Principles of Double Effect and Personal Contact: Intuitive Mechanisms of Moral Decision Making

The aim of the current research was to investigate the mental mechanisms of decision-making in moral dilemmas. The objectives of this study were: (1) to see the effect of the ethical principles of double effect and personal contact on the participants’ decision-making, (2) the relationship of immediate emotions with ethical decision-making, and (3) to examine the level of people's awareness of the underlying principles of their ethical decisions under time constraints. Mixed-methods design was used in this study. Research instruments included three scenarios adapted from similar studies. The statistical population included students active in virtual networks of national universities in Tehran. A number of 129 subjects were selected using convenience sampling. For statistical analysis, variance test analysis, Tukey's post hoc test, and Pearson's correlation coefficient were utilized. The research results showed the significant effect of both mentioned principles on the participants’ ethical decision making (p<0.001). Also, there was a positive correlation (p<0.01) between the degree of moral acceptability and the pleasant emotion about the moral events that occurred in the scenarios under time constraints. From the findings, it can be concluded that ethical decision-making depends on a dual system: 1- an intuitive, automatic, immediate, universal and emotion-based system, which is a function of fundamental mental mechanisms, and 2- a logical system, which is the result of conscious thinking and creates justifications for immediate moral decisions.