are also engaged when we consider adults with developmental disorders or brain injury, as these deficits are often associated with selective loss of either components of agency or experience, and sometimes both. As demonstrated by the work of Kurt Gray, Andres Martinez, and others, labeling someone a psychopath, autistic, or schizophrenic effectively pigeon holes the individual into a class of individuals with less than fully human qualities. This is a good thing when it focuses us on protection, intervention and rehabilitation. It is a bad thing when it allows us to morally disengage because those lacking the full compliment of qualities associated with agency and experience are less morally worthy. Humanness drives our moral concerns and our sense of others’ moral worth. When we lower our sense of another’s value, we are willing to violate our sense of the sacred, engaging in trade-offs that are normally taboo. Experiments by the American psychologists Philip Tetlock and Jonathan Haidt help us see what is sacred by asking individuals what they would pay to do something sacrilegious. If something is sacred, of great moral worth either personally or to your group, could you be paid off by a wealthy investor to give up the object or engage in an act against it? For each of the acts below, think about your payoff point in dollars from $0 (for free) to $1million, including the option of saying that you would never do it for any amount of money. Keep in mind that if you choose to carry out an act and receive payment you
will not suffer any consequences:
* Kick a dog in the head, hard.
* Sign a secret but binding pledge to hire only people of your race into your company * Burn your country’s flag in private
* Throw a rotten tomato at a political leader that you dislike.
* Get a one pint transfusion of disease-free, compatible blood from a convicted child molester.
If you are like the subjects in these experiments, the mere process of considering a payoff, even for a short period of time, will have turned your stomach into knots and triggered a deep sense of disgust. This is because violating the sacred is akin to violating our sense of humanness. It is playing with the devil, accepting a Faustian offer of money to strip something of its moral worth. As Haidt notes, even though it is sacrilege to accept payment across different moral concerns, including avoiding harm, acting fairly, and respecting authority, different experiences can modulate the aversion we feel when we imagine such transgressions. Women typically demand more money for each of these acts than men, and more often reject them as taboo. Those who lean toward the conservative end of the political spectrum either ask for more money or consider the act taboo when compared to liberals, and this was especially the case for questions focused on acting against an in-group (race), an authority figure (political leader), or ones
purity (blood transfusion). What this shows is that our cultural experiences can distort what we consider
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 93
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012839