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What is the fair way to distribute resources? Past research documents widespread egalitarianintuitions. Charitable donations show the prevalence of redistributive concerns. For recentcontractualist accounts of moral cognition, however, moral judgments should coincide with whatrational agents would agree to in a negotiation, and reflect each party’s relative bargainingpower. How can these perspectives be reconciled? We suggest a key difference lies in whetherthe logic of bargaining drives the underlying interaction, turning existing asymmetries intobargaining power differences. Participants (n = 887) make third-party judgments about themorally best split of a fixed amount. When the context is one of bilateral (Study 1) or third-party(Study 2) negotiation, moral judgments overwhelmingly track bargaining power differences, andcan be predicted with striking quantitative precision. In a closely matched donation setting inwhich the logic of bargaining is irrelevant, moral intuitions are completely reversed, insteadreflecting redistributive or egalitarian concerns. 

ABSTRACT Contractualist moral theories view morality as a matter of mutually beneficial agreements among rational agents. Compared to its rivals in moral philosophy–consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics–contractualism has only recently started to attract attention in empirical work on the cognitive science of morality. Is it fruitful to adopt a contractualist lens to better understand how moral cognition works? After introducing the main contractualist theories in contemporary moral philosophy, I present five reasons to take inspiration from this family of normative theories to develop descriptive accounts of morality. Then, I review how the contractualist framework has been used to contribute to our understanding of moral cognition at three interrelated levels of analysis: Morality's evolutionary logic, its cognitive organization, and the specific cognitive processes and forms of reasoning involved in moral judgment and decision making. First, several evolutionary accounts of morality argue that its evolutionary logic must be understood in contractualist terms. Second, resource‐rational contractualism proposes that the subcomponents of moral cognition–including well‐studied rule‐ and outcome‐based mechanisms, and much less studied agreement‐based processes–are organized to efficiently approximate the outcome of explicit negotiation under resource constraints. Third, recent empirical developments suggest that three characteristically contractualist forms of reasoning–virtual bargaining, we‐reasoning, and universalization–can be involved in producing moral judgments and decisions in a variety of contexts. Beyond the traditional distinction between rules and consequences, these various research programs open a third way for the cognitive science of morality, one based on agreement. This article is categorized under:Psychology > Reasoning and Decision MakingEconomics > Interactive Decision‐MakingPhilosophy > Value 

For contractualist accounts of morality, actions are moral if they correspond to what rational or reasonable agents would agree to do, were they to negotiate explicitly. This, in turn, often depends on each party’s bargaining power, which varies with each party’s stakes in the potential agreement and available alternatives in case of disagreement. If there is an asymmetry, with one party enjoying higher bargaining power than another, this party can usually get a better deal, as often happens in real negotiations. A strong test of contractualist accounts of morality, then, is whether moral judgments do take bargaining power into account. We explore this in vive preregistered experiments (n = 3,025; U.S.-based Prolific participants). We construct scenarios depicting everyday social interactions between two parties in which one of them can perform a mutually beneficial but unpleasant action. We find that the same actions (asking the other to perform the unpleasant action or explicitly refusing to do it) are perceived as less morally appropriate when performed by the party with lower bargaining power, as compared to the party with higher bargaining power. In other words, participants tend to give more moral leeway to parties with better bargaining positions and to hold disadvantaged parties to stricter moral standards. This effect appears to depend only on the relative bargaining power of each party but not on the magnitude of the bargaining power asymmetry between them. We discuss implications for contractualist theories of moral cognition and the emergence and persistence of unfair norms and inequality.