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Moral Pluralism: Beyond Harm

 

Moral Pluralism: Beyond Harm

[email protected]

Question

Do cultural differences in moral psychology explain political conflict on climate change?

Plan:

Work through Feinberg & Willer, 2013 ‘The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes’

Next quote to analyse

2

Moral-foundations researchers have investigated the similarities and differences in morality among individuals across cultures (Haidt & Joseph, 2004). These researchers have found evidence for five >1 fundamental domains of human morality

(Feinberg & Willer, 2013, p. 2)

Here I am just going to focus on the idea that there is more than one.
Descriptive moral pluralism is the view that humans’ ethical abilities involve distinct moral concerns (such as harm, equality and purity) which are not reducible to just one moral concern.

Why accept [descriptive, not normative] pluralism?

Example: consider a version of consequentialism. Everything ethical boils down to whether it harms another person. This is a normatively monist (not pluralist) picture.
Or classic utilitarianism where it’s all about happiness. There is thought to be a single good.
Now in Part II of this course, our concern is not with whether that is how morality actually is. We care about how people think.
Maybe the truth is that only harm matters, or that only happiness matters. It would still be a good question whether that is how people actually think or whether they recognize multiple, incommensurate moral foundations in their thinking.

first consideration

first consideration is: impure vs harm -> different expectations
This is from study 2 where the harmful actions are matched for weirdness with the impure actions

harmful,

eg. hitting someone over the head with a textbook

impure,

eg. sucking your sisters’ fingers one by one

caption: ‘Study 2 expected behavior means by agent type (harmful versus impure), collapsing across levels of extremeness for both agent type and expected behavior. Means with different letter subscripts differed at p b 0.05. Error bars ± 1 S.E.’

Chakroff, Russell, Piazza, & Young (2017)

See (Dungan, Chakroff, & Young, 2017, p. 12) for a summary of ‘existing evidence for distinct cognitive processing of harm and purity violations. First, information about a violator’s intentions influence moral judgments of harm violations more than purity violations [...]. Second, purity violations, more so than harm violations, are attributed to dispositional versus situational factors [...] and strongly affect perceptions of the violator’s moral character’.
[Some of the evidence for moral foundations theory, including confirmatory factor analysis, supports the claim that there are multiple domains. But there's also some kind of skepticism that we might have about that research, so here's some other research that further supports the claim.]
[I start here because it's important that we have evidence from outside of moral foundations theory, at least for the claim about multiple foundations.]

Why accept (descriptive) moral pluralism?

first consideration

Because we seem to need to appeal to more than one foundational ethical quality—not just harm but also purity—in order to explain patterns in ordinary people’s moral judgements
But it’s more interesting than that ...

second consideration (coming later)

third consideration

There are cultural variations in concerns about specific domains,

and these are related to historical challenges.

ex: purity & pathogens

We know that we need to distinguish harm and purity to keep track of patterns in people’s moral judgements.
But you might say that purity concerns are not genuinely moral at all; you might insist that it’s just a form of political correctness to think that we ought to respect such things and it can only lead to disaster.
But there’s another reason why we should be moral pluralists ...
To explain this I first need a tiny bit of background about human evolution

background: hominin habitats

300kya there were maybe maybe nine hominid species. Why all except one disappeared remains controversial, but it’s unlikely to be a climate event and more likely to have something to do with the humans.
In evolutionary history, different groups of humans have faced quite different environments and challenges.
In fact homo sapiens look like an extreme case even compared to other hominis, who were quite versatile (for example, very cold and very warm places; very wet and completely arid places; woodlands, grasslands and coastal plains).
Caption: ‘Map showing the potential distribution of archaic hominins, including H. erectus, H. floresiensis, H. neanderthalenesis, Denisovans and archaic African hominins, in the Old World at the time of the evolution and dispersal of H. sapiens between ca. 300 and 60 ka’
Source: Roberts & Stewart (2018)

‘the colonization of the world’s continents
by the end of the Pleistocene
represents
one of the clearest idiosyncracies of our species’

(Roberts & Stewart, 2018, p. 542)

different places—different dietary challenges

coming up: comparison with AMY1 gene
This gene influences production of the enzyme amylase in saliva, which is important for digesting starch.

Perry et al. (2007, p. figure 2a)

People in different regions eat different proportions of starch, and have done for thousands of years.
More starch your group eats, the more copies of the AMY1 gene and so the more amylase in your saliva.
‘Our high-starch sample included two agricultural populations, European Americans (n 1⁄4 50) and Japanese (n 1⁄4 45), and Hadza hunter-gatherers who rely extensively on starch- rich roots and tubers (n 1⁄4 38)12. Low-starch populations included Biaka (n 1⁄4 36) and Mbuti (n 1⁄4 15) rainforest hunter-gatherers, Datog pastoralists (n 1⁄4 17) and the Yakut, a pastoralist, fishing society (n 1⁄4 25)’ (p.~1257)
‘the pattern of variation in copy number of the human AMY1 gene is consistent with a history of diet-related selection pressures, demonstrating the importance of starchy foods in human evolution.’ (p.~1259)

not just enzymes, also morals ...

Comparison is instructive—saliva varies, ethics vary, both in the aid of enabling dietary flexibility.
[Hadza lion scavenging story here?]
[connecting evolution to MFT]: ‘pathogens are among the principle existential threats to organisms, so those who could best avoid pathogens would have enhanced evolutionary fitness. Van Vugt and Park contend that human groups develop unique practices for reducing pathogen exposure---particularly in how they prepare their foods and maintain their hygiene. When groups are exposed to the practices of a foreign culture, they may perceive its members as especially likely to carry pathogens that may contaminate one’s ingroup’ (Graham et al., 2013, p. 93)

van Leeuwen et al, 2012 figure 1

(van Leeuwen, Park, Koenig, & Graham, 2012, p. figure 1)
Historical pathogen prevalence
‘binding foundations (mean of Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity). The data for contemporary pathogen prevalence showed a similar pattern.’
‘When controlling for GDP per capita, the pattern of correlations between historical pathogen prevalence and endorsement of moral foundations remained largely unchanged; however, contemporary pathogen prevalence was not significantly correlated with any of the moral foundations’ (van Leeuwen et al., 2012).

‘historical pathogen prevalence

---even when controlling for individual-level variation in political orientation, gender, education, and age---

significantly predicted endorsement of Ingroup/loyalty [stats removed], Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity;

it did not predict endorsement of Harm/care or Fairness/reciprocity’

(van Leeuwen et al., 2012; see also Atari et al., 2022)

Maybe you are sceptical about confounds ... but actuallu the researchers were very careful about this.
‘Participants were 120,778 adult visitors (42.0% female, median age=35 years) to the Web site YourMorals.org who completed the MFQ (Graham et al., 2011) and provided demographic data for country (for participants who moved to their current country at age 14 years or older, the country they grew up in was used instead, cf. Graham et al., 2011). Data from the MFQ were available for 147 countries for which historical pathogen prevalence data were available’
No invariance testing done!

Why accept (descriptive) moral pluralism?

first consideration

second consideration

third consideration

Part of the answer is:
The challenges humans face from place to place have been different.
Moral psychology is, at bottom, a way of dealing with challenges: how do we share for mutual benefit without being taken advantage of? How do we scavenge meat without getting poisoned or killed by larger predators?
Their moral psychologies have been accordingly different.
But it’s more interesting than that ...

fourth consideration

\subsection{Argument for Pluarlism} Moral Foundations Theory is pluralist (it postulates more than one foundation). A monist theory would likely identify harm, or something related to harm, as the one foundation. Why accept pluralism? Because

‘purity concerns uniquely predict [...] attitudes about

gay marriage, euthanasia, abortion, and pornography (Koleva et al., 2012).

Purity also predicts opposition to

stem cell research (Clifford & Jerit, 2013), environmental attitudes (Rottman, Kelemen, & Young, 2015), lawsuits (Buccafusco & Fagundes, 2015), and social distancing in real-world social networks (Dehghani et al., 2016)’

We need not to take this at face value but to check out some of their sources ...

(Graham et al., 2019).

‘Inconsistent with Moral Dyad Theory, our results did not support the prediction that Harm concerns would be the unequivocally most important predictor of sacrifice endorsement. Consistent with Moral Foundations Theory, however, multiple moral values are predictive of sacrifice judgments: Harm and Purity negatively predict, and Ingroup positively predicts, endorsement of harmful action in service of saving lives, with Harm and Purity explaining similar amounts of unique variance. The present study demonstrates the utility of pluralistic accounts of morality, even in moral situations in which harm is central (Crone & Laham, 2015)’ (Graham et al., 2019) on (Crone & Laham, 2015).

Why accept (descriptive) moral pluralism?

first consideration

second consideration

third consideration

fourth consideration

Last consideration was that ‘Purity/degradation judgments predict important thoughts and behaviors over and above Care/harm judgments.’

2

Moral-foundations researchers have investigated the similarities and differences in morality among individuals across cultures (Haidt & Joseph, 2004). These researchers have found evidence for five >1 fundamental domains of human morality

(Feinberg & Willer, 2013, p. 2)

opposition:

- Kollareth, Brownell, Durán, & Russell (2023) against purity as a domain of concern

mention Kollareth et al. (2023) as arguing that there is no purity domain (I do not think their methods are great—they show, in essence, that people do not verbally report feeling grossed out in response to non-health purity violations (‘Frank spent a day wearing a sweater once owned by Adolf Hitler’).) Can contrast with Tracey et al (Which Kollareth et al do not cite)—they do find an effect of ginger on specifically purity violations.

- Gray, Schein, & Ward (2014) it’s all harm

- Curry, Mullins, & Whitehouse (2019)? ‘morality consists of ... solutions to the problems of cooperation’

questions or objections