. A. C., Earp, B. D., Caviola, L., Faber, N. S., Crockett, M. J., & Savulescu, J. (2018). Beyond sacrificial harm: A two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology. Psychological Review. doi:10.1037/rev0000093
- Gawronski, B., Armstrong, J., Conway, P., Friesdorf, R., & Hütter, M. (2017). Consequences, norms, and generalized inaction in moral dilemmas: The CNI model of moral decision-making. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. doi:10.1037/pspa0000086
An honest note The items are Quinthea's own wording, adapted from the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale, so scores are not comparable to the published norms. Only the first two bars correspond to that scale; preference for inaction is a related construct from dilemma research, not a validated factor of it. Answers to hypothetical dilemmas predict real behaviour only weakly, most samples come from a few Western countries, and none of these bars measures how moral a person is.
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