Psychological Inquiry
David Pizarro, David Tannenbaum
Department of Management
Abstract
There is a compelling simplicity to the theoreti-cal approach to moral judgment proposed by Gray, Young, and Waytz (this issue; henceforth GYW). On their approach, all that is needed to account for the large body of empirical findings on moral judgment is a description of the prototypical moral encounter?a moral agent who brings harm to a moral patient. This is what psychological theorizing ought to look like: ex-plaining the observed complexity of a phenomenon by appealing to more basic, general, psychological mech-anisms. However, the simplicity of the dyadic approach out-lined by GYW may not be sufficient to account for several recently documented aspects of moral judg-ment. Namely, that there are a number of situations in which neither agency nor harm (as typically defined) appear necessary for the ascription of moral respon-sibility and blame. For instance, in our own work we have documented cases in which individuals judge a transgression to be morally wrong despite a clear ab-sence of harm, as well as cases in which individuals are deemed to be blameworthy despite their lack of
