Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics

A new upcoming book and a new theory of moral disagreement

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This seems as good a time as any to introduce and preview my newest book, Outraged: Why We Fight about Morality and Politics. The book will be released on January 14, 2025, and you can preorder it at the Amazon link here.

People today are divided. We are filled with outrage. We fight about morality and politics at the polls, on social media, and at the dinner table. These clashes destroy friendships and threaten the health of our democracy. Although some people are happy to be angry, most of us want less outrage and more understanding. This book is for everyone who wants to better understand the “other side” and the underlying psychology behind moral conflicts.

It is easy to assume that liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different moral minds. After all, they disagree heatedly about the morality of abortion, the death penalty, vaccines, and countless other issues. But over a decade of research from my lab shows that this assumption is wrong. Everyone’s moral sense, no matter their political leaning, is fundamentally rooted in concerns about preventing victimization.

The core argument of the book is simple:

We have a harm-based moral mind. Our evolutionary past makes us worry about harm, but people today disagree about which harms are most important or most real, creating moral outrage and political disagreement.

Even though we all share the same moral mind grounded in concerns about harm, moral disagreement arises when we disagree about what is most harmful, and who is most vulnerable to victimization. This point is nicely illustrated in the figure below: while some people on the left might worry about the harm of growing inequality between the rich and poor, systemic racism, and the destruction of the environment, someone on the right might emphasize the harm of banning firearms, restricting religious freedoms, and the destruction of sacred national symbols.

The key point is that both side’s perceptions of harm are sincere, even if they don’t immediately make sense to you. Once we come to understand the authenticity of people’s worries—often by learning about their personal experiences of suffering—we can better understand people on the other side.

The book covers three big ideas:

Part 1: Human Nature, explores why harm forms the basis of our moral psychology, by tracing the history of the human species back to a time when potential harm was everywhere. Millions of years of being hunted made us hard-wired to perceive danger, but without saber-toothed cats to fear, we now fret about elections, arguments in group texts, and decisions at PTA meetings.

Part 2, Our Moral Minds, explores how concerns about harm fuel morality, diving into the newest science from moral psychology. We explain how perceptions of harm underlie moral judgments of different acts and drive disagreements between liberals and conservatives.

Part 3, Bridging Divides, explores the practical takeaways of a harm-based moral mind—how we can leverage these insights to bridge moral divides in the real world. We will see how sharing personal stories of suffering can make people more willing to interact across moral divides and how affirming people’s feeling of threat can soothe moral outrage and bring people closer together.

The three parts of this book—Human Nature, Our Moral Minds, and Bridging Divides—are each preceded by a myth, a popular but mistaken idea that prevents us from understanding ourselves and those around us.

Myth 1: Humans are Apex Predators

Many assume that humans, and our ancestors, were always apex predators—aggressive primates who were more likely to kill than be killed. After all, modern humans are at the top of the food chain. We can hunt wolves from helicopters, order caviar to penthouse suites, and we live by the motto “animals are more afraid of us than we are of them.” But this was not always the case.

For the vast majority of our history, as our minds were slowly evolving into what they are now, we were less predators and more prey. Our ancestors were not the bloodthirsty “killer apes” that many believe them to be, but were instead frightened creatures worried about being killed and eaten. Our human nature was shaped by the constant threat of danger, and we are constantly vigilant to harm.

The myth of humans as apex predators feeds into what we call the destruction narrative in morality and politics. When we see people shouting at each other on social media or at the polls, we assume that they are aggressive, hate-filled people who want to watch the world burn.

Fortunately, the destruction narrative is wrong. In reality, a more accurate story is the protection narrative. When people get outraged at each other, it is not because they are filled with hate but because they are concerned about harm and how to best prevent it.

Myth 2: Harmless Wrongs Exist

One popular theory in moral psychology argues against the idea that all of our moral judgments are driven by concerns about harm. This theory proposes that our moral mind is carved up into many different “moral foundations”, only one of which revolves around harm. This theory argues that liberals have a harm-based morality, but that the morals of conservatives are driven by additional concerns about loyalty, authority, and sanctity that don’t reduce to harm. The most popular evidence for this is the supposed existence of “harmless wrongs”—acts that seem immoral despite seeming to harm no one, like breaking promises to the dead. But the idea of harmless wrongs is a myth.

New research from our lab suggests that people hold different moral stances not because they have fundamentally different moral minds, but because they have different assumptions of vulnerability (AoV’s)—beliefs about who or what is most vulnerable to harm. In a set of eight studies, we gave thousands of liberals and conservatives a list of different targets, from “Jesus” to “transgender people” to “coral reefs,” and asked them to rate the extent to which each entity was vulnerable to harm, victimization, and mistreatment.

We found that liberals and conservatives had systematically different assumptions about the vulnerability of four groups—The Powerful (e.g., corporate leaders), The Environment (e.g., the rainforest), The Divine (e.g., the bible), and The Othered (e.g., illegal immigrants)—and these differences predicted their stances on hot button issues.

The overall trend, visualized below, shows a clear picture: liberals tend to divide the world into two camps—the vulnerable oppressed and the invulnerable oppressors—while conservatives see everyone as similarly susceptible to being victimized, harmed, or mistreated. Everyone strives to protect their chosen victims, but disagrees about who the true victims are.

Figure 1. Liberals and conservatives have different “assumptions of vulnerability,” which explains their different moral stances on hot button issues.

Myth 3: Facts Bridge Divides

Ever since the Enlightenment, facts have (rightly) reigned supreme. What is true is what is supported by facts. This explains why most people think the best way to bridge divides is to share facts with each other. Sadly, the power of facts to increase respect within moral debates is a myth. Flinging statistics at each other does not foster respect when it comes to morality because one person’s facts are another person’s lies, especially in politics.

In the final part of the book, we discuss new research showing how sharing personal experiences of harm—not facts—helps create common ground. Discussing the feelings of threat that drive your moral judgments makes you seem both more human and more rational, because everyone understands the desire to avoid suffering. Of course, it’s not always easy to be vulnerable with someone you’re arguing with, and so we also explore important wisdom about how to encourage people to open up in conversations that make us want to shut down.

Conclusion

Moral disagreements often seem intractable, but understanding our harm-based moral mind provides hope for a better future. Harm is a common currency across moral disagreements. No matter who you are, where you live, or what your politics are, we can all relate to the desire to protect our loved ones and the vulnerable from being victimized. We may disagree about the relative victimhood of different groups, and have different strategies for how to organize society to prevent harm, but this common goal can serve as a starting point to bridge divides. This book is for all of those who share in this goal of having less outrage and more understanding.

Note: I would like to thank my two research assistants who helped with research and writing for the book, Will Blakey and Sam Pratt.