Impartial Beneficence: The Forgotten Core of Utilitarian Psychology

Prior work on moral reasoning has relied on sacrificial moral dilemmas to study utilitarian versus non-utilitarian decision-making. This research has generated important insights into people’s attitudes toward instrumental harm—the sacrifice of an individual to save a greater number. But this approach has serious limitations. Most notably, it ignores impartial beneficence—the positive, altruistic core of utilitarianism, characterized by a radically impartial concern for the well-being of others. Here, I describe the two-dimensional model of utilitarianism, showing that instrumental harm and impartial beneficence are both conceptually and psychologically distinct. I review evidence showing that they have different patterns of individual differences, associated underlying processes, and consequences for how moral decision-makers are perceived. Acknowledging the dissociation between instrumental harm and impartial beneficence in the thinking of ordinary people has helped clarify existing debates about the nature of moral psychology, its relation to moral philosophy, and helps generate fruitful avenues for further research.