Beyond WEIRD Morality

Before we continue with this week’s edition of Synapse, I want to apologize for missing your inbox last Sunday. I needed a break and gave myself permission to take a Sunday off. It’s been a tough year for a lot of us and I encourage each of you to cut yourself some slack. I’ve got some interesting content planned for the next few weeks. Thanks in advance for your support!

In Toward a Quest of Understanding, I discussed the virtue of using neuroscience and to better understand human nature in an effort to become more compassionate and understanding human beings. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is a book helps me work toward that end and this week I want to share another important tidbit I’ve learned: that even though WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic) are statistical outliers in the global population, they are often the subject of research in the social sciences. The result of this is a tempting erroneous conclusion that WEIRD morality is the “correct” morality.

For example, many psychological studies are conducted on college students because they are located at the same place that these studies are being conducted and are easy to find/recruit. One moral tenant emphasized on many college campuses—especially secular ones—is the harm principle which was popularized by John Stuart Mill and others and states that the only reason anyone should exercise power in a society is to prevent harm.

In other words, moral judgements shouldn’t be extended as long as there isn’t harm done to any person.

Yet, when we venture out into non-WEIRD societies, we find that there is more to morality than harm and fairness. For example, most people would claim that incest is immoral without appealing to any claim of harm. “Incest is just wrong. Period.”

Decades of social science research summarized by Haidt have actually found three types of ethics across WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies:

1. Ethic of Autonomy: The concept that people have their own unique wants and needs and that people have a right to pursue those wants and needs given that they aren’t harming others. This is the foundational ethic of secular, western societies.

2. Ethic of Community: The concept that individuals are first part of a group—family, city, nation, etc—and then an individual. Concepts such as duty and hierarchy are more pronounced in this ethic. Many non-western societies value the ethic of community more