Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA; Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences Program, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA.
Cognition. 2022 Mar;220:104980. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104980. Epub 2022 Jan 3.
There is wide-ranging consensus that harm or perceptions of harm play a significant role in judgments of moral wrongdoing. On one prominent view, the pattern that makes up the "essence" (Gray, Waytz, & Young, 2012) of acts of moral wrongdoing is "harm caused by an agent" (Schein, Goranson, & Gray, 2015, p. 983). According to Gray, Schein, and colleagues, events matching this pattern-a thinking/intentional agent inflicting some manner of harm (i.e., emotional/physical pain) upon a suffering patient-will be perceived as immoral. With this proposal in mind, we argue two basic points: (1) the current specification of the dyadic template would need to be further refined or "fortified" to withstand some obvious counter-examples; (2) this "fortified" formulation is still unfit to address the underlying concern: for any general pattern that is supposed to link perceptions of harm and wrongdoing, there are a number of cases (the "wrongless harms" of the title) that match the pattern quite well but are not viewed as immoral. We show this in four studies and one supplementary study. In our original study, we find, across six vignettes, that people may judge a behavior to be intended, self-serving, as well as foreseeably harmful and yet not judge it immoral. In our subsequent studies, we replicate these results with further checks and controls. With these findings in mind, we argue that moral cognition is far too complex and capricious to be reduced to a template.
人们普遍认为，伤害或伤害感知在道德错误判断中起着重要作用。有一种观点认为，构成道德错误行为“本质”（Gray、Waytz 和 Young，2012）的模式是“行为者造成的伤害”（Schein、Goranson 和 Gray，2015，第 983 页）。根据 Gray、Schein 和同事们的说法，符合这种模式的事件——即思维/故意的行为者对受苦的患者造成某种伤害（即情感/身体疼痛）——将被视为不道德的。考虑到这一建议，我们提出两点基本观点：（1）目前对二元模板的规范需要进一步细化或“加强”，以抵御一些明显的反例；（2）这种“加强”的表述仍然不适合解决潜在的问题：对于任何旨在将伤害感知和错误联系起来的一般模式，都有许多案例（标题中的“无罪伤害”）非常符合这种模式，但不被视为不道德。我们在四项研究和一项补充研究中证明了这一点。在我们的原始研究中，我们发现，在六个案例中，人们可能会判断一个行为是有意的、自私的，并且可以预见是有害的，但不会判断它不道德。在随后的研究中，我们通过进一步的检查和控制来复制这些结果。考虑到这些发现，我们认为道德认知太复杂和多变，不能简化为模板。
