Tony Grist
In a recent New Yorker article, Elizabeth Kolbert raises the question, does the ability to perceive harm, which helped our ancestors survive, now underlie our current moral/ethical/cultural divisions?
She finds her answer in a recent book, Outraged: Why We Fight about Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground by Kurt Gray, the director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Bookshop affiliate link and Amazon affiliate link).
Kolbert writes:
“Millions of years of being hunted have made us preoccupied with danger,” he writes. “But without saber-toothed cats to fear, we fret about elections, arguments in group texts, and decisions at PTA meetings.”
Our ethical judgments, he suggests, are governed not by a complex of modules but by one overriding emotion. Untold generations of cowering have written fear into our genes, rendering us hypersensitive to threats of harm.
“If you want to know what someone sees as wrong, your best bet is to figure out what they see as harmful,” Gray writes at one point. At another point: “All people share a harm-based moral mind.” At still another: “Harm is the master key of morality.”
If people all have the same ethical equipment, why are ethical questions so divisive? Gray’s answer is that different people fear differently. “Moral disagreements can still arise even if we all share a harm-based moral mind, because liberals and conservatives disagree about who is especially vulnerable to victimization,” he writes.
It is reasonably easy to see how this framework can be applied to America’s great gun debate. It also seems to have some parallels with Daniel Kahan and Donald Braman’s cultural cognition theory (see, e.g., “More Statistics, Less Persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions”). Kahan and Braman argue that individuals’ views of guns (and so of gun policies) are profoundly shaped by fundamental cultural worldviews that orient them in different ways to risk.
One consequence of Kahan and Braham’s argument is that worldviews are not strongly influenced by empirical evidence; rather, individuals interpret empirical evidence based on whether it agrees or disagrees with their pre-existing cultural worldviews.
This, again, parallels Gray’s perspective on cultural divisions in America, including over guns. Kolbert writes:
The book’s tantalizing promise, as its subtitle announces, is that it will help us “find common ground.” Gray tries to make good on this with a section on the do’s and don’ts of “bridging moral divides.”
He starts with the don’ts. A big one is: Don’t imagine that facts are convincing. Gray cites a study from 2021 in which researchers argued with strangers about gun control. Half the time, the researchers tried to bolster their case with facts. The rest of the time, they offered stories, one of which involved a relative who had been wounded by a stray bullet. (The relative, though made up, was presented as real.) The encounters were taped, so that the conversations could later be analyzed. Strangers who were offered anecdotes were, it turned out, much more willing to engage with the researchers than those offered data were. The group that got stories also treated their interlocutors with more respect.
“Sharing personal experiences instead of facts improved cross partisan perceptions by about 0.7 to 0.9 on a 7-point scale,” Gray writes, trotting out statistics to argue against trotting out statistics. “This may not seem like a giant effect, but it’s actually quite substantial.” Gray’s takeaway from this is that the best way to reach across a moral divide is with a narrative, preferably one that features suffering: “Respect is easiest to build with harm-based storytelling.”
Having spent 12 years trying to understand U.S. gun culture, I am currently trying to find ways to bridge the gun rights/public safety divide in America. So, I find any ideas along these lines welcome.
But, as Kolbert insightfully observes, “harm-based storytelling” in an outraged culture might just as easily create division as healing. She recalls a disgusting lie perpetrated in the form of a harm-based story by Donald Trump in September 2024: “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
So, the diagnosis of the root of the problem has some promise, as does the proposed cure. But both require more consideration before I would accept them outright based on this interesting book.
If you are going to buy the book, consider using these affiliate links to support my work: Bookshop.org or Amazon.
NOTE ON SUPPORT
Putting out materials like this is part of my mission to educate people and enrich conversations about guns. I have never pay-walled my work, so it is free to you. But the work is not free to me. If you would like to support my efforts, please consider the following:
- Please like and share my blog posts and videos. This helps others see this work which is my main goal.
- Subscribe to my YouTube channel. Publishers and media outlets look at how many subscribers I have to assess my “platform” when considering my work.
- Buy my book: Gun Curious: A Liberal Professor’s Surprising Journey Inside America’s Gun Culture.
- Make a direct financial contribution to help offset my costs through Buy Me A Coffee or PayPal Donate.
Read the full article here
