In 2012, when Barack Obama announced that he was supporting
same-sex marriage, he cast the discussion in moral terms. The focus of his remarks was on
fairness. He pointed out, for example,
that there are gay men and women serving in the military who are not free to
marry the people they love. That is
unfair.
The concept of fairness is a moral value. Why are discussions of issues like gay
marriage turned into moral issues? There
are many ways that this discussion could have been frame. For example, the President could have focused
on the economic benefits for couples to have the option to marry.
One reason by President Obama framed his discussion as a
moral issue is that opposition to gay marriage has also been cast in moral
terms. Opponents of gay marriage often
have strong religious views that make homosexual behavior broadly and gay
marriage in particular a moral issue.
So, Obama was simply fighting one moral value with another.
But that doesn’t explain why everyone feels that an issue
like gay marriage should be discussed in moral terms.
An interesting paper by Daniel Effron and Dale Miller in the
May, 2012 issue of Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin explores this issue.
They point out that the psychological value of creating a moral issue is
that it gives people a legitimate reason to have an opinion on an issue.
Most of the time, we give people the right to weigh in on an
issue when it affects them directly. If
someone threw garbage all over my lawn, it would make sense if I was angry
about it in the morning, because my house was affected directly. It would be strange, though, if a stranger
walking through the neighborhood got angry about it. After all, she is not affected by the
mess. If, however, she turns it into a
moral issue, then we, as a community, give her the right to have an opinion
about what happened.
In one study, Effron and Miller asked people whether they
thought abortion rights was a moral issue.
A few weeks later, they asked the same people to read about a man or a
woman who advocated strongly in favor of a pro-choice position on abortion
rights and donated money to a pro-choice group.
They were asked whether they were skeptical, suspicious and surprised
about this person’s support of abortion rights.
Participants were unsurprised that a woman would be pro-choice. People who thought that abortion is not
really a moral issue were skeptical of men who took strong stances on abortion,
while those who thought it was a moral issue at heart were not at all skeptical
or surprised by a man who took a strong stance.
That is, when an issue is seen in moral terms, it gives people the right
to have an opinion, even if the issue may not affect them personally.
In another study, the researchers looked at the rights of
victims of a minor crime. They were told
about two people whose houses were damaged by vandals. One house sustained $1,000 worth of damage,
while the other sustained only $80 worth of damage. In this case, people judged that the person
whose house was more badly damaged had more right to be outraged at what had
happened. However, other people were
told the same story, but in this case, the smaller amount of damage consisted
of graffiti that was morally offensive to the homeowner. Once the crime took on this moral dimension,
people judged that the person who had sustained less damage was more entitled
to be angry.
Putting all of this together, the moral dimension is used to
help people participate in community-wide issues. Generally speaking, we expect people to be
involved only in issues that have direct relevance to their lives. However, our society cannot function
effectively if people are only self-interested.
As a result, we turn issues into moral issues to allow us to have
discussions that may affect the lives and behavior of other people around us.
