Harmful transgressions qua moral transgressions: A deflationary view

Abstract

One important issue in moral psychology concerns the proper characterisation of the folk understanding of the relationship between harmful transgressions and moral transgressions. Psychologist Elliot Turiel and associates have claimed with a broad range of supporting evidence that harmful transgressions are understood as transgressions that are authority independent and general in scope which, according to them, characterises these transgressions as moral transgressions. Recently many researchers questioned the position advocated by the Turiel tradition with some new evidence. We entered this debate proposing an original, deflationary view in which perceptions of basic-rights violation and injustice are fundamental for the folk understanding of harmful transgressions as moral transgressions in Turiel's sense. In this article we elaborate and refine our deflationary view, while reviewing the debate, addressing various criticisms raised against our perspective, showing how our perspective explains the existent evidence, and suggesting new lines of inquiry.

Keywords:

• Harm
• Moral transgression
• Punishment
• Moral psychology
• Social cognition.

Notes

¹ “H ”, “I ”, and “MT ” stand for the following properties, respectively: harmful, involving basic-rights violation/injustice, and moral transgression. “∀” represents a universal quantifier, “→” represents a conditional, and “x” is a variable ranging over actions and omissions. This formula should be read as: for any item x, if the item has property H and has property I, then it has property MT.

² The general concept of rights at stake here is the concept of “claim-rights” (for an analysis of this folk concept, see Jackendoff, 1999).

³ In our discussion we leave aside the conventional side of the moral/conventional task and we focus on harmful actions instead of the broader scope of possible immoral actions.

⁴ We leave aside the military cases because they introduce other issues related to utilitarian harm that we discuss in detail elsewhere (see Piazza et al., 2013). It is worth pointing out that the above researchers utilised a slavery scenario as well, but this scenario in fact constitutes a case of simple harm whose results, contrary to their claims, completely support positions like ours and Turiel's (see Sousa, 2009a; Sousa et al., 2009).

⁵ Quintelier et al.'s study had a second aim as well—to demonstrate a methodological problem with current phrasings of the generalisability probe in the moral/conventional task in the Turiel tradition. We disagree with their representation of the Turiel Tradition with regards to this issue, but to elaborate on this would take us outside the scope of this paper. The design and results reported here relate only to the version of the paired scenarios of their study that, according to them, contain the appropriate way of phrasing the generalisability probe.

⁶ Of course, the descriptive-reading confound constitutes a problem that may compromise the validity and reliability of the moral/conventional task more generally. However, this confound is particularly problematic to the drunken-sailor scenarios discussed here because, in their design (in contraposition to the more traditional design of the moral/conventional task), there is an explicit emphasis on an asymmetry between the institutionalised contexts of the first and second scenarios, which makes the descriptive reading of the questions more salient. Moreover, we would argue that while this problem affects the No-Yes pattern of response related to “harmful” scenarios, it does not affect as much the No-Yes pattern related to “conventional” scenarios, a point that we do not have space to develop here.

⁷ Note that this distinct criterion may be related to justice considerations, as punishment-procedural issues have always been discussed under the heading of procedural justice, a point that we do not have space to discuss here.

⁸ This involves the much more complicated issue about how people understand excuses and the relationship between culpability and wrongdoing, which we do not have space to discuss here.

⁹ For preliminary evidence that ordinary people parse the domain of discretionary actions into suberogatory, neutral, and supererogatory actions, and that this parsing is related to badness/goodness that does not imply wrongness/rightness, see Salomon and Sousa (2010).