Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: It is widely observed that there is a difference in our moral psychology between acts and omissions. Individuals condemn harmful acts more than omissions, they prefer to commit harmful omissions than equally harmful actions, and prefer to punish harmful actions more than equally harmful omissions. In this project, we use a novel experimental setting to study whether this preference is affected by the relative efficiency of punishing actions. In our experiments, harm eventuates as the result of both actions and omissions by multiple individuals. By studying the preference to distribute punishment over both actors and omitters, we are able to investigate whether the omission effect is a result of a preference for efficient punishment strategies, or if it is robust, even to circumstances where it is more efficient to punish omissions.