Mindless, Harmless, and Blameworthy

There is a compelling simplicity to the theoretical approach to moral judgment proposed by Gray, Young, and Waytz (this issue; henceforth GYW). On 10 their approach, all that is needed to account for the large body of empirical findings on moral judgment is a description of the prototypical moral encounter—a moral agent who brings harm to a moral patient. This is what psychological theorizing ought to look like: ex15 plaining the observed complexity of a phenomenon by appealing to more basic, general, psychological mechanisms. However, the simplicity of the dyadic approach outlined by GYW may not be sufficient to account for 20 several recently documented aspects of moral judgment. Namely, that there are a number of situations in which neither agency nor harm (as typically defined) appear necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility and blame. For instance, in our own work we 25 have documented cases in which individuals judge a transgression to be morally wrong despite a clear absence of harm, as well as cases in which individuals are deemed to be blameworthy despite their lack of agency (e.g., Inbar, Pizarro, & Cushman, 2012; Tan30 nenbaum, Uhlmann, & Diermier, 2011). Elsewhere, we have argued that these results are best explained by a fundamental feature of moral evaluation—the motivation to assess an individual’s underlying moral character (Pizarro & Tannenbaum, 2011). On this person35 centered account, the question at the heart of moral evaluation is, Is this a good person or a bad person? This approach, which emphasizes the goal of evaluating persons over time, stands in contrast to many extant theories of moral judgment that emphasize moral 40 evaluations made for singular acts (often inspired by deontological and consequentialist normative theories; Bayles, 1982) and that characterize moral judgment as seeking to answer a different set of questions such as, Was a moral rule broken? Was any harm caused? and 45 Did the person have an intention to act harmfully? To be sure, the Morality as Mind Perception account (hereafter MMP) defended by GYW reliably accommodates many intuitions about how individuals arrive at judgments of moral blame and responsibility, such 50 as the intuition that individuals who intended harm are more blameworthy than those who did not, and that harmless acts often do not even qualify for moral evaluation. But the person-centered approach, we have argued, is better suited to account for recent findings 55 demonstrating that even actions that are harmless or mindless (i.e., not performed with obvious agency) are nonetheless judged to be blameworthy. To its credit, the MMP account goes beyond current theories of moral judgment in its acknowledgment of 60 character as a central feature of moral evaluation (albeit in a supporting role). However it still relies fundamentally on the claim that morality is, at its essence, about the dyadic relationship between a moral agent and a moral patient. For instance, GYW contend that “all 65 moral transgressions are fundamentally understood as agency plus experienced suffering—i.e., interpersonal harm—even ostensibly harmless acts such as purity violations” (p. XX). It is possible, as GYW argue, that even in the absence of explicit harm, moral trans70 gressions (such as eating an already-dead dog; Haidt, 2001; Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993) may be implicitly viewed as causing symbolic harm and suffering. Yet from a person-centered perspective, it is not necessary to stretch the definition of harm in this fashion in or75 der to account for such acts. Because even harmless acts can be informative of an individual’s underlying character, such acts are important candidates for moral evaluation. It is to these harmless (and in some cases mindless) acts that we turn. 80