Explaining Away Differences in Moral Judgment

Abstract

Moral judgments about harm versus impurity differ in a number of nonsuperficial ways, as shown by dozens of studies, conducted by dozens of separate research labs, using a wide variety of methods and stimuli. Gray and Keeney attempt to explain away these differences by arguing that the “confounds” of severity and typicality may account for them all. This comment examines the evidence for this claim. Severity and typicality are undoubtedly important factors for moral judgment, but Gray and Keeney fail to demonstrate that they account for any (much less all) of the harm/impurity differences in the literature. Correlated ratings of “harm” and “impurity” are redundant with severity (.93 ≤ rs ≤ .97), merely tracking overall wrongness. The conclusion that harm and impurity judgments don’t meaningfully differ at all, that all the functional and cognitive differences in the literature are “illusions” resulting from confounds and “sampling bias,” is entirely unwarranted by the present studies.