Rethinking moral decision-making: Navigating the Trolley Problem in Virtual Reality

Public talk jointly arranged by the BioXPhi Lab (Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Philosophy); Wellcome Centre for Ethics & Humanities, and Neurosec (Psychiatry)
Held at the Oxford Martin School, 30 November 2024.
Dr Katherine Francis (Keele University)
Moral decision-making is traditionally assessed using text-based vignettes derived from philosophy, enabling systematic comparisons of moral principles. However, these scenarios are often contextually impoverished and fail to elicit the emotional reactions that might occur in real-life counterparts of the same moral conflict. To address this limitation, we have used Virtual Reality (VR) and Haptic VR technologies to recreate these dilemmas, finding a striking contrast between moral judgments in text-based scenarios and moral actions in VR scenarios. In this talk, I explore the implications of this work for models of moral decision-making and I reflect on the transformative potential of VR in moral psychology research.