Animal welfare depends on moral judgments about harming animals. The Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM) predicts people judge it more morally wrong to harm animals when they perceive intentional harm and believe animals can suffer. However, the TDM ignores the agency of harmed animals. In this dissertation, I conducted two online survey experiments that manipulated agency beliefs about harmed animals (i.e., free will beliefs about sea turtles harmed by plastic pollution. and intelligence beliefs about pigs harmed by eating them) to test whether people use animal agency beliefs to rationalize and reduce their moral concern about harming animals. Since the TDM predicts less judged moral wrongness when one perceives less intentional harm, I tested whether people rationalize they are less morally responsible because (1) the animals have free will and are causally responsible for harming themselves, or (2) they (the humans) did not intend to do the harmful action or cause the animal suffering. In the first experiment, I found evidence of the first rationalization. Framing sea turtles as having free will increased free will beliefs about sea turtles, and, amongst political conservatives, reduced moral concern for sea turtles in terms of moral judgments and behavioral intentions (but not feelings of guilt), and it increased agency beliefs that sea turtles intended and are responsible for the self-harming behavior of eating plastic straws. Amongst political conservatives, framing sea turtles as lacking free will also increased these agency beliefs and decreased moral concern, suggesting free will salience suffices for conservatives.
In the second experiment, I failed to find evidence of the second rationalization. I replicated prior findings that framing pigs as more intelligent than dogs increases wrongness judgments about eating pigs from the imagined perspective of others, and not from one’s own perspective. However, I failed to find evidence that framing pigs as more intelligent caused people to rationalize that they did not intend to harm pigs. Self-affirmation theory predicts rationalizations decrease after affirming the self, but I found no evidence of this. Moreover, I found that perceived pig intelligence weakly predicts perceived pig suffering. I discuss its implications for future research.
