Eating your dog and having sex with chickens: The research of Moral Dumbfounding

Read the following scenarios…(Beware. Some are, well, weird…)

A)
A Woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.

B)
A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.

C)
A brother and sister like to kiss each other on the mouth. When nobody is around, they find a secret hiding place and kiss each other on the mouth.

D)
A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he thoroughly cooks it and eats it.

Do these things seem wrong, very wrong, to you? Most would say yes. But let me ask you a question, what is exactly wrong with each? That is, without simply restating the problem (e.g., that’s unpatriotic, you shouldn’t eat your dog, brothers and sisters should not kiss, etc.), what moral principle is being violated in each instance?

If you are like most people, you’ll find it hard to locate a moral or ethical principle being violated in each scenario. Yet, without a doubt, we know and feel that each scenario is wrong. This feeling, the strong sense of wrongness while being at a loss for a moral argument, is called “moral dumbfounding.” The scenarios above are taken from Jonathan Haidt’s very interesting moral psychology research (Haidt, J., Koller, S., & Dias, M. (1993). Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 613-628.) Haidt’s research has interesting implications for any discussion about sin and morality. Over the last week I’ve been giving very cognitive and intellectual arguments for defining sin. What is interesting is that Haidt’s research calls all that theological work into question.

Moral dumbfounding research acts like a scalpel, cleanly dissecting our moral psychology into emotion and cognition. And what we find is that, when we make moral judgments (e.g. Is homosexuality as sin?), we FEEL the answer first. We simply know something is wrong and those feelings GO IN SEARCH OF RATIONALIZATIONS. Moral arguments, therefore, are simply this: Justifications for appraisals of wrongness we instinctively feel.

And what this means is that theological arguments are simply a show, a way to appear rational and well justified to others and ourselves. And this has huge implications for the homosexuality question. Basically, we are simply going to FEEL that it IS a sin or that it IS NOT a sin, and there is little that argument or blogging is going to do to change those viscerally held judgments.