Kurt Gray, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding, all at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has written an important new book—Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground (2025).
Gray is interested in moral psychology, what we tend to call behavioral ethics here at Ethics Unwrapped. His approach to the study of morality is descriptive (the “how” of moral decision making”) rather than normative (what people should decide).
In Gray’s view, although we tend to think of ourselves as apex predators, which we are now (note how we are laying waste to the planet’s environment), for most of the history of Homo sapiens’ evolution as our brains evolved, we were more prey than predator. Relatively small and weak, we were easy pickings for larger mammals and reptiles and, therefore, were necessarily preoccupied with monitoring our environment for signs of danger that might cause us harm.
This preoccupation with harm, says Gray, dominates our minds even today as we make both moral and political choices. This is problematic because “people today disagree about which threats are most important or most real, creating moral outrage and political disagreement.” (p. 9) This is Gray’s essential message.
Gray presents substantial (though probably not incontrovertible) evidence that our hominid ancestors lived their lives as prey rather than predators, leading to our harm-based view of the world.
Importantly, he presented study after study indicating that people tend to view decisions and actions as immoral because they cause harm. No harm, no foul, so to speak. Wearing your pajamas to a wedding defies social convention, but it is not immoral because it doesn’t harm anyone. He focuses on NYU professor Jonathan Haidt’s hypothetical scenario of two late-twenties siblings who decide to have sex with one another in order to deepen their relationship. They don’t tell anyone. They do it only once. They take all necessary precautions to ensure that no pregnancy can possibly result. Their relationship does deepen. We know from discussions with our students that they–along with the vast majority of other people—believe strongly that the two have acted immorally. Both Haidt and Gray agree that people make most of their moral decisions intuitively rather than rationally, following the “System One/System Two” typology developed by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Adam Tversky. Haidt believes that people are motivated by what he calls Moral Foundations Theory to label harmless acts as immoral. After all, the reasons people give for condemning the siblings’ coupling—it could lead to a dangerous pregnancy, it might poison their relationship, others might find out and it could lead to a slippery slope where other siblings try it—are all ruled out by Haidt’s description of the scenario.
However, Gray presents substantial evidence that people judging this scenario tend to strongly believe that the actions are harmful notwithstanding Haidt’s description. It’s harm that motivates their moral judgment. And through numerous other studies, both done in his lab and by other scientists, Gray presents substantial evidence that the perceived potential for harm is indeed what motivates most moral judgments.
Unfortunately, in America today our society is split politically as well as morally because we tend to disagree factually as to what are the true threats that face us. Conservatives believe that illegal immigrants will injure our citizens by committing crimes against them and taking away their jobs. Liberals focus on the harms these immigrants face (poverty, political persecution, etc.) in their native lands. Conservatives in the abortion debate focus on the potential harm to the fetus whereas liberals emphasize danger to the mother’s health if abortion is not allowed. And so on, down through our many significant moral and policy debates.
Worse, because of our different perceptions of harm, conservatives tend to view liberals as moral monsters and vice versa. This is true despite the fact that surveys show the two groups tend to share the same basic moral values. Both liberals and conservatives value fairness, honesty, integrity, industry, loyalty, and other common virtues when they make moral decisions. However, they tend to disagree as to the factual bases of those choices, which is not surprising if you watch the different factual view points presented on Fox News and MSNBC.
Gray’s book wraps up with his hopeful argument that our riven political scene can perhaps be repaired if our competing groups can realize that it is our factual beliefs, not our moral values, that tend to divide us. And if we can speak honestly and openly with one another as to these factual matters, we may begin to close the divide that separates us. This is perhaps more hopeful than realistic, but we agree with Gray that we have to try.
Gray makes the point that we are a species of story tellers and that a well told story has much more persuasive impact than dry statistics. MSNBC can repeat endlessly the statistics showing that illegal aliens per capita commit fewer crimes than U.S. citizens, but this will be outweighed by Fox News’ repeating on a loop the story of a single teenage girl being murdered by an illegal alien. But, again, we have to try to bridge the existing gap. This book is a reasonable choice as an instruction manual for how to try to do so. We strongly recommend it.
Sources
Kurt Gray, Outraged: Why We Fight about Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground (2025).
Kurt Gray & Emily Kubin, “Victimhood: The Most Powerful Force in Morality and Politics,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 70, pp.137-220 (2024).
Kurt Gray, Chelsea Schein & Adrian Ward, “The Myth of Harmless Wrongs in Moral Cognition: Automatic Dyadic Completion from Sin to Suffering,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 143, pp. 1600-1615 (2014).
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012).
Elizabeth Kolbert, “Fear and Loathing,” The New Yorker, Jan. 20, 2025.