Thinking and Deciding

BIASES IN MORAL JUDGMENT? 411
in order to help others. The indirectness bias is shown in the following scenario
(Royzman and Baron, 2002):
A new viral disease is spreading rapidly in a region of Africa. Left alone,
it will kill 100,000 people out of 1,000,000 in the region. X, a public
health official, has two ways to prevent this. Both will stop the spread
of the virus and prevent all these deaths:
A. Give all 1,000,000 a shot that makes them immune to the first disease.
The shot will also cause, as a side effect, a second disease that will kill
100 people.
B. Give all 1,000,000 a shot that gives them another disease, which is
incompatible with the first disease. The second disease will kill 100
people.
Most subjects thought that option A was better, because the deaths are a side effect
rather than part of the mechanism of the main effect.
Agent relativity
Agent relativity illustrated in the following scenario used by Baron and Miller (1999).
X is one of ten people who could save someone’s life by donating bone marrow (a
painful but relatively risk-free procedure) to Y. Is X’s obligation to donate greater
when X is Y’s cousin then when X and Y are unrelated? Many people think so. Utilitarians
even think so, if they think that family cohesion is a good thing that should
be promoted for other reasons. Now consider Z, who is unrelated to X or Y. X, the
potential donor, asks Z’s advice about whether to donate, and Z knows that X will
probably follow the advice offered. Does Z have a greater obligation to advise donation
when X and Y are cousins than when X and Y are unrelated? A utilitarian
who answered yes to the first question would have to answer yes to this one. After
all, it is promoting family loyalty that is at issue, and it doesn’t matter whose family
it is (without knowing more details, of course). An agent relative response, however,
would say that only Y needs to worry about family obligations. The obligation
is relative to the agent. It differs from person to person. Miller and Baron found
no evidence for agent relativity in any of their subjects (who were Indian as well
as American). However, many philosophers argue that some obligations are agent
relative in this way.
Omission bias is agent relative when the omission is the result of someone else’s
action. In the classic case of shooting one prisoner to save ten from the horrible
dictator, the choice of not shooting is implicitly agent relative, because shooting will
happen anyway. This is not a pure test of agent relativity, though, because the two
options also differ in doing something versus doing nothing.