Moral judgment and decision making, contractualism and virtual bargaining

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Moral psychology attempts to understand the mechanisms that underlie moral judgment and decision making. Researchers in this area often appeal to normative theories from moral philosophy to construct descriptive accounts of morality (Bartels et al., 2015). Two schools of thought - consequentialism and deontology - have received particular attention in recent decades (Greene, 2013). Simply put, consequentialism bases the morality of an action on its consequences only. For deontology in contrast, certain actions are inherently right or wrong, independently of the consequences they bring about, depending on specific moral rules (Malle, 2021). A third influential family of theories - contractualism - has received much less attention in empirical work. Contractualism posits that morality is a matter of agreement and that "an act is morally permissible if all the parties relevantly affected by the act could reasonably agree to it (or at least, not reasonably reject it)" (Levine et al., 2018, p. 1). Typically contractualist concerns (e.g., agreement, consent, mutual interests) could be crucial to understand the psychological basis of morality. Virtual bargaining has been proposed as a specific form of contractualist reasoning. Virtual bargaining is a theory of social coordination which proposes that many of our social interactions can be understood as the result of virtual bargains or "agreements that social participants anticipate they would make, where they to engage in explicit bargaining" (Misyak et al., 2014, p. 512). This project uses experimental methods from psychology (e.g., moral dilemmas) and economics (e.g., economic games) to empirically investigate contractualist moral judgment and decision making and the role played by virtual bargaining processes in moral reasoning.