Principles of Moral Accounting: How our Intuitive Moral Sense Balances Rights and Wrongs

We are all saints and sinners: Some of our actions benefit others, while other actions lead to harm. How do people balance moral rights against moral wrongs when evaluating others’ actions? Across 9 studies, we contrast the predictions of three conceptions of intuitive morality—outcome-based (utilitarian), act-based (deontologist), and person-based (virtue ethics) approaches. These experiments establish four principles: Partial offsetting (good acts can partly offset bad acts), diminishing sensitivity (the extent of the good act has minimal impact on its offsetting power), temporal asymmetry (good acts are more praiseworthy when they come after harms), and act congruency (good acts are more praiseworthy to the extent they offset a similar harm). These principles are difficult to square with utilitarian or deontological approaches, but sit well within person-based approaches to moral psychology. Inferences about personal character mediated many of these effects (Studies 1–4), explained differences across items and across individuals (Studies 5–6), and could be manipulated to produce downstream consequences on blame (Studies 7–9); however, there was some evidence for more modest roles of utilitarian and deontological processing too. These findings contribute to conversations about moral psychology and person perception, and may have policy and marketing implications.