The Moral Dyad: A Fundamental Template Unifying Moral Judgment

Felix Mendelssohn, the famous Romantic composer, sought to take the unique experiences of each human life—distinctive sorrows and personal pleasures—and give them universal expression in his music. Likewise, a key goal of science is to take diverse phenomena and ask whether such diversity can be unified at a deeper level. Darwin, for instance, saw a common process underlying the diversity of species, and Maxwell saw a common set of equations uniting both electricity and magnetism. In our target article (Gray, Young, & Waytz, this issue), we suggested that the diversity of moral judgment is underlain by the moral dyad, a psychological template of two perceived minds—a moral agent and a moral patient. This idea is inspired by decades of research from cognitive psychology suggesting that concepts1 (e.g., birds, dogs, furniture) are understood not as strict definitions but as prototypes or exemplar sets (Murphy, 2004). In the case of morality, we suggest that this prototype is interpersonal harm: an intentional moral agent causing suffering to a moral patient. This dyad not only serves to represent the most canonical and powerful examples of immorality, but—more important—acts as a cognitive working model or template through which all morality is understood (Craik, 1967). In the target article, we summarized this statement as “mind perception is the essence of morality,” which helps explains not only the general correspondence between perceptions of mind and moral judgments (Bastian, Laham, Wilson, Haslam, & Koval, 2011; H. M. Gray, Gray, &