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Haidt describes five universal axes of human morality. I submit that there is a sixth sphere that Haidt overlooked because Western culture weights it very little, and because according to our intellectual tradition it is not part of 'ethics'. The sphere is patheticness. I hypothesize that if we encounter a pathetic persion, we can experience an aversion that, biologically speaking, similar to the response to encountering a violation of ethics.
In the article, Pinker describes moralization as a psychological state with certain properties:
" Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).
The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”
The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”
We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial. "
It seems to me that patheticness may share these hallmarks:
I postulate that another hallmark is evolutionary/teleological: each sphere is something that would be helpful to evolve because they are ways in which an individual, if left unchecked, could hurt the group.
The part of the patheticness sphere that is compatible with Western intellectual tradition is responsibility. If someone is so imprudent so as to be negligent and cause themselves serious harm, even if it only hurts them, we think there is something wrong with that.
