Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We describe a cognitive mechanism of moral judgment, universalization, that has received little attention up to now. Underuniversalization, an action’s moral permissibility is determined by calculating what the outcome would be if all people whoare similarly situated to the actor also acted in that way. This mechanism is particularly well-suited to capture our moraljudgments of free-rider cases, where one person doing the action increases utility but many people doing it decreasesutility. Universalization fits into an agreement-based (contractualist) theory of moral cognition, and explains properties ofour moral judgments that an outcome-based or rule-based approach cannot. We show patterns of universalization reasoningin young children as well as adults.