Do We View All Wrongdoers as Equally Immoral?
Every so often, we hear of crimes wherein someone inflicts harm on blameless others. This could be in the form of a petty theft, bullying in school, a mass shooting, police caning protestors, terrorist attacks and so on. We often make moral judgements about the inflictors of these crimes. Our judgements differ based on various factors.
Let’s play pretend for a minute.
Imagine you hear of several inflictors of harm who have hit an innocent man: [1] a Harvard Professor [2], a postman, [3] a patient who suffers from schizophrenia, [4] a cat, and [5] a tree branch.
How might your moral judgment of these inflictors of harm vary?
Based on the popular social intuitionist model put forth by eminent social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, your judgement of the inflictor will depend solely on whether or not you feel the emotion of anger. If you feel anger, you judge the inflictor to be immoral, and if you didn’t feel anger, you don’t impose a moral judgement. In other words, the presence or absence of anger creates a figurative “moral line” which distinguishes moral and amoral judgement.
However, there are a few other aspects of our moral judgements in reaction to such crimes that I believe remain unaccounted for.
Firstly, not only can you immediately judge whether the inflictor was immoral to hit the innocent man, you can also automatically rank the degree of inflictors’ immorality relative to each other. For instance, I would rank the degrees of the inflictors immorality as 1,2,3,4,5 with (1) being most immoral and (5) being least immoral.
Secondly, even though you feel the same emotion towards the inflictors, your moral judgements of them may differ. For instance, although you feel anger towards both the postman and the patient who suffers from schizophrenia for hitting the innocent man, you nonetheless perceive one to be more immoral than the other.
What do you think you perceived differently about the inflictors of harm that led to your unequal moral judgements of them?
I propose that how much “mind” one perceives an inflictor of harm to have influences our moral judgement of the inflictor. “Mind” in this case is loosely defined as the sum of knowledge, beliefs, experience, emotional and cognitive capacities that one individual perceives another to possess.
The more “mind” we perceive an individual to have, the more morally upright we expect them to be, and the less harm we expect them to commit. For example, you perceive the Harvard professor to have more “mind” than a patient with schizophrenia, and hence expect him to commit less harm. This could be why you judge him more harshly than a mentally ill patient who commits the same act.
The inverse is true as well. For instance, since we perceive a tree branch to have zero “mind”, we have zero expectation for a tree branch to behave morally. Even if a tree branch causes harm to a man, we do not judge it to be “immoral”.
My illustration demonstrates that our reactions to various inflictors of crime could depend on how much mind we perceive them to have.
Variations in the amount of “mind” we perceive towards different individuals might account for why we feel and judge differently whenever we hear about senseless shootings committed by completely sane policemen, as compared to shootings by mentally ill individuals. It could also account for our aggressively negative reactions when high-ranking politicians (whom we assume have a requisite level of cognitive capacity in order to govern our countries) commit certain blunders, and our relative nonchalance when the average Joe performs the same erroneous behaviours.
