Article ID: 96.23029
The context of a Not in my backyard (NIMBY) facility, a type of public goods, can be established as a NIMBY dilemma because it includes the moral dilemma that requires an ethical judgment, the rightness or wrongness of a utilitarian choice to save the majority at the expense of the minority. This study examined the effects of moral judgment, empathic concern, and relational mobility on people's judgments in the NIMBY dilemma. Participants who evaluated an utilitarian choice as right in the moral dilemma also rated them as right in the NIMBY dilemma. Ethical evaluation in the moral dilemma was also found to be a positive determinant for ethical evaluation and utilitarian behavioral intention in the NIMBY dilemma. Furthermore, empathic concern was negatively related to utilitarian intentions in the NIMBY dilemma, while inference about the ethical evaluation of others had positive relations. These suggested that intuitive processes, such as moral judgment and empathic concern, intervene decision making in the NIMBY dilemma. We discussed the moral tragedy in which individual moral judgment and empathic concern may lead to collective consequences that undermine public goods.
