Morality Goes Beyond Mind Perception

Gray and colleagues make two central claims in their target article. The first is that people fundamentally understand morality in terms of a moral dyad consisting of an intentionally harming agent and a suffering patient; the second is that morality necessarily involves the process of perceiving minds. Both claims underlie the broader thesis that mind perception is the essence of morality, but the claims are largely orthogonal, so we discuss them separately. Before we proceed, we must clarify what morality means. The authors subsume multiple distinct phenomena under this term, including moral judgments, moral norms, moral domains, and moral actions. They propose that each of these phenomena must be understood in terms of mind perception and dyadic representation. To defend each of these claims would require separate arguments and separate evidence, which the authors don’t provide. Some of the claims are also unlikely to be true; for example, many moral norms refer neither to mind perception nor to the suffering of others (e.g., not to destroy the environment). Our commentary therefore focuses on the claim that appears to have the best prospect of being true and for which the authors mount the most arguments and evidence: that dyadic representation and mind perception fundamentally characterize moral judgments.