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Puritanism needs purity, and moral psychology needs pluralism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2023

Jesse Graham Open the ORCID record for Jesse Graham [Opens in a new window] ,
Mohammad Atari ,
Morteza Dehghani  and
Jonathan Haidt
Jesse Graham
Affiliation:
Department of Management, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA jesse.graham@eccles.utah.edu
Mohammad Atari
Affiliation:
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA matari@fas.harvard.edu
Morteza Dehghani
Affiliation:
Departments of Psychology and Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA mdehghan@usc.edu
Jonathan Haidt
Affiliation:
Business and Society Program, New York University, New York, NY, USA jhaidt@stern.nyu.edu
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Abstract

This account of puritanical morality is useful and innovative, but makes two errors. First, it mischaracterizes the purity foundation as being unrelated to cooperation. Second, it makes the leap from cooperation (broadly construed) to a monist account of moral cognition (as harm or fairness). We show how this leap is both conceptually incoherent and inconsistent with empirical evidence about self-control moralization.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 46 , 2023 , e307
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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