| It is commonly held that when people obtain power, their sense of morality lessens. This idea goes back for thousands of years and still rules our understanding on the link between power and moral thinking. In this proposal I challenge this claim. I argue that instead of looking at whether power affects morality itself (whether people are benign or malignant) we should look at how power affects people's style of moral thinking. Based on experimental psychological research into the effect of power on cognition and behavior, I claim that power increases rule-based thinking and decreases outcome-based thinking. That is, when powerful people decide on what is right and what is wrong, they focus on relevant rules and principles, while powerless people focus more on the outcomes of decisions. As a result, I expect that power can both increase and decrease morality. After all, rule-based moral thinking is not inherently ethically superior or inferior than outcome-based thinking. Sometimes dogmatically sticking to the rules can lead to injustice, but at other times arbitrarily ignoring the rules causes injustice. Hence, by looking at the effect of power on the style of moral thinking, we can not only obtain a deeper understanding of how power affects morality, but we can also understand that power does not necessarily decrease but can even increase people's morality. Showing this will give us a complete picture of the power-morality link. |
