The Human Moral Mind – Econlib

• Experiments consistently reveal that our moral judgments are driven by perceptions of harm. We condemn acts based on how much they seem to victimize someone vulnerable.

• —Kurt Gray, Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground (page 8)

In his book, Outraged, Kurt Gray studies the psychology of moral attitudes. He argues that humans all share the same basic idea of morality. We take the side of the victim of intentional harm and wish to see the perpetrator punished. Our moral disagreements come from different perceptions of the severity of harm and whether a particular claim of victim status is valid.

Gray’s view of morality can be contrasted with Friedrich Nietzsche’s distinction between master morality and slave morality. As described by Gregg Henriques,

Master morality is:

• Focused on those who are strong, powerful, or above the herd; concerned with ethical codes that emphasize excellence, virtue, strength, merit, and toughness; legitimizes power differentials; and orients towards hierarchical or authoritarian political systems

Slave morality is:

• Focused on those who are abused, oppressed, weak, or suffering; concerned with justice, equality, and fairness; works to delegitimize power imbalances; orients towards socialist or communal political systems

In Gray’s view, humans are naturally inclined toward something closer to slave morality. He attributes this to the prehistoric environment in which we once lived in fear of powerful predators, including large wild beasts. We evolved to form groups that could increase our ability to survive, and these groups in turn evolved a moral outlook that was focused on protecting individuals from harm.

As history unfolded, humans have been able to reduce the risks posed by nature and drive many of the ancient wild beasts to extinction. By now, the biggest threats to humans come from other humans. But the moral drive to protect individuals from harm has stuck with us.

Gray writes,

• Moral outrage is the psychological tool that motivates people to punish wrongdoers, even at cost or risk to themselves. It is a “commitment device,” something that commits people to punishment, even though trying to punish someone can be dangerous. When we witness unjust harm, whether someone committing interpersonal violence or blatant cheating, we have an embodied physical reaction. We get angry, our blood pressure spikes, our heart beats faster; we thirst for retribution. p. 81

Gray suggests that nowadays, moral outrage is often excessive and inappropriate. We are much safer than we were hundreds of years ago, and much, much safer than we were in prehistoric times, when our brains evolved. But we consume media that is saturated with threats and divisiveness.

Given the universal drive to be outraged by intentional interpersonal harm, what can account for our disagreements over morality and politics? Gray argues that these disagreements reflect different perceptions of the nature of harm, and especially differences concerning victim status. Gray writes,

• Moral divisions arise because liberals and conservatives have different assumptions of vulnerability (AoVs). They disagree about who is especially vulnerable to mistreatment and victimization…

• Much political disagreement is driven by liberals and conservatives having different assumptions of vulnerability about four entities: the Environment (for example, Planet Earth), the Divine (for instance, God), the Powerful (for example, state troopers), and the Othered (such as undocumented immigrants). Compared with conservatives, liberals tend to view the Environment and the Othered as more vulnerable to victimization and the Powerful and the Divine as less vulnerable.

• … Committed liberals amplify differences in vulnerability, splitting the world into the very vulnerable (the oppressed) and the very invulnerable (oppressors). Committed conservatives dampen differences in vulnerability, seeing all people as relatively similar in their vulnerability… p. 193

The concept of differences in AoVs seems useful. For example, consider how different AoVs were apparent in the reactions in December of 2024 to the assassination of health insurance executive Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangioni, a young man who suffered from back pain.

The AoV concept relates to an earlier book co-authored by Gray and Daniel Wegner. They found that people have two clusters of beliefs about other humans. One is that those humans have rational agency; the other is that humans can feel suffering. When focusing on a single individual in an emotionally fraught situation, we become tempted to view one person as the villain and the other as the victim, rather than take a more nuanced perspective.

Based on his framework, Gray suggests that political differences can be bridged if people can come to empathize with the other side’s assumptions of vulnerability. For example, if a gun rights activist can appreciate the story of a gun control advocate whose close friend or relative was killed by a gun, the activist might at least acknowledge the humanity of the gun control advocate.

Some Unanswered Questions

When I finished Outraged, I had questions that I thought remained unanswered. Gray devotes considerable effort to trying to establish that harm prevention is the single factor that is involved in moral psychology. He takes particular pains to criticize the multifactor “moral foundations” model of Jonathan Haidt.

But reducing moral psychology to a desire to deter interpersonal harm leaves us with a tautology, not a theory. In any sentence, we can replace “takes a moral stand against” with “wants to reduce interpersonal intentional harm caused by,” every time. But doing so leaves us without any explanatory power over how the moral stand arose.

All of the explanatory work that is attempted by moral foundations theory, or Nietzsche’s model, instead gets done in Gray’s framework by assumptions of vulnerability. We now want to ask, what causes people to have different AoVs? Why do liberals amplify differences in vulnerability? Why do they see the Environment and the Othered as especially vulnerable, and the Divine and the Powerful less so? For that matter, why does the Environment or the Divine have standing as an entity that can feel harm? And is Othered a fixed identity group? Whether Jews are Othered or by whom seems to vary over history. And Trump supporters seem to be Othered by many Democrats.

Gray points out that a soccer fan will see a fallen player on his favorite team as an injured victim, while viewing a fallen player from another team as faking injury. This suggests to me that group loyalty is an important factor in moral psychology.

Implicitly, Gray is promising to tell us why we are outraged. The answer seems to be that we have different assumptions of vulnerability. Fair enough. Supporters of Israel see that country as vulnerable to Muslim Arab militancy, and they are outraged. Opponents of Israel see Arabs as vulnerable to Israel’s “settler colonialism,” and they are outraged.

What can be done to reduce outrage? Perhaps understanding one another’s stories is the solution. But perhaps not. The conflicts that America had with Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Communist Soviet Union were not solved by mutual understanding.

Footnotes

[1] Kurt Gray, Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground. Pantheon, 2025.

[2] Gregg Henriquez, “Political Correctness is all about Slave Morality,” Psychology Today, April 26, 2016.

[3] The Mind Club, by Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray, which I reviewed in my article “Two Theories of Mind.” Library of Economics and Liberty, Oct. 3, 2021.