Dëmin

Dëmin is a theoretical construct in moral psychology and decision theory used to describe a cognitive bias in which individuals tend to underweight distant or abstract harms when evaluating moral dilemmas or policy outcomes. It functions as a heuristic that makes people appear more permissive toward actions whose negative consequences are far in the future or difficult to observe directly, even when those consequences are potentially serious.

The term is used to model how people discount moral significance across temporal, spatial, or social distance. In practice, dëmin is measured by presenting participants with scenarios that vary the immediacy, location, or personal relevance of harms and comparing judgments of acceptability or responsibility. Researchers typically describe dëmin with a scale that ranges from minimal to substantial underestimation of distant harms, helping to quantify the strength of the bias in different contexts.

Dëmin has been applied to discussions in climate policy, public health, technology governance, and humanitarian decision-making. In climate policy, a high level of dëmin suggests smaller moral urgency attached to emissions that will affect future generations, potentially influencing target stringency. In public health, it can help explain why distant or probabilistic risks receive less attention than immediate threats. The concept is used to inform experimental designs, risk communication, and ethical guidelines that aim to counterbalance the influence of moral distance.

Critics argue that dëmin may conflate cognitive biases with value judgments or politicized incentives, and that isolating it from other factors such as uncertainty and credibility remains challenging. Related concepts include moral distance, time discounting, and ethical risk perception. See also: moral distance, time preference, risk perception.