Motivated Moral Decisions: Target Acceptability in Warfare

How do individuals reason about target acceptability in armed conflict? Modern conflict’s complexities and evolving dynamics, particularly the targeting of opaque and decentralized armed groups, have rendered this question increasingly relevant. Altruistic theories of morality propose that empathy explains conflict norms. An alternative interpretation of the evidence suggests that actions are more likely to be morally condemned when they oppose the condemner’s extended phenotypic interests (i.e., the welfare of the individual, their kin, or coalitional partners). The subjective condemnation prompts greater alertness to the potential threat while grounding the motivation to pursue welfare-enhancing behaviors. Situations indicating unrestrained, predatory aggression should be particularly evocative, as they signal a broader personal threat. In a preregistered experiment, participants were more likely to condemn combatant actions indicative of greater potential personal risk. Assessments about the perpetrator’s dangerousness, unreasonableness, and aggressiveness mattered for moralization. The negative moral appraisal was not correlated to the harmfulness of the action per se, but the magnitude of the potential threat perceived by the participant. Widely held moral intuitions shaped by self-interest probably explain much of the universal content of warfare norms. If accurate, this should trigger some reconceptualization of existing legal frameworks, including membership approaches to targeting enemy combatants.