Link Search Menu Expand Document Copy Check Copy
copy for chat

Moral Pluralism: Beyond Harm

A pluralist theory is one which entails that there are multiple kinds of moral concern which are not reducible to just one ultimate concern; for example, both purity and harm. By contrast, a monist theory is one which identifies one fundamental aspect, most likely harm, or something related to harm, as the sole basis for all genuinely moral concern. What kind of evidence might favour descriptive moral pluralism over monism? This section introduces two key sources.

If the slides are not working, or you prefer them full screen, please try this link.

Essay Question

This section is relevant for answering the following question:

Notes

In order to describe human moral psychology, do we need to recognise incommensurable kinds of moral concern?

This section offers three reasons for a positive answer.

First, it seems that harm- and purity-related concerns are incommensurable; and both kinds of concern appear to be involved in ordinary moral judgements (Chakroff, Dungan, & Young, 2013; Chakroff, Russell, Piazza, & Young, 2017).

Second, specific kinds of moral concern (e.g. purity) appear to have had different roles in evolution. For instance, van Leeuwen, Park, Koenig, & Graham (2012) had subjects answer questions which indicated the degree to which they endorsed moral concerns linked to purity, authority and loyalty (the ‘binding foundations’) compared to the degree to which they endorsed moral foundations linked to harm and unfairness (the ‘individual foundations’). They found a link between stronger endorsement of binding foundations and the historical prevalence of pathogens in the region subjects lived:

‘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).[1]

This is coherent with the idea that purity has been important because it enabled humans to mitigate risks from pathogens associated with their diet long before they understood pathogens (see further Atari et al., 2022).

The third reason for accepting (descriptive) moral pluralism is that it appears to be needed to explain how cultural differences in moral psychology underpin attitudes to homosexuality. Greater endorsement of binding foundations appears to explain stronger homophobia (Koleva, Graham, Iyer, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012), and this may explain why both being more socially conservative (Barnett, Öz, & Marsden, 2018) and being more sensitive to disgust (Lai, Haidt, & Nosek, 2014) is correlated with being more homophobic.

While none of these reasons are decisive, it appears that moral pluralism is needed for a variety of explanations. This justifies us in accepting that there are several kinds of moral concern.

Descriptive vs Normative Moral Pluralism

Our focus on this course is humans’ ethical abilities. We are therefore interested in whether or not we need to recognize that they involve multiple moral concerns that cannot be reduced to one ultimate concern. This is a concern about descriptive moral pluralism.

There is a distinct, narrowly philosophical question: Are ‘different values [...] all reducible to one supervalue, or [... are] there really are several distinct values’?[2] This is a question about normative (or ‘foundational’) moral pluralism. It is not our question.

Given that humans’ ethical abilities are limited and may not reflect how things actually are, one might be a descriptive moral pluralism but a normative monist (or conversely).

Glossary

binding foundations : Categories of moral concern linked to social needs; these are often taken to be betrayal/loyalty, subversion/authority, and impurity/purity (Graham et al., 2011).
individual foundations : Categories of moral concern linked to individual needs; these are often taken to be harm/care, cheating/fairness (Graham et al., 2011). Sometimes called individualizing foundations.
moral pluralism : 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.

References

Atari, M., Reimer, N. K., Graham, J., Hoover, J., Kennedy, B., Davani, A. M., … Dehghani, M. (2022). Pathogens are linked to human moral systems across time and space. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 3, 100060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cresp.2022.100060
Barnett, M. D., Öz, H. C. M., & Marsden, A. D. (2018). Economic and Social Political Ideology and Homophobia: The Mediating Role of Binding and Individualizing Moral Foundations. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 47(4), 1183–1194. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-0989-2
Chakroff, A., Dungan, J., & Young, L. (2013). Harming Ourselves and Defiling Others: What Determines a Moral Domain? PLOS ONE, 8(9), e74434. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074434
Chakroff, A., Russell, P. S., Piazza, J., & Young, L. (2017). From impure to harmful: Asymmetric expectations about immoral agents. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 69, 201–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.08.001
Crone, D. L., & Laham, S. M. (2015). Multiple moral foundations predict responses to sacrificial dilemmas. Personality and Individual Differences, 85, 60–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.04.041
Curry, O. S., Mullins, D. A., & Whitehouse, H. (2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. Current Anthropology.
Dungan, J. A., Chakroff, A., & Young, L. (2017). The relevance of moral norms in distinct relational contexts: Purity versus harm norms regulate self-directed actions. PLOS ONE, 12(3), e0173405. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0173405
Feinberg, M., & Willer, R. (2013). The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes. Psychological Science, 24(1), 56–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612449177
Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. P., & Ditto, P. H. (2013). Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism. In P. Devine & A. Plant (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 47, pp. 55–130). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-407236-7.00002-4
Graham, J., Haidt, J., Motyl, M., Meindl, P., Iskiwitch, C., & Mooijman, M. (2019). Moral Foundations Theory: On the advantages of moral pluralism over moral monism. In K. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of Moral Psychology. New York: Guilford Publications.
Graham, J., Nosek, B. A., Haidt, J., Iyer, R., Koleva, S., & Ditto, P. H. (2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 366–385. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021847
Gray, K., Schein, C., & Ward, A. (2014). The Myth of Harmless Wrongs in Moral Cognition: Automatic Dyadic Completion From Sin to Suffering. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(4), 1600–1615.
Haidt, J., & Joseph, C. (2004). Intuitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues. Daedalus, 133(4), 55–66. https://doi.org/10.1162/0011526042365555
Koleva, S. P., Graham, J., Iyer, R., Ditto, P. H., & Haidt, J. (2012). Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes. Journal of Research in Personality, 46(2), 184–194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2012.01.006
Kollareth, D., Brownell, H., Durán, J. I., & Russell, J. A. (2023). Is purity a distinct and homogeneous domain in moral psychology? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(1), 211–235. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001274
Lai, C. K., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2014). Moral elevation reduces prejudice against gay men. Cognition and Emotion, 28(5), 781–794. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2013.861342
Mason, E. (2018). Value Pluralism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/value-pluralism/
Perry, G. H., Dominy, N. J., Claw, K. G., Lee, A. S., Fiegler, H., Redon, R., … Stone, A. C. (2007). Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation. Nature Genetics, 39(10), 1256–1260. https://doi.org/10.1038/ng2123
Roberts, P., & Stewart, B. A. (2018). Defining the ‘generalist specialist’ niche for Pleistocene Homo sapiens. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(8), 542–550. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0394-4
van Leeuwen, F., Park, J. H., Koenig, B. L., & Graham, J. (2012). Regional variation in pathogen prevalence predicts endorsement of group-focused moral concerns. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33(5), 429–437. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.12.005

Endnotes

  1. We cannot entirely rely on these findings because these researchers did not test for measurement invariance and because the version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire they used does not generally exhibit scalar invariance (see Operationalising Moral Foundations Theory). ↩︎

  2. (Mason, 2018). The full quote is:

    ‘Let us distinguish between two levels of pluralism: foundational and non-foundational. Foundational pluralism is the view that there are plural moral values at the most basic level—that is to say, there is no one value that subsumes all other values, no one property of goodness, and no overarching principle of action. Non-foundational pluralism is the view that there are plural values at the level of choice, but these apparently plural values can be understood in terms of their contribution to one more fundamental value’ (Mason, 2018).

    ↩︎