The Gender and Cultural Differences in Moral Choices under the Trolly Dilemma and the Footbridge Dilemma

Abstract

The Moral judgment is an activity in which an individual measure the moral value of another individual or group's behavior or event according to social moral norms and value measurement standards. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the individual's moral choice from the perspectives of male and female, Eastern and Western cultures. In the face of, for example, the trolley dilemma or the footbridge dilemma, moral judgment is influenced by describing the problem as the number of people that could be saved or killed, whether the action resulting in negative moral consequences is a means to an end or an incidental effect to an end, whether it is intentional or unintentional, the number of reasons, and the relative number of lives that could be saved. Moral judgments from different perspectives will produce different differences. The differences in physiological structure, social attributes, positioning and thinking modes between men and women, and the differences in thinking modes under the influence of Western and Eastern cultural values, all have different psychological reactions to the same event, although the differences in moral choices are not obvious. However, there are obvious differences from the level of individual psychological activities.