The many faces of moralized self-control: Puritanical morality is not reducible to cooperation concerns

Abstract

Fitouchi et al.'s moral disciplining approach highlights the significant role social evaluations of self-control appear to play in human moral judgment. At the same time, attributing the wide range of puritanical concerns to a singular focus on self-control seems unwarranted. A more pluralistic approach would enrich understanding of moral judgment in all its cultural and historical diversity.

Fitouchi et al. argue that moral judgments are produced by a single, functionally unified cognitive mechanism that has evolved to support cooperation. The core feature of this proposed mechanism is to moralize behaviors that are seen as causally related to socially harmful outcomes. Accordingly, humans moralize seemingly harmless hedonic behaviors because these are indicative of poor self-control and therefore serve as obstacles to social cooperation. This unifying account is interesting, and also attractive from the standpoint of parsimony. In its current incarnation, however, it is problematic in several ways.

First, the normative concerns categorized as “puritanical” in Fitouchi et al.'s account don't necessarily share unitary origins or reflect unitary concerns. Sexuality, for example, falls within the purview of puritanical moral concerns, and the target article implies that moral concerns regarding female sexuality simply reflect more general concerns about poor self-control. In contrast, Hrdy (2009) has suggested that policing of female sexuality and elaboration of female chastity values is historically (and uniquely) tied to the emergence of land ownership and patrilineal inheritance, which isn't readily explained by a self-control account.

Second, the authors contend that the propensity to monitor others' self-control stems from prosocial interest in potential cooperation. Yet other accounts are available for explaining the prevalence of self-control monitoring, and some attempt is needed to adjudicate between alternative accounts. For example, Joffe and Staerklé (2007) have identified self-control monitoring as a mechanism by which societal malfunctions are interpreted as individual failings, ultimately contributing to justification of existing injustices. On their account, then, self-control monitoring is key to antisocial psychological processes, in contrast to Fitouchi et al.'s cooperation-centered framing of self-control monitoring.

Thus, a myriad of evolutionary and psychological processes likely undergirds self-control monitoring and puritanical morality alike. In fact, significant ambiguity bedevils the very concept of morality, which poses difficulty for unitary accounts regarding its evolutionary and psychological basis. Along those lines, describing morality as an adaptation to cooperation does not distinguish between moral phenomena and other things that facilitate cooperation, such as language, social understanding, and social conventions. Consequently, the cooperative function of morality provides only limited explanatory value regarding the nature of moral cognition.

Positing that morality is reducible to concerns about harm, fairness, or cooperation implies that these are the defining features constituting the moral domain. In doing so, the moral disciplining approach commits to a “classical view” of concepts (see Rosch, 1978), which holds that all instances of a concept share common properties that are necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership (Smith & Medin, 1981). Yet, as decades of research have shown, human concepts generally cannot be characterized in terms of necessary and sufficient features (Keil, 1992; Markman, 1989). This is certainly the case for morality, as there is no consensus regarding its constitutive features, despite millennia of effort (Heath, 2017; Stich, 1993, 2018).

The notion that humans possess a special purpose, functionally unitary, moral cognition mechanism that is dedicated to detecting a set of essential features is worth questioning for other reasons, as well. This framing implies that the moral domain is organized around a moral essence that distinguishes the moral domain from other domains, complete with moral-specific psychological processes (McHugh, McGann, Igou, & Kinsella, 2022). In contrast, the multifaceted nature of the moral domain and its overlap with normative (Kelly & Setman, 2020), mentalistic (Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012), and causal cognition (Astuti & Bloch, 2015) calls into question the plausibility that all human moral worldviews revolve around a singular core mechanism.

Finally, Fitouchi et al. suggest that the tendency to moralize bodily pleasures and self-discipline “compensates” for perceived self-control deficits. For example, they point to correlational data indicating that environments with perceived low levels of self-control tend to be associated with greater endorsement of puritanical values. Although these are interesting correlations, the source of the relationship is not clear and multiple factors may play a role in generating these patterns.

We recommend that greater emphasis be placed on diverse moral outlooks appearing in different cultural and historical contexts (Miller, 2015). This approach embeds moral reasoning within a network of psychological and sociocultural processes that collectively shape it. To illustrate, self-control may relate to a broader symbolic emphasis placed on distinguishing between humans and animals in European thought (Agamben, 2004) or to concepts of divinity believed to be shared by humans and animals alike in Hinduism (Shweder, 2003). Put another way, symbolic folk concepts reflect human systems of meaning which are constitutive of psychological phenomena (Bruner, 1990), including moral reasoning (Much & Harré, 1994).

In sum, self-control monitoring is an important aspect of moral reasoning. However, simultaneous recognition of the importance of other factors and mechanisms in shaping such reasoning is necessary. Shedding light on the variety of folk concepts that are constitutive of moral psychology marks a fruitful path forward.