WEIRD morality

Moral Ought

A lot of people from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) societies I’ve met seem to think that “ought” necessarily implies morality. I believe this is either true or false depending on one’s domain-of-moral-ought.

Domain-of-moral-ought

What is a domain-of-moral-ought? A person’s domain-of-moral-ought is whatever counts as a moral issue in their worldview. Moral ought can refer either to moral norms or moral values. A domain-of-moral-ought is contingent upon the idiosyncratic worldview specific to a person, therefore, it differs from one person to another. A clear example of how domains-of-moral-ought can differ between people is on the issue of science’s moral status. According to some people’s worldviews, science never falls within their domain-of-moral-ought whereas for others, science itself is intrinsically amoral but sometimes may be forced to grapple with moral problems in its practical applications; still, some others believe that scientific theorizing is intrinsically moral rather than being only incidentally moral, and therefore, all of science falls under the purview of morality.

Moral Foundations Theory

One’s domain-of-moral-ought is closely linked to one’s intuitive moral foundations. According to Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt & Bjorklund, 2008; Haidt & Kesebir, 2010), the ‘moral domain’ comprises a limited number of areas of social concern. These areas of moral relevance are norms and values pertaining to:

  1. care/​harm

  2. fairness/​cheating

  3. liberty/​oppression

  4. loyalty/​betrayal

  5. authority/​subversion

  6. sanctity/​degradation

Jonathan Haidt explains the differing moral domains by analogy to taste buds. We have taste receptors for sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. But just like we all have the same taste buds yet different tastes in food, it is also true that we all have the same moral taste buds yet different tastes in morality. As a result different groups are more sensitive to different moral taste buds over others. This is a big factor that shapes the differences in our moral ought beliefs.

WEIRD domain-of-moral-ought

Much of WEIRD morality seems to focus exclusively on welfare and justice. EAs in particular seem to be have theories of value that are single-mindedly focused on wellbeing and suffering-reduction. The welfarism (belief that welfare is the only thing with intrinsic value) that seems to be so prevalent in the EA movement ignores non-welfarist theories that recognize other sources of value, such as fairness, equality, or beauty. Welfarism is what happens when one’s domain-of-moral-ought is based only on harm/​care norms without regard for the other norms that exist; sometimes even going so far as to deny the existence of these other norms. Other values such as justice and liberty are merely thought as means to achieving the ultimate moral value of wellbeing or suffering-reduction.

Going back to the moral taste receptor metaphor, WEIRD moralities are like cuisines that only try to activate one or two of these receptors:

Imagine a restaurant which reasoned that since the activation of sweet receptor produces the strongest surge of dopamine in the brain, it is highly efficient in terms of units per of pleasure per calorie to consume sweeteners. This sort of restaurant aims exclusively to stimulate this one taste receptor. Naturally, this would be off-putting to people who are more used to having more than just one taste receptor being satisfied. Likewise, a morality that concerns itself exclusively with suffering-reduction or harm-minimization can ignore important moral issues like justice or liberty.

It is believed that the attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles.

Prudential Ought

In WEIRD societies, where the domain-of-moral-ought is almost exclusively limited to concerns of welfare (care norms) and justice (fairness norms), only norm-violations such as harm and injustice are moralized and, therefore, considered to fall within the purview of moral ought. Norms pertaining to cleanliness, beauty, loyalty, politeness, obedience and sanctity are not intrinsically valuable according to WEIRD morality and so belong to prudential ought. Prudential oughts are adhered to not because they are moral obligations, but because they are instrumental norms which are valued insofar as they contribute to intrinsic values such as care. For instance, I once heard a distinctly WEIRD argument that cleanliness may be justified as a moral norm insofar as it contributes to eradicating disease and reducing the harm that arises from it. This, I feel, to be a stark contrast to non-WEIRD attitudes which value cleanliness in itself, without recourse to welfare. The distinction between moral and prudential ought seems to exist only in WEIRD societies where norms such as “you ought to be loyal to me” or “I ought to be polite to you” are no longer considered moral but are recognized to have some instrumental value if we abide by them. A more pertinent example of a norm that used to be moralized but is now a prudential norm — at least in WEIRD societies — are norms about belief-formation. Belief in a deity’s existence as a matter of moral ought is a clear-cut example of how belief-formation is moralized in many religious people’s worldviews but is largely a matter of prudential ought in WEIRD societies. Neither to believe nor to disbelieve is a matter of moral ought for WEIRD DOMO.

Non-WEIRD domain-of-moral-ought

In contrast to this, many non-WEIRD societies (including my own) moralize many of these so-called prudential norms and consider them to be moral norms. To use the taste buds analogy again, non-WEIRD societies tend to rely on all six moral foundations in tasting the cuisine of their domain-of-moral-ought. In such a worldview, adherence to the law is in itself a moral act independent of its contribution to welfare.

Conclusion

The domain-of-moral-ought differs between WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies. Different DOMOs might be evoked in discussion when morality is evoked because different people have different scopes of the moral domain. In other words, their domain-of-moral-ought differs in what it counts as moral. Part of the reason why these discussions about values can be so heated with so much people talking past each other is because there is no consensus of DOMO. Hopefully this clarification allows for better disagreements between people of different DOMOs.