Religious Affiliation and Conceptions of the Moral Domain

Abstract

What is the relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the moral domain? Putting aside the question of whether people from different religions agree about how to answer moral questions, here we investigate a more fundamental question: How much disagreement is there across religions about which issues count as moral in the first place? That is, do people from different religions conceptualize the scope of morality differently? Using a new methodology to map out how individuals conceive of the moral domain, we find dramatic differences among adherents of different religions. Mormon and Muslim participants moralized their religious norms, while Jewish participants did not. Hindu participants in our sample did not seem to make a moral/non-moral distinction of the same kind. These results suggest a profound relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the scope of the moral domain.

Morality and Normative Cognition: Categories of Norms in Moral Psychology and Across Culture

“…While it seems to match to some extent patterns of normative judgments made by Western participants (Haidt et al, 1993;Levine et al, 2021; see Sections 2.3 and 2.4), the boundary between the two categories is much blurrier and intermediate cases much more common than SDT would predict. These results led some authors to propose that the moral/conventional distinction is culture-specific and not a human universal (e.g., Machery, 2018;Stich, 2018b, p. 554;Shweder et al, 1987, pp.…”

Analytic Atheism & Analytic Apostasy Across Cultures

“…Given how much some religions moralize their religious norms (Levine et al, 2021), participants rated how much their religious or spiritual beliefs influenced their "life decisions" and "moral beliefs" on a scale from "A great deal" (2) to "Not at all" (0), with 41 participants (16%) selecting "I don't have religious or spiritual beliefs".…”

When rules are over-ruled: Virtual bargaining as a contractualist method of moral judgment

“…However, we do not mean to draw a sharp distinction between moral decisions and other kinds of social normative decisions. 4 In many social contexts, decisions often have intersecting and conflicting normative elements, though not all of them recognizably "moral" on traditional definitions (Levine et al 2020b). For instance, in an organizational context, an employee may need to balance loyalty to colleagues, following correct procedure, keeping a promise, avoiding deception, not missing good opportunities for the organization, doing what everyone else would do, doing what they are told by the manager, reporting wrong-doing, and so on.…”

“…Indeed, there may be no coherent "intuitive" or universally accepted definition of what counts as moral at all(Levine et al 2020b, Stich 2018). …”