Benefiting from misfortune: When harmless actions are judged to be morally blameworthy

Moral Foundations Theory

“…A monist model in which all moral judgments (even those based on explicitly harmless transgressions) are produced by a single mental process (perceptions of intentional dyadic harm) cleans up much of the "litter" of empirically observed moral life, and in this cleaning suffers as a scientific description of morality. To name just three examples, such an account cannot explain: why incidental disgust harshens moral judgments (Schnall et al, 2008), why cognitive processes differ for Care-and Sanctity-based moral judgments (Young & Saxe, 2011), or why moral judgments of character can be produced by less harmful (Tannenbaum, Uhlmann, & Diermeier, 2011) or even harmless (Inbar, Pizarro, & Cushman, 2012) actions. Although not as explicitly committed to monism, accounts boiling morality down to fairness (Baumard et al, 2013) or universal grammar (Mikhail, 2007) can suffer from the same deficits in their ability to adequately describe and explain human morality in all its messiness and complexity (see also Graham, 2013).…”

“…This work has mostly contrasted Sanctity with Care or Fairness (e.g., Feinberg & Willer, 2013;Inbar, Pizarro, & Cushman, 2012;Young & Saxe, 2011), but so far much less work has been done on Loyalty and Authority concerns. Recent (see Table 2.2) and future implicit measures of foundation-related intuitions and reactions could be used by social/cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists to learn more about the automatic processes associated with foundation-related judgments.…”

Moral Judgment and Decision Making

“…For instance, even harmless actions are judged as blameworthy if they contain these cues, such as if the agent appears callous or insensitive (Tannenbaum, Uhlmann & Diermeier, 2011), or appears to possess "wicked" underlying desires (Inbar, Pizarro & Cushman, 2012). Even when there are no clear moral violations or harmful consequences, perceiving a person as having a bad moral character changes how their actions are judged.…”

Mindless, Harmless, and Blameworthy

“…Such acts are often drawn from the domain of moral purity-something that the MMP approach attempts to account for-but not always. For instance, Inbar et al (2012) recently demonstrated that gaining financially 115 from a harmful event (e.g., by betting that a natural disaster will occur within the next year) is judged as a blameworthy act, and individuals who engage in these actions are seen as possessing bad character. In these cases, it is clear that there is no way an individual would 120 have been capable of having caused the harm.…”

“…Namely, that there are a number of situations in which neither agency nor harm (as typically defined) appear necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility and blame. For instance, in our own work we 25 have documented cases in which individuals judge a transgression to be morally wrong despite a clear absence of harm, as well as cases in which individuals are deemed to be blameworthy despite their lack of agency (e.g., Inbar, Pizarro, & Cushman, 2012;Tan-30 nenbaum, Uhlmann, & Diermier, 2011). Elsewhere, we have argued that these results are best explained by a fundamental feature of moral evaluation-the motivation to assess an individual's underlying moral character (Pizarro & Tannenbaum, 2011).…”