Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the/nquestion in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report/nevidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral/ndilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently/nreducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of/nusing a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal/nproperty to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.

This research was partially supported by grants from the Spanish Government (PSI2011-23033, CONSOLIDER-INGENIO2010 CSD2007-00048, ECO2011-25295, and ECO2010-09555-E), from the Catalan Government (SGR 2009-1521), from the 7th Framework Programme (AThEME 613465), the University of Chicago’s Wisdom Research Project and the John Templeton Foundation, a National Science Foundation grant BCS-0849034, and *Language Learning*’s Small Grants Research Program. Alice Foucart was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from the Catalan Government (Beatriu de Pinos). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.