You have to disapprove of anyone committing such acts.
Second, moralized beliefs are actionable. While people may not unfailingly carry out Socrates’ dictum that “To know the good is to do the good,” they tacitly aspire to it. People see moral actions as intrinsically worthy goals, which need no ulterior motive. If people believe that murder is immoral, they don’t need to be paid or even esteemed to refrain from murdering someone. When people do breach a moral precept, they rationalize the failure by invoking some countervailing precept, by finding an exculpatory excuse, or by acknowledging that the failure is a regrettable personal weakness. Other than devils and storybook villains, no one says, “I believe murder is a heinous atrocity, and I do it whenever it serves my purposes.”167
Finally, moralized infractions are punishable. If one believes that murder is wrong, one is not just entitled to see a murderer punished, but one is obligated to make it happen. One may not, as we say, let someone get away with murder. Now just substitute “idolatry” or “homosexuality” or “blasphemy” or “subversion” or “indecency” or “insubordination” for “murder,” and you can see how the human moral sense can be a major force for evil.
Another design feature of the moral sense is that many moral convictions operate as norms and taboos rather than as principles the believer can articulate and defend. In the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous six-stage progression of moral development, from a child’s avoidance of punishment to a philosopher’s universal principles, the middle two stages (which many people never get out of) consist of conforming to norms to be a good boy or girl, and maintaining conventions to preserve social stability. When reasoning through the moral dilemma that Kohlberg made famous, in which Heinz must break into a drugstore to steal an overpriced drug that will save his dying wife, people in these stages can muster no better justification for their answers than that Heinz shouldn’t steal the drug because stealing is bad and illegal and he is not a criminal, or that Heinz should steal the drug because that’s what a good husband does.168 Fewer people can articulate a principled justification, such as that human life is a cardinal value that trumps social norms, social stability, or obedience to the law.
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has underscored the ineffability of moral norms in a phenomenon he calls moral dumbfounding. Often people have an instant intuition that an action is immoral, and then struggle, often unsuccessfully, to come up with reasons why it is immoral.169 When Haidt asked participants, for example, whether it would be all right for a brother and sister to have voluntary protected sex, for a person to clean a toilet with a discarded American flag, for a family to eat a pet dog that had been killed by a car, for a man to buy a dead chicken and have sex with it, or for a person to break a deathbed vow to visit the grave of his mother, they said no in each case. But when asked for justifications, they floundered ineffectually before giving up and saying, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.”
Moral norms, even when ineffable, can sometimes be effective brakes on violent behavior. In the modern West, as we have seen, the avoidance of some kinds of violence, such as mercy-killing an abandoned child, retaliating for an insult, and declaring war on another developed state, consist not in weighing the moral issues, empathizing with the targets, or restraining an impulse, but in not having the violent act as a live option in the mind at all. The act is not considered and avoided; it is unthinkable or laughable.
The combination of radical cultural differences in which behaviors are moralized with moral dumbfounding in our own culture may create the impression that norms and taboos are arbitrary—that there may be a culture out there somewhere in which it is immoral to utter a sentence with an even number of words or to deny that the ocean is boiling hot. But the anthropologist Richard Shweder and several of his students and collaborators have found that moral norms across the world cluster around a small number of themes.170 The intuitions that we in the modern West tend to think of as the core of morality—fairness, justice, the protection of individuals, and the prevention of harm—are just one of several spheres of concern that may attach themselves to the cognitive and emotional paraphernalia of moralization.