A new scaling rule for context-dependent moral judgments.

Moral judgments are typically explained by a combination of either deontological considerations about the nature of actions, or quantitative assessments of the consequences of those actions. These proposals, however, have serious limitations such as being insensitive to personal biases and global circumstances. This study presents an alternative approach based on comparative affective evaluations that modulate responses as more contextual information is presented to the choice set. We show that, when we make a moral decision, we do not simply judge the action and/or its consequences, we judge the protagonist performing the action embedded in a given set of circumstances and we normalize their behavior using the same gain control mechanism that operates in other sensory and motor domains. The explanatory power of this novel approach is broader than that provided by traditional paradigms and can be easily applied to more ecologically relevant scenarios.