Citation

Gray K. Cognition 2014; 133(1): 329-331.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, United States. Electronic address: kurtgray@unc.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.cognition.2014.06.007

PMID

25023146

Abstract

Two prominent theories offer different perspectives on the role of harm in moral cognition. Dyadic morality suggests that harm-related concerns are pervasive, whereas moral pluralism suggests that these concerns apply only to canonically harmful violations (e.g., murder), and not impure violations (e.g., suicide). Rottman et al. (2014) contrast these two theories by examining moral judgments of suicide. They conclude that suicide wrongness is independent of harm, therefore arguing against dyadic morality and for moral pluralism. However, these conclusions may be overstated; across all these studies, a meta-analysis reveals that harm is a significant predictor of suicide judgments. Moreover, the association between harm and suicide wrongness may be suppressed in individual studies by insufficient power, restrictive exclusion criteria, a single bivariate outlier, and reliance upon the conventional significance threshold of p<.05. In revised analyses harm is robustly associated with suicide wrongness, consistent with dyadic morality.

Language: en