TY - JOUR PY - 2014// TI - Purity matters more than harm in moral judgments of suicide: response to Gray (2014) JO - Cognition A1 - Rottman, Joshua A1 - Kelemen, Deborah A1 - Young, Liane SP - 332 EP - 334 VL - 133 IS - 1 N2 - Many people judge suicide to be immoral. We have found evidence that these moral judgments are primarily predicted by people's belief that suicide taints the soul and by independent concerns about purity. This finding is inconsistent with accounts that define morality as fundamentally based upon harm considerations. In this commentary, we respond to a critique of our finding, and we provide further support for our original conclusions. Even when applying new exclusion criteria to our data, an examination of effect sizes demonstrates that concerns about purity robustly and meaningfully explain variance in moral judgments of suicide. While harm concerns sometimes predict moral judgments of suicide alongside purity concerns, they reliably explain a much smaller proportion of the variance than do purity concerns. Therefore, data from six studies continue to suggest that the relevance of harm concerns for moral judgments of suicide is substantially overshadowed by the contribution of purity concerns.

Language: en

LA - en SN - 0010-0277 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.06.008 ID - ref1 ER -