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With the COVID-19 pandemic threatening millions of lives, changing our behaviors to prevent the spread of the disease is a moral imperative. Here, we investigated the persuasiveness of messages inspired by three major moral traditions. A sample of US participants representative for age, sex and race/ethnicity (N= 1032) viewed messages from either a leader or citizen containing deontological, virtue-based, utilitarian, or non-moral justifications for adopting social distancing behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. We measured the messages’ effects on participants’ self-reported intentions to wash hands, avoid social gatherings, self-isolate, and share health messages, as well as their beliefs about others’ intentions, impressions of the messenger’s morality and trustworthiness, and beliefs about personal control and responsibility for preventing the spread of disease. Consistent with our pre-registered predictions, compared to non-moral control messages, deontological arguments had a modest effect on intentions to share the message. Message source (leader vs. citizen) did not moderate any of the observed effects of message type. A majority of participants predicted the utilitarian message would be most effective, but we found no evidence that the utilitarian message was effective in changing intentions or beliefs. We caution that our findings require confirmation in replication studies and are modest in size, likely due to ceiling effects on our measures of behavioral intentions and strong heterogeneity across all dependent measures along several demographic dimensions including age, self-identified gender, self-identified race, political …