Expanding on Moral Dyad Theory

Schein and Gray on Harm, Negative Affect, and Norm Violation

Chelsea Schein and Kurt Gray write (2017),

we suggest that moral judgments emerge when three components are present: norm violations, negative affect, and dyadic harm.

Dyadic harm means

an intentional agent causing damage to a vulnerable patient.

In my previous post on the Moral Dyad, and in The Mind Club by Gray and Wegner, the example of an intentional agent is a robot and the example of a vulnerable patient is a baby. It was a commenter on my earlier post that pointed me to the Schein-Gray article.

Schein and Gray emphasize that there is a continuum between harmful and harmless. Also, harm cannot necessarily be measured objectively.

Amplifying the moral dyad concept:

Moral judgment is proportional to the agency of agents, the experience of patients, and the clarity of causation between them; acts with obviously intentional agents who cause obvious damage to obviously vulnerable patients should seem both most harmful and immoral. Consistent with this idea, people will robustly condemn the CEO of a corporation (obvious thinking doer) for taking a 2-year-old (obvious vulnerable feeler) and hitting her across the face (causing obvious damage). On the contrary, people will not generally condemn a 1-year-old who squishes an ant, because toddlers lack agency and ants lack experience.

Also,

Harm is not merely the presence of an intentional agent and suffering patient but also involves a causal act linking them together (Cushman, 2015; Cushman et al., 2006). The clearer this causation, the more obvious the harm, which is why moral judgments are attenuated when causality is unclear

During the George Floyd trial, some conservative media outlets cast doubt on the cause of Floyd’s death, claiming that he was saying “I can’t breathe” long before he was on the ground. They also cast doubt on Officer Chauvin as having intent to harm Floyd by pointing out that Floyd did not accept other forms of restraint and claiming that Chauvin’s use of a knee on the neck was a conventional procedure.

Of course, the outcome of the trial indicates that the jury found such defenses unpersuasive. My point is that people with different opinions nonetheless argued within the moral dyad framework. As Schein and Gray put it, using pornography as an example,

One might argue that one side of each debate is wrong, and that there is an objective fact about harm, such that pornography either causes harm or not. However, we suggest that claims of “objective” harm are misplaced, at least as they concern moral psychology.

Schein and Gray argue that the perception of harm starts with fast thinking but can be modified by slow thinking.

People are lousy moral utility calculators (Sheskin & Baumard, 2016), and generally not consequentialist thinkers (Baron, 1994). Instead, harm is an intuitive perception—one that is affective and often motivated, and which may or may not cohere to an external objective reality of the immediate or absolute number of people killed….[but] initial intuitive perceptions of harm can be modified by additional conscious reasoning…Overall, both harm itself and the elements composing harm are perceived intuitively, even if reason can strengthen or weaken these perceptions.

To me, Schein and Gray seem to be saying that morality is universal in that we perceive harm in terms of agents, patients, and causality. But it is heterogeneous in that individuals and cultures may assess particular actions differently with respect to who is an agent, who is a patient, and how reliably causality may be determined.

This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.