Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 133, Issue 1, October 2014, Pages 329-331
Cognition

Harm concerns predict moral judgments of suicide: Comment on Rottman, Kelemen and Young (2014)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.06.007Get rights and content

Abstract

Two prominent theories offer different perspectives on the role of harm in moral cognition. Dyadic morality suggests that harm-related concerns are pervasive, whereas moral pluralism suggests that these concerns apply only to canonically harmful violations (e.g., murder), and not impure violations (e.g., suicide). Rottman et al. (2014) contrast these two theories by examining moral judgments of suicide. They conclude that suicide wrongness is independent of harm, therefore arguing against dyadic morality and for moral pluralism. However, these conclusions may be overstated; across all these studies, a meta-analysis reveals that harm is a significant predictor of suicide judgments. Moreover, the association between harm and suicide wrongness may be suppressed in individual studies by insufficient power, restrictive exclusion criteria, a single bivariate outlier, and reliance upon the conventional significance threshold of p < .05. In revised analyses harm is robustly associated with suicide wrongness, consistent with dyadic morality.

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Acknowledgments

For helpful comments, thanks to Sierra Bainter, Lisa Feldman-Barrett, Karim Kassam, Kristen Lindquist, Keith Payne, and Chelsea Schein. Thanks to Joshua Rottman for generously sharing these data.

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