Kelly sits down with Kurt Gray, a professor in psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he directs the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. He has a new book “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground.”  

It’s not lost on me that we’re recording this podcast about moral outrage the day after a United Healthcare CEO was murdered. 

“Right. Someone’s causing harm to someone that you think is evil. But at the end of the day, you’re still causing suffering to innocent humans. But you know that’s not how our moral minds work. Right? We pick a side, and we see some people as vulnerable and some people as invulnerable villains.” 

Your theory – that our morality is based on a harm-based mind – is not un-controversial, right? 

“It did take a long time to come up with that premise, and there’s a lot of studies that went into this idea that we have a harm-based mind, and a lot of those studies – especially at first and even still – don’t get a great reception sometimes in my subfield, because there’s what I think are wrong ideas about how our minds work and the difference between Liberals and Conservatives. But my work challenges that idea, that popular misconception that Liberals and Conservatives have different values or different foundations. Instead, we all care about harm. And that’s really what morality is in its entirety: how we make sense of harm and how we try to protect ourselves.” 

We should also make it clear that there are positive outcomes related to having a harm-based mind. 

“Because we’re a group species, like many other primates, we have to have rules so we can live together and not kill each other and not be threatened by the people around us, and that that rule is morality. We have to have these intuitions baked in. So, if I wanted to steal this food because I’m hungry, I think that maybe I shouldn’t, because others might retaliate, or our society might plunge into chaos. And so all of our kind of psychological moral convictions revolve around getting together better and not being antisocial and cooperating more. And it turns out that moral intuitions help us prosper as a society and outcompete other societies that don’t have a strong moral code.”