The concept of moral circle expansion resonates very deeply with me. Having previously worked at an NGO in Pakistan, I have seen both the devastating effects of poverty and the way many people from privileged social groups seem to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others. I am driven to understand why we, as humans, tend to care for certain people and groups only under certain circumstances and how we might justify these judgments to ourselves.
Quick note on the design:
My dissertation tested whether inclusion and exclusion frames could elicit moral circle expansion towards political out-groups. The study had a 2 x 2 between-subjects design. I recruited my participants via Prolific.
A Brief Introduction to Moral Circles
At some point in our lives, we all experience either personally, or witness others treat people differently on the basis of their identity. Between meting equal concern for all humans, or only being concerned for people of specific identity and origin lies what philosopher Peter Singer has popularized as the “moral circle.”
Our moral circles allow us to distinguish who is (and is not) worthy of our concern. These boundaries can vary in expansiveness – our family receives most of our concern, followed by friends, then our neighbors or wider community, animals around us etc. You can take a moment here to think about your own moral circle and the how much concern and care you ascribe to the various entities in it - they don't have to be just human, they can (and often do) include animals and the environment (hint: think of how much you care for your pet versus a chicken at the butcher’s).
A broader question for researchers is how we decide who is included in our moral circles. Attempts to answer this question have looked at sentience, intelligence, species categories, similarity to humans, moral character and political ideology.
Having reviewed the literature, I considered that perhaps the shapes and structures of our moral circles are reflections of intuitions and beliefs (including conflicting ones) within ourselves. It follows that when making moral judgements, we might choose how to treat people on the basis of their identity and on the basis of our own identities. Who we are when we're making these judgments matters.
Are Moral Circles Political?
We can understand politics as a moral contest where we align ourselves with a ‘side’ on social and political issues. Given that our lives are steeped in political content, the demonstrable links between our moral concerns and our social and political attitudes seem natural.
I make the case that the size and shape of our moral circles is a function of our political leanings. Our political leaning influences how we decide which issues and acts are considered moral and worth concern, and our related judgments of social issues. It also influences how our concerns about harm and fairness towards others can vary (see Moral Foundation Theory) and how we feel about topics like same-sex marriages and euthanasia.
Some examples of how politics can inform our moral circles in harmful ways includes:
Not caring enough about the rights of minorities to protect them.
Endorsing exclusionary policies that harm a large group of people.
Engaging in violence against people viewed as out-groups.
If our moral circles are informed by politics in harmful ways, then it makes sense that we should try to find address this.
Framing and Circle Expansion
Two types of framing have predominantly been tested in moral circle expansion. One is similarity framing; likening animals to humans. This has been used succesfully to reduce speciesism (prejudice towards animals). The second type is inclusion-exclusion framing, and exclusion frames have previously been demonstrated to make people more morally expansive towards other human-beings and animals.
The best way to think about inclusion-exclusion framing is to imagine that we are trying to select the best candidates to interview for a job from a list. We can either cross off the candidates that aren't qualified enough from the list (exclusion frame) and then choose to interview the remaining. Or, we can select a few candidates that seem best (inclusion frame) to interview. The interesting thing about these frames is the size of the outcome - when we exclude candidates, we're more likely to end up with a larger list of people to interview than if we selected the ones that seem best. This happens because it's much harder to justify why some people are not good enough than it is to justify why people are good enough.
I chose to use inclusion-exclusion framing because of what each frame implies in the context of politically-motivated cognition:
Inclusion frames imply that options are accepted if they are good enough.
How strongly might my participants’ politics affect justification for the inclusion of a political out-group?
Exclusion frames imply that options are rejected only if they are not good enough.
How strongly might their politics justify the exclusion of a political out-group?
My primary hypothesis was thus that exclusion frames would elicit more moral expansion towards out-groups. This would look roughly like:
“Who is not worthy of moral concern?” → difficult to justify exclusion → fewer people crossed off the list → larger outcome = bigger moral circle
I found that participants who received the exclusion frame were generally more morally expansive than those who got the inclusion frames. However, when controlling for political orientation, their moral circles became more constricted, demonstrating that political leaning affected the shapes and sizes of their moral circles.1
Open Questions
I was excited to see how framing works in some aspects of moral expansion but not others. My findings raised the following questions:
Why might political others be more difficult to be morally expansive towards?
In Laham’s (2009) study, exclusion frames successfully made people expansive towards entities like fetuses or comatose people who are considered to be on the margins of life, and also towards animals. The frame had a trickle-down effect; people who originally received the exclusion frame later on expressed more concern towards marginalized groups. This feels like a stark contrast to my findings. My best guess is that, given much of the evidence on motivated cognition, it is easier for people to justify the things they believe in, even if it’s the exclusion of other people.
Do we consider agency or potential for harm when making judgments?
One of my intuitions is that the difference in results between my findings and Laham’s (2009) may be related to the perceived agency and potential to harm from political out-groups. For example, refugees can be seen as as a threat to resources and are thus easily excluded. However, a fetus has no real agency and is thus more difficult to exclude. I wonder what would happen when perceived agency and threat intersect (for example, is a refugee baby just as threatening?)
Maybe we perceive or have intuitions about the competence of entities?
Breaking away from psychological theories, I was attracted to some of the ideas posited by the philosophical theory of Normative Competence - that we make judgments on the basis of two components: intellectual competence (the ability to do a thing) and volitional competence (the motivation to do a thing). Following from this, an intuition I have about my findings is the perceptions my participants may have had of out-groups’ volitional competence; for example, refugees have the agency to take resources and they have stronger motivation to do so (i.e., survival).
I didn’t measure perceived motivation or agency, so I hesitate to make any claims about this (for now). As of yet, there is also little existing work on the role of normative competence in moral circle expansion - I hope I’ll be able to explore more of these aspects in the future.
This is an oversimplified account of my results. There were two lists participants received: one had political out-groups (e.g., refugee, environmentalist), the other list was a control with ordinary descriptions (e.g., banker, student). Across both lists, the exclusion frame made participants more morally expansive than the inclusion frame. However, when controlling for political orientation, the exclusion frame for the political list did not make participants more morally expansive - in fact, they became more exclusionary.