Masking sacred-value trade-offs in moral rhetoric sharply raises acceptance of them.

Evidence

In two conditions of that experiment, the Commission makes no reference to dollar/life trade-offs but it does offer a vague smokescreen rationale that took either utilitarian form (‘After weighing relevant costs and benefits, the Commission concludes that this is the right thing to do’) or deontic form (‘Based on its analysis, the Commission concludes that morally this is the right thing to do’). In a third condition, the decision process was utterly transparent: people learned that the Commission decided that the cost of saving the additional 200 lives (at 500 000 per life) is too high given other priorities. The Commission therefore recommends redirecting the saving of 100 million to other uses, including reducing the deficit and lowering taxes. The results showed that support for the recommendation hovered at 72% when the trade-off was masked by vacuous moralistic rationales but plummeted to 35% when the trade-off flagrantly violated the injunction against dollar valuations of human life. — Philip E. Tetlock, Thinking the unthinkable, 35

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s research on manufactured enemies and taboo cognitions: transparent rationality backfires exactly where hollow moral packaging succeeds. — connects to: Moral outrage over sacred-value violations depends heavily on rhetorical framing. — Philip E. Tetlock, Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values…, 1; Mere contemplation of sacred trade-offs produces opposite moral reactions for taboo versus tragic cases — Philip E. Tetlock, Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values…, 24
• DEEPTHINKING: The 72% vs 35% gap on identical underlying decisions, differing only in verbal framing, is a dense demonstration that professed moral conviction is decoupled from substance.

Related

• Mere contemplation of sacred trade-offs produces opposite moral reactions for taboo versus tragic cases (similarity 0.84)
• Merely lingering over a taboo trade-off provokes moral outrage independent of the choice made. (similarity 0.83)
• Merely contemplating trade-offs on sacred values provokes moral outrage beyond cognitive confusion (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Mere contemplation of sacred trade-offs produces opposite moral reactions for taboo versus tragic cases #expands (0.80) — Philip E. Tetlock, Thinking the unthinkable, 24