Abstract

Psychological Inquiry, 23: 137–142, 2012 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1047-840X print / 1532-7965 online DOI: 10.1080/1047840X.2012.667768 Nate Carnes and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts The title of Gray, Young, and Waytz’s article gives scriptions are what we should do and proscriptions are notice that they are making grand claims, for they pro- what we should not do. fess to identify the “essence of morality.” The authors At first glance, then, it would seem that immorality do not actually deal with the entire moral domain, but involves doing what we should not do and morality instead focus only on immorality, and acknowledge entails doing what we should do. Gray et al. claim this in a brief footnote. The crux of their argument re- that “perceived harm” unites different domains of im- garding immorality is that “all moral transgressions are morality; and at the very end of the article, in suggest- fundamentally understood as agency plus experienced ing directions for future research, they call for work suffering – i.e., interpersonal harm” (p. 101). on goodness, or morality, and propose that “perceived There are many ways to approach an evaluation help” unites this domain.