Within your rights: Dissociating wrongness and permissibility in moral judgement

Abstract

Are we ever morally permitted to do what is morally wrong? It seems intuitive that we are, but evidence for dissociations among judgement of permissibility and wrongness is relatively scarce. Across four experiments (N = 1438), we show that people judge that some behaviours can be morally wrong and permissible. The dissociations arise because these judgements track different morally relevant aspects of everyday moral encounters. Judgements of individual rights predicted permissibility but not wrongness, while character assessment predicted wrongness but not permissibility. These findings suggest a picture in which moral evaluation is granular enough to express reasoning about different types of normative considerations, notably the possibility that people can exercise their rights in morally problematic ways.