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Have you ever discovered that a friend has a dramatically
different position than you on a moral matter? Perhaps you found yourself on opposite sides with an old pal in the wake of 9/11 and
the US invasion of Iraq. Maybe, during the Occupy Movement, you discovered that some of your
friends had a different take on financial inequality than you did. Or, possibly, last week you found out that a colleague lined up proudly to get a
Chik-Fil-A sandwich in order to support "traditional marriage day,” whereas you had a different
take on the issue. How would these differences of opinion make you feel? It's likely you might find yourself questioning your opinion of the friend and your relationship with him or her.
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Why
can’t we accept differences in moral opinion the same way we readily accept
differences in other opinions like music preference? What makes moral attitudes so different and divisive?
Psychologists may have a few answers. In comparison to other attitudes, moral attitudes are:
Seen as universal:
Moral attitudes are different from either personal
preferences or social conventions, because we believe that everyone should hold
the same ones we do. When it comes to personal preferences, we accept that people have
different tastes. Even social conventions, things like tipping waiters or not
eating with your hands, are seen as culturally contingent. We are perfectly
happy imagining a different country with different social rules in which people eat with their hands and don't leave tips at restaurants.
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Young children can spot
these differences pretty easily (Turiel, 1998, for a review). When kids as young as
four were asked whether it would be okay to make loud noise if there was no
rule against it, they typically said that this would be okay. However, when
asked whether it would be okay to hit someone else if there was no rule about
it, they typically said that hitting would still be wrong.
Associated with
unique strong emotions:
There is now a sizeable literature discussing the
association between emotions and morality. Overall, psychologists agree that
moral attitudes carry with them an emotional component. Your reaction to
someone who tortured an animal is very different in both strength and tone from your reaction to someone who doesn’t like your favorite sports team. Moral
attitudes are associated with very strong emotions such as disgust, anger, and
shame.
As important as
attitudes about our material welfare:
Having a moral attitude gives us permission to express
opinions that may have nothing to do with our material interests. For example,
we can certainly see why low and middle class individuals vote against tax cuts
for the rich (when they do), but why would wealthy people vote against a bigger
paycheck every month?
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In addition to having a personal or material stake in an
issue, we can have an equally valid moral stake in it. In other words, standing
up for others based on one’s moral values is seen to be as justified as
standing up for oneself. This explains phenomena like “straight allies” in the
LGBT Rights Movement and white supporters of the Civil Right Movement.
To show the strength of this effect, one study (Efron &
Miller, 2012) demonstrated that people who think of the abortion debate as a
moral issue weren’t surprised when men had an opinion on the matter. However,
those people who did not think of the debate as a moral one were surprised as
to why men, who have no personal stake in the matter, would have a strong
opinion on abortion. A related study showed that we believe victims of moral
crimes (i.e. racist graffiti) are more entitled to retribution than victims of
crimes without a moral connotation (i.e. abstract graffiti).
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Give us reason to
punish and distance:
People who have different opinions from us on a moral issue,
in comparison to a non-moral issue, are seen in a fairly bad light. We think of
moral transgressions and differences of opinions to be serious breaches of an innate code. Even people who merely have a
different opinion than we do are seen as somehow unsavory. In one unique study,
researchers showed that we tend to sit further away form people who have
different moral attitudes (Skitka, Bauman, & Sargis, 2005).
Skitka LJ, Bauman CW, & Sargis EG (2005). Moral conviction: another contributor to attitude strength or something more? Journal of personality and social psychology, 88 (6), 895-917 PMID: 15982112
This article is interesting, and I agree with it.
ReplyDeleteThe first answer of the question "Seen as universal" might be approached from cultural persopective because it says young children can spot differences pretty easily.
Which means their moral attitudes can be based on their growing background.
I am strongly agree with cross-cultural perspective, because as this article said
what people see is really important especially young children.
Most children usually do what their parents do because that's what they have lerned since when they born.
Also, the background of people will make most of their behavioral habits.
It also can be explained with Cognitive perspective which is about what people are receiving, and performing.
People have different thought about the same situation depend on what they have received,
and how they interpret the situation.
thanks for this article.:)