Dylan Tweed (Student Talk Series)

Date: 

Thursday, March 28, 2019, 12:00pm

Location: 

Room 105 William James Hall

Casus belli: a coalitional theory of moral outrages

The killing of Trayvon Martin. The Orlando massacre. The attack on Pearl Harbor. These grave events are dramatically different from one another on surface properties but are brought together by a feature of our psychology tailored to solving the problem of collective deterrence. An extension of the Recalibrational Theory of Anger, the coalitional theory of moral outrages suggests that a suite of motivational goals is brought to bear on the unique problem of collective deterrence. Unlike the deterrence of one member of a dyad by the other, collective deterrence entails coordinating the behavior of two or more individuals to make a concerted effort to protect against behaviors (and pre-requisitely, attitudes) that generalize to each individual in the set. Events that represent a threat to group welfare by outgroup members will preferentially engage punitive sentiments, moral wrongness judgements, and target-specific information sharing. In a series of studies, we see that these motivational concerns hang together and are sensitive to negative attitudes toward groups. Moral outrages can precipitate positive social change through collective protest or the overthrow of a corrupt regime, but at the same time they can impel the repression of ideas, individual freedoms, or entire demographics. I will also propose ways in which this psychology of moral outrages is recruited across the gamut of human affairs, from slights and slurs to civil wars.