Harm, Help, and the Nature of (Im)Moral (In)Action

Abstract

The title of Gray, Young, and Waytz’s article givesnotice that they are making grand claims, for they pro-fess to identify the “essence of morality.” The authorsdo not actually deal with the entire moral domain, butinstead focus only on immorality, and acknowledgethis in a brief footnote. The crux of their argument re-gardingimmoralityisthat“allmoraltransgressionsarefundamentally understood as agency plus experiencedsuffering – i.e., interpersonal harm” (p. 101).There are many ways to approach an evaluationof their claims; we’ve chosen to focus on forms of(im)morality rather than specific content. In this com-mentary we concern ourselves with both morality andimmorality. In doing so we contend that there are fourdistinct “quadrants” that compose the (im)moral do-main, and Gray et al. specifically address one of them.We then attempt to use their dyadic mind perceptionperspective to better understand the four distinct quad-rants. Although a thorough mapping of the forms ofmorality and immorality poses an important challengeto the Gray et al. claims, in the end we hope to demon-strate that they have provided a very valuable analy-sis of (im)morality; however, this conclusion rests ontweaking their argument in particular ways, as we dis-cuss next.