nostalgebraist:

One of Jonathan Haidt’s experiments involved telling people stories which had been written to feel morally objectionable without involving actual harm or unfairness, and asking people whether any of the characters did anything “morally wrong.” For instance, in one story, a man buys a chicken from a supermarket, then has sex with it before cooking and eating it.

Haidt uses the results of this study (some people say these things are wrong, others don’t) as support for his view that “there’s more to morality than harm and fairness.” When I look at my own reactions to these stories, though, that doesn’t seem quite right.

My reaction to the chicken story is something like “yes, the chicken was already dead, no one was harmed, the action wasn’t ‘bad’ in itself … but I really worry about the moral character of anyone who would do that.“ It’s one thing to let people have their kinks, but “having sex with a dead chicken“ doesn’t resemble anything I’ve ever seen in my travels through internet fetish porn, and seems less like an arbitrary “kink” and more the sort of thing someone would do out of a general zeal for transgressing moral and social rules. In particular, it’s the kind of behavior I would not expect to find in a discussion of “people like you and me doing weird things besides closed doors,” but which I would expect to hear about in, say, the biography of a serial killer. (My impression is that serial killers and related criminals tend to do a lot of this sort of “fucked-up without being obviously appealing in any way” stuff.)

In sum, the action may not be harmful in itself, but if I were to learn that someone had performed it, I would expect that they were the sort of person who would harm others on other occasions. This is even more clear-cut for hypotheticals like “someone says something extremely racist, but in private where there is no one around to be offended by it and no one else will ever hear about it“ – it’s still evidence that the person is a racist.

So couldn’t this just reflect an ambiguity in what we mean by “doing something morally wrong”? It feels kind of off to say that there is “nothing wrong” with what the chicken guy did, not because anyone was harmed, but because it is (to speak crudely) the sort of thing that only harmful people do.

This seems to line up with the supposedly “purity-based” objections made by social conservatives to weird sex or weird art – these often boil down to “clearly no one would enjoy doing this for its own sake, so they must be doing it out of a general distaste for conventional morality and the social fabric, and at some point that distaste is going to result in harm.” I may disagree about exactly which acts qualify for this objection, but the objection itself is not alien to me – it’s exactly what I thought about the chicken guy.

It seems like it would be straightforward to experimentally test this: just ask people about stories in which someone is forced by some contrived scenario to have sex with a dead chicken or whatever, so that it’s clear it doesn’t reflect on their character and isn’t “the sort of thing they would do.” I wonder if anyone has done this? I haven’t finished Haidt’s book, so maybe he talks about this later on.

