The role of victimization in normative judgment and justification: An empirical investigation

Abstract

Are all norms cognized in the same way? I present experimental evidence suggesting that they are not. I propose a distinction between two main classes of violations—the victimful and the victimless—and show that while people tend to rate acts belonging to either category as impermissible, the justifications for their judgments refer to salient features of the act only in the former case. I further show that Feinberg's distinction between harmful and offensive acts is useful in discriminating between different types of victimful violations.

Keywords:

• Harm
• Judgment
• Justification
• Moral Psychology
• Offense
• Victimful Violations
• Victimless Violations

Acknowledgements

This research was begun while the author was in the departments of Anthropology and Psychology at the University of Michigan, and was partly supported by the Culture and Cognition Program. Parts of this paper were presented in seminars at the University of Manchester, at the AHRC Culture & the Mind workshop at the University of Sheffield, and at the ICEA seminar at the University of Oxford. I wish to express my gratitude to audience members for their comments; in particular, I should like to mention Peter Goldie, John Mikhail, and Stephen Stich. Justin Barrett, Emily Burdett, Emma Cohen, Tenelle Porter, Paulo Sousa, and especially Shaun Nichols, who also provided useful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

[1] In this paper, I will refrain from using the terms ‘moral’ and ‘morality’. There are a number of different (and often incompatible) accepted meanings of these terms in philosophy, as illustrated by the essays in Wallace and Walker (1970), and—as far as I’m aware—there has been no investigation of these terms’ folk meanings. When the authors that I cite use the terms ‘morality’ and ‘moral’, I will occasionally adopt them, though I do not commit to a specific meaning of ‘morality’.

[2] I owe this clarification to Shaun Nichols (2004), who elaborates on the necessity of this step.

[3] This, of course, assuming that the victim is aware of the acts of the perpetrator; being unaware of having had a wallet stolen does not equal not having been victimized.

[4] Note that this is not begging the question, because there is no a priori reason why characteristics of the act should be invoked as reasons for its impermissibility.

[5] Whether “mob justice” qualifies as the expression of a legitimate personal grievance is debatable, but it is hard to equate the feeling of a harmed or offended victim with that of those who, say, express their utter outrage at the idea of homosexual conduct taking place in private abodes by taking to the streets.

[6] There is increasing evidence that the folk term ‘disgust’ covers a variety of phenomena that, although related, are heterogeneous in psychological and neurological terms (Rozin, Haidt, & Fincher, 2009; Nabi, 2002; Olatunji et al., 2007; Royzman & Sabini, 2001; Schaich Borg, Lieberman, & Kiehl, 2008; Simpson, Carter, Anthony, & Overton, 2006). As far as the present argument is concerned, I would simply like to stipulate that the disgust reported by those who perceive an offensive act to be impermissible and by those who perceive an act of cannibalism to be impermissible are not cognitively identical.

[7] Part of the problem with Haidt's argument is the ambiguity that creeps into some of its crucial parts. Whether we choose a stronger or weaker interpretation of “closely related,” for example, has important consequences for the argument that follows.

[8] Indeed, Turiel (2006) explicitly criticizes Haidt for discounting the role of reasons in children's normative psychology.

[9] Keil, reviewing psychological research on explanation, appears to agree with my position when noting that “a difference may exist between moral thoughts that have the form of explanations and those that defy explanations in phenomena known as ‘moral dumbfounding’… People sometimes explain their moral judgments by reference to a set of principles, rules, or laws; but other times, often with cases of such taboos as incest, sacrilege, and torture, people have ‘gut’ responses more akin to disgust or perception without apparent explanation” (2006, p. 233).

[10] The full text of the two versions of this case and all other scenarios is available in the Appendix.

[11] All quoted justifications are representative and are given in their entirety except when they contain personal or sensitive details. Spelling and grammatical mistakes have been corrected for clarity.

[12] This story is less implausible than it appears—in Germany in 2001, a man consented to give his body to Armin Meiwes, who had expressed his desire to kill and eat him. The “cannibal” was eventually convicted of murder (though not of cannibalism, which was not illegal in Germany at the time). Note that the scenario used in the experiment did not require the cannibal perpetrator to kill, which may have introduced unwanted harm aspects.

[13] Given the definition of harm adopted, it is difficult to envisage limiting cases in which the harm done to a victim is trivial enough as to result in more impermissibility judgments being made when it is coupled with offense to witnesses than on its own. If such cases existed, a revision of the definition of harm would be necessary.