Mind & behavior · 2015
Do people think someone can have a moral duty even when they cannot carry it out?
Yes. Across eight experiments, participants repeatedly judged that people could still have a moral duty even when they could not carry it out. Judgments about duty showed no clear difference between people who could and could not perform physical actions, while judgments of blame were highly sensitive to ability. These findings concern participants’ judgments, not proof of what anyone’s moral duties actually are.
Details
The researchers tested the idea that someone can only be morally required to do something if they are able to do it. Participants repeatedly attributed moral duties even when the person being evaluated was unable to act. This pattern held across different types, durations, and scopes of inability, different wording for moral judgments, and different levels of seriousness in the consequences of not acting.
The important distinction was between duty and blame. In the physical-action comparison, the researchers found no clear difference in moral-duty judgments based on ability; evaluations of a non-moral obligation differed from this pattern. Blame judgments, by contrast, were highly sensitive to whether the person could act. The authors suggest that people may treat ability as a condition for blame without treating it as a condition for moral duty.
The abstract does not give participant characteristics, sample sizes, detailed experimental tasks, or effect sizes. It therefore supports a pattern in the judgments studied, not a universal rule about how everyone thinks.
What do you think?
Good conversations begin with curiosity.
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