normally taboo. Experiments by the psychologists Philip Tetlock and Jonathan Haidt help us see what is sacred by asking individuals what they would pay to do something sacrilegious 29 . 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 $1 million, 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 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 is especially the case for questions focused on acting against an in-group (race), an authority figure (political leader), or one’s purity (blood transfusion). What this suggests is that certain experiences can distort what we consider morally worthy or sacred. It suggests that we can flip our values in the face of tempting alternatives. It suggests that we can be tempted to treat others as moral zeroes.
The scientific evidence presented in this section reveals that our decisions to treat others according to different moral principles or norms is powerfully affected by our sense of what counts as another human being. What counts includes at least two important dimensions, one focused on agency and the other on experience. These dimensions determine whether we blame or praise someone, punish or rehabilitate them, and ultimately, include or exclude them from the inner circles of moral agents or moral patients. Those who fall outside these two inner circles are morally worthless. Those who are morally worthless can be destroyed or banished. Some things are justifiably excluded and fit with our general sense of reality — rocks, dirt, cardboard boxes, plastic balls, and pieces of glass. Other things are excluded because they don’t fit with our values of what reality should be. This is where distortion and denial enter the process. This is where we create walls around members of one group in order to keep others out. This is where we express partiality instead of the impartiality that Lady Justice champions with her two balanced scales and blindfold-covered eyes. This is where we exclude others from our inner sanctum in order to justify great harms. How is the inner sanctum set up and put into action over a lifetime, sometimes for legitimate causes and sometimes for illegitimate and unconscionable causes?
Populating the inner sanctum
Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Laureate and Holocaust survivor, remarked that “anti-Semitism is the oldest group prejudice in history.” 30 This claim may well be true of human written history, but is most definitely false if one considers the fact that
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 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 is especially the case for questions focused on acting against an in-group (race), an authority figure (political leader), or one’s purity (blood transfusion). What this suggests is that certain experiences can distort what we consider morally worthy or sacred. It suggests that we can flip our values in the face of tempting alternatives. It suggests that we can be tempted to treat others as moral zeroes.
The scientific evidence presented in this section reveals that our decisions to treat others according to different moral principles or norms is powerfully affected by our sense of what counts as another human being. What counts includes at least two important dimensions, one focused on agency and the other on experience. These dimensions determine whether we blame or praise someone, punish or rehabilitate them, and ultimately, include or exclude them from the inner circles of moral agents or moral patients. Those who fall outside these two inner circles are morally worthless. Those who are morally worthless can be destroyed or banished. Some things are justifiably excluded and fit with our general sense of reality — rocks, dirt, cardboard boxes, plastic balls, and pieces of glass. Other things are excluded because they don’t fit with our values of what reality should be. This is where distortion and denial enter the process. This is where we create walls around members of one group in order to keep others out. This is where we express partiality instead of the impartiality that Lady Justice champions with her two balanced scales and blindfold-covered eyes. This is where we exclude others from our inner sanctum in order to justify great harms. How is the inner sanctum set up and put into action over a lifetime, sometimes for legitimate causes and sometimes for illegitimate and unconscionable causes?
Populating the inner sanctum
Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Laureate and Holocaust survivor, remarked that “anti-Semitism is the oldest group prejudice in history.” 30 This claim may well be true of human written history, but is most definitely false if one considers the fact that
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