Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The doctrine of double effect (DDE) explains that it may be permissible to cause harm as a foreseen side-effect of an action that brings about a good result but impermissible to cause harm as a means of bringing about the same good result. The DDE is commonly illustrated with the Trolley Problem, which along with similarly structured examples, have become widely popular as a tool for studying moral psychology and have been taken to demonstrate a universal feature of moral judgment. Across two studies, we investigate how consenting to being harmed interacts with the Doctrine of Double Effect. Specifically, we ask whether (1) harming someone as a means becomes morally acceptable when that person consents to being used as a means, and (2) whether the distinction between harming as a means vs. side-effect persists even when the person being harmed consents. We find that consent significantly interacts with the DDE.