Cooperation Creates Special Moral Obligations
A large-scale economic experiment, conducted on a representative sample of the US population, shows that cooperation creates special moral obligations. Participants in the experiment, acting as impartial spectators, transferred significantly more m...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/639511531483537757/Cooperation-creates-special-moral-obligations http://hdl.handle.net/10986/30004 |
| Summary: | A large-scale economic experiment,
conducted on a representative sample of the US population,
shows that cooperation creates special moral obligations.
Participants in the experiment, acting as impartial
spectators, transferred significantly more money to an
unlucky worker when two individuals had cooperated than when
they had worked independently. The authors further show that
the effect of cooperation is strongly associated with
political affiliation, with Democrats attaching
significantly more importance to cooperation as a source of
moral obligation than Republicans. The findings shed light
on the foundations of redistributive preferences and may
contribute to explain the often observed asymmetry in moral
concern for different groups of individuals, both nationally
and internationally. |
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