Relativism or tolerance? Defining, assessing, connecting, and distinguishing two moral personality features with prominent roles in modern societies.

Abstract

This work disentangles moral tolerance from moral relativism and reveals their distinct personological meanings. Both constructs have long been of interest to moral philosophers, moral psychologists, and everyday people, and they may play prominent roles in the feasibility of modern diverse societies. However, they have been criticized as devaluing morality and as producing overly permissive societies. Moreover, although they lack necessary conceptual implications for each other, they are easily (and often) conflated. Three studies included nine samples (total N>3,200, 40%-50% female, Mage =38-40, 83% white). Participants completed (online) new measures of moral tolerance and moral relativism, along with measures of 40 additional constructs. Results reveal robust psychometric quality of the new measures (the Moral Relativism Scale and the Moral Tolerance Scale), demonstrate that the constructs are empirically overlapping but separable, and highlight their distinct personological networks. Moral relativism was associated with liberal political views and a lowered valuing/enacting of moral values. Moral tolerance was weakly associated with liberal political views but was strongly related to a broad range of both liberal and conservative moral values. This work yields new tools for investigating moral character, and it reveals the differential meaning of two important moral constructs.