Between Law and Conscience: The Role of Legality in Moral Decision-Making

Does the legal status of an action shape how morally wrong people perceive it to be? Across three experiments (N = 1,226), we find that participants judged actions to be more morally wrong when labelled as “illegal” as opposed to “not illegal.” Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness of this effect, revealing the impact of act legality on moral evaluations across manipulations of agent intentionality and type of law-making process. Notably, the influence of act legality was not restricted to judgments of actions, but also guided perceptions of others’ moral character. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed individual differences in the extent to which people’s moral judgments were shaped by an act’s legal status, with act legality being most influential for participants viewing respect for authority as a moral good. Based on these findings, we forward an account in which individuals use legal judgments as heuristic cues when making moral evaluations.