The Utilitarian moral judgment: real Utilitarianism or moral leniency?

Recent findings in the field of moral judgment have brought forth some inconsistencies casting some doubts on the link between cognitive style and moral judgments. The aim of this research is to investigate the Moral Leniency Hypothesis which addresses these inconsistencies. It states that what is commonly called an "utilitarian" answer to moral dilemmas, is not actually participants showing Utilitarian tendencies but Moral Leniency. For this we performed two online studies. First, we created and validated the Moral Leniency Scale (N = 192). Then, we investigated the link between cognitive style, Moral Leniency, and "utilitarian" moral judgement (N = 455). We were able to show that the Moral Leniency Scale presents expected correlations with the usual measure of Utilitarianism and with a more reflexive cognitive style (CRT, Belief Bias and negatively with Faith in Intuition). Indeed, the more reflexive were the participants, the more morally lenient they were. In addition, the more morally lenient they were, the greater were their “utilitarian” tendencies in classic dilemmas and Harmless crimes scenarios. We also showed that the more participants were reflective, the lesser they gave “utilitarian” answers in moral dilemmas of a certain type, Demanding ethics dilemmas. We also documented a partial mediation of the effect of cognitive style on “utilitarian” tendencies through moral leniency on two types of moral scenarios. Thus, our findings support the Moral Leniency Hypothesis. However, we were unable to replicate the link between cognitive style and “utilitarian” tendencies in classic sacrificial dilemmas. Implications for the field are discussed