MORAL DECISIONS HOW TO

Moral values do not influence concrete moral decisions What insights can we draw from academic research into moral decision making, to help us navigate the storm? In this blogpost, I will draw from my team’s* publicly funded (by the European Research Council) work on this topic, in an attempt to contribute to public understanding of these important moral dimensions of the choices we make during the corona crisis. From panic-buying and social-distancing to triage and determining the monetary ‘value’ of a human life: citizens, health professionals and politicians around the globe are faced with decisions whose moral salience make them qualitatively different from the average types of choices most of us make in our daily lives. I strongly believe that in the longer run, insights into human behavior and social processes will play a role in helping us weather this and future pandemics.ĭuring the past few weeks – and in China, months – it has become clear that the corona virus generates a flurry of moral challenges for human decision-makers to solve.

MORAL DECISIONS HOW TO

Why society is heading towards a gigantically uncomfortable taboo trade-off between human lives and the economy and how to deal with that.Īlthough clearly the corona crisis is first and foremost a healthcare crisis for which medical solutions are urgently needed (enormous respect for our colleagues working in those areas!), this blog attempts to make a small contribution from the social and behavioral sciences.Why our moral values hardly echo through in our concrete moral actions (panic buying, social distancing) and what can be done to change that.

Here is a blogpost (around 1,750 words) that presents insights from the behavioral sciences, including work done in the BEHAVE-project. Want to know more about how people make moral decisions in corona times? Caspar Chorus – Professor of choice behavior modeling at TU Delft – 28 March 2020

Moral decisions