Moral alchemy: How love changes norms
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Author(s)
Magid, Rachel
Schulz, Laura E
Date Issued
April 2017
Journal
Cognition
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Magid, Rachel W., and Laura E. Schulz. “Moral Alchemy: How Love Changes Norms.” Cognition, vol. 167, Oct. 2017, pp. 135–50.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We discuss a process by which non-moral concerns (that is concerns agreed to be non-moral within a particular cultural context) can take on moral content. We refer to this phenomenon as moral alchemy and suggest that it arises because moral obligations of care entail recursively valuing loved ones’ values, thus allowing propositions with no moral weight in themselves to become morally charged. Within this framework, we predict that when people believe a loved one cares about a behavior more than they do themselves, the moral imperative to care about the loved one's interests will raise the value of that behavior, such that people will be more likely to infer that third parties will see the behavior as wrong (Experiment 1) and the behavior itself as more morally important (Experiment 2) than when the same behaviors are considered outside the context of a caring relationship. The current study confirmed these predictions. Keywords: Moral learning, Ethics of care, Recursive value, Utility
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.COGNITION.2017.03.003
