Mathematical foundations of moral preferences

TL;DR

This paper reviews the mathematical foundations of moral preferences, emphasizing their role in explaining various unselfish behaviors and their potential applications in policy and artificial intelligence.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review and proposes mathematical foundations for moral preferences to enhance understanding and modeling of selfless human actions.

Findings

Moral preferences better explain unselfish behaviors than social preferences.

Interventions highlighting morality can increase charitable donations.

Mathematical foundations enable improved modeling of moral decision-making.

Abstract

One-shot anonymous unselfishness in economic games is commonly explained by social preferences, which assume that people care about the monetary payoffs of others. However, during the last ten years, research has shown that different types of unselfish behaviour, including cooperation, altruism, truth-telling, altruistic punishment, and trustworthiness are in fact better explained by preferences for following one's own personal norms - internal standards about what is right or wrong in a given situation. Beyond better organising various forms of unselfish behaviour, this moral preference hypothesis has recently also been used to increase charitable donations, simply by means of interventions that make the morality of an action salient. Here we review experimental and theoretical work dedicated to this rapidly growing field of research, and in doing so we outline mathematical foundations for moral preferences that can be used in future models to better understand selfless human actions and to adjust policies accordingly. These foundations can also be used by artificial intelligence to better navigate the complex landscape of human morality.