Developing and validating realistic moral dilemmas for deontological, utilitarian and virtue ethical orientations

Abstract

Recent advances in neuroethical and moral psychological research have largely focused on the cognitive and emotional bases of moral judgments through the use of extreme and artificial moral dilemmas. These studies suffer from three key limitations: (1) overreliance on unrealistic, sacrificial dilemmas; (2) the complete omission of virtue ethics as a distinct moral framework; and (3) a lack of validated instruments that reflect the complexity of moral reasoning in everyday contexts. To address this issue, we developed and tested a 22-moral dilemma set that incorporates moral reasoning in three ethical traditions. Explanatory factor analysis with 349 participants aged 18-65 showed a strong context-dependency. Confirmatory factor analysis including 443 participants for 19 dilemmas with 38 corresponding binary items provided good model fit with RMSEA = 0.062, CFI = 0.987, and SRMR = 0.048. The findings of the present study suggest that efforts to measure moral reasoning through ethical dilemmas must move beyond rigid theoretical opposition and embrace more ecologically valid, context-sensitive conceptual models.