Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People often withdraw previously drawn conclusions in light of new information. This defeasible reasoning is also im- portant for law, where judges often have to change their ver- dicts in light of new evidence. Here we investigate defeasibil- ity in the context of conflicting fundamental rights. When, for instance, law to property conflicts with law to information, can one of these rights be “defeated” by the other? We em- bedded conflicting fundamental rights in inference tasks (Ex- periment 1) and in elaborated vignettes (Experiment 2). Re- sults show that people decide between two conflicting funda- mental rights in a rational way. Case by case, participants pro- tected that fundamental right whose violation evoked the highest moral outrage (Experiment 1) or whose violation was considered to be more serious (Experiment 2). We discuss the implications of our findings for law theory and psychology.