Several studies published in the online edition of Social Psychological and Personality Science examined “the moral judgments of religious individuals and political conservatives,” finding them to be “highly insensitive to consequentialist (i.e., outcome-based) considerations.” The full paper is behind a paywall (and I’m not sure I’d understand it, anyway), but Eric W. Dolan at The Raw Story offered a summary, which included some unavoidable spin.
The study by Jared Piazza of the University of Pennsylvania and Paulo Sousa of Queen’s University Belfast, which included a total of 688 participants, found religious individuals and political conservatives consistently invoked deontological ethics. In other words, they judged the morality of actions based on a universal rule such as, “You should not kill.” Political liberals, on the other hand, consistently invoked consequentialist ethics, meaning they judged the morality of actions based on their positive or negative outcomes.
I can’t help but put this into the frame of the Philosophy 101 class I took at Rice University almost exactly twenty years ago. (Prof. Larry Temkin would be so proud to know I’m finally using what he taught me, assuming he has any idea who I am.) We read and compared the deontological theories of Immanuel Kant to the utilitarian theories of John Stuart Mill in that class. Dr. Temkin pretty much designed it to be as painful as possible for incoming freshmen.
Anyway, political and religious conservatives tend to be deontological, focusing on the “rightness” of an act itself. I’m not sure if the study examined political or religious liberals directly, but Dolan goes on to say that they tend to take outcomes into context in determining morality—a very utilitarian view.
In general, conservatives who participated in the study showed far greater concern with whether an underlying action was “right” or not, even if an action considered “wrong” by the participant led to positive outcomes, or vice versa. However, as Dolan notes:
There was a notable exception. When it came to torture, Piazza described American conservatives as “full-blown consequentialists.” But the same could not be said of religious individuals.
“In other words, political conservatives found torture acceptable when it brought about a greater good, but religious individuals found torture less acceptable even when it was a means to a greater good,” he told PsyPost.
Anyway, take what you will from this.
Photo credit: “Immanuel Kant (painted portrait)” [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
