These four categories of moral reactions to behavior are:

1) Disgust: A visceral, emotional reaction to a behavior (which appears connected to the moral realm) that’s perceived as gross or disgusting.

Examples:

• The disgust that most people would have at the idea of someone eating human flesh (even in a survival scenario where there is no other food available and a person has died of natural causes).

• The disgusted reaction that some (but not most) people have to the idea of gay sex. For instance, in one study I ran, about 40% of Americans said that imagining themselves having sex with someone of their own gender caused them “an emotion of disgust.”  

I think that people sometimes confuse the visceral emotion of disgust in response to a behavior with the behavior itself actually being immoral. Jonathan Haidt’s “moral dumbfounding” experiments support this point of view, where people insist a situation is immoral but can’t explain what is immoral about it (because the situations were carefully crafted not to violate moral principles and not to involve harm).

2) Character judgments: when a behavior is seen as indicative of an unethical character, even in cases where the behavior itself has no actual effects.

Examples:

• A person going to watch the daily operations of a slaughterhouse because they are intrigued by the idea of watching an animal die

• A person who enjoys daydreaming about stealing items from people they know, even though they have never stolen before

Cases like these provide evidence (some would argue, though it’s perhaps debatable) that a person has bad moral character, even if the behaviors themselves are not immoral. But people can jump to thinking an action is immoral because the sort of person that does it is more likely to be immoral, which I’d argue is, a mistake. While immoral actions are evidence of bad moral character, some actions that are evidence of bad moral character are not themselves immoral actions!

3) Heuristics: when a behavior is (collectively) judged as being “bad” because it often either causes harm, involves unethical behavior, or involves defecting on a social contract of some sort. These negative judgments can apply even if the behavior in question isn’t causing any harm in the specific situation where it’s being witnessed.

Examples:

• Driving fifty miles an hour over the speed limit is generally categorized as bad behavior, but if someone did it because they were driving a dying person to the hospital, we’d say that was actually okay.

• The head of an organization dating one of their employees is generally viewed as bad behavior because it often leads to harm, but there are instances where many people would say that in that particular case, it was ethically okay, such as cases where the employee insistently initiated the relationship leading to the pair ending up happily married

It’s easy to think of violations of heuristics like these as being bad, but really what’s going on is that we’re socially agreeing they are bad because it’s a good and helpful rule of thumb to treat them that way. But special circumstances can make them fine. Because of this, it’s not unreasonable to judge actions as probably bad when they fall in these categories (when we lack other information), but we should be sensitive to the specific details of the case since they are not necessarily bad.

4) Fundamentally unethical: a behavior that is, in and of itself, actually unethical according to at least some people’s deep ethical values. These actions don’t necessarily cause a feeling of disgust, and don’t merely appear bad because they are the sort of thing bad people do, and aren’t merely matching a heuristic about what’s bad – they are actually bad because of the precise action for some ethical values that people hold.

Examples:

• Poisoning your toddler because you don’t want a child

• Pretending you love someone when you don’t because you lack the courage to be honest

• Secretly spying on someone so you can see them naked

• Violating a promise you swore to uphold merely because you’re feeling lazy

When we treat an action as fundamentally unethical merely because it produces a feeling of disgust, or because it’s the sort of thing that provides evidence of bad character, or only because we have a societal heuristic against it because actions in that category tend to be harmful, I think we’re making a mistake. These categories are easy to conflate with an action being immoral, but they aren’t the same thing.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 20, 2025.

So, what are those things that at least some human cultures view as INHERENTLY immoral, that is, acts they would still think of as immoral even if no other consequences of that behavior were to occur?

Here’s my attempt so far at making a comprehensive list of things that at least some cultures view as intrinsically wrong. Note that many of these items are related or overlapping. What am I missing from the list?

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1. UNFAIRNESS

• Injustice (e.g., helping a bad person avoid punishment, or undermining someone’s just reward)

• Inequality (e.g., causing society’s resources to be concentrated among just a few while everyone else is poor, or treating people differently based on gender or skin color)

• Abuse of authority (e.g., nepotism, or favoritism, or those in power giving rewards to those they like best instead of those who deserve it, or those who are given a certain position of authority not carrying out the duties of that position, or carrying out the duties poorly or in a self-interested manner)

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2. HARM

• Harm (e.g., causing others suffering or purposely reducing the happiness of others)

• Murder (e.g., ending the life of another person, including in some cultures, animals, or allowing others to die needlessly)

• Genocide (e.g., the harming or killing of a specific, targeted group)

• Stealing (e.g., taking something that belongs to someone else or that should be no one’s property)

• Destruction (e.g., damaging or annihilating things of value, like ruining the environment, destroying ancient or beautiful artifacts, instigating societal collapse, or hunting a species to extinction)

• Slander (e.g., speaking ill of others, or gossiping by spreading true but negative or harmful information about other people)

• Subjugation (e.g., controlling the body, mind, or choices of others, or restricting freedom)

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3. DISRESPECT

• Disrespect of authority (e.g., being rude to your parents or disobeying your leaders)

• Disrespect of the vulnerable (e.g., treating people badly or not showing respect for members of a subjugated or vulnerable or oppressed group, or not paying proper respect to those who are victims, or disrespecting people living under hard conditions)

• Disrespect of the dead (e.g., digging up a grave, selling a dead body, necrophilia, cannibalism, speaking badly of the dead)

• Disrespect of god or gods (e.g., blasphemy, taking God’s name in vain, desecrating a place of worship, violating a commandment such as doing work on a day when work is forbidden, worshiping a carved idol instead of worshiping God, not engaging in prayer or thanks, questioning God’s nature, or God’s choices, or God’s existence)

• Practicing other faiths (e.g., worshipping alternative gods, engaging in superstitions, engaging in practices or rituals of other religions)

• Rule-breaking (e.g., violating the laws of your country or the rules of your culture, even if those laws are arbitrary or pointless)

• Violating tradition (e.g., non-conformity, or refusing to engage in the traditions of your culture, or flouting traditional roles or norms)

• Disrespect of opinions (e.g., not taking into account the opinions or desires of other people, falsely believing you know more or are wiser than others)

• Defiling (e.g., causing others to be impure, or causing others to take immoral actions, or causing others to leave your religion)

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4. IMPURITY

• Food impurity (e.g., eating certain “forbidden”, “impure” or “disgusting” foods)

• Sexual impurity (e.g., sex before marriage, bestiality, incest, sex with forbidden people, or performing forbidden sexual acts)

• Bodily impurity (e.g., uncleanliness, or making certain disallowed alterations to the body, face, or hair, or taking drugs or intoxicants)

• Social impurity (e.g., spending time with others who are thought to be bad or impure, such as murderers or members of an outcast group)

• Unnaturalness (e.g., engaging in behaviors or social relationships that are viewed as unnatural or in violation of the natural order, or “playing god”, such as by trying to modify natural things)

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5. DISLOYALITY

• Betrayal (e.g., refusing to help someone who has often helped you or with whom you have a long history)

• Familial rejection (e.g., disowning a family member or refusing to help a family member in need or choosing to benefit a non-family member over a family member)

• Infidelity (e.g., to cheat on a romantic partner when in a monogamous relationship)

• Treason (e.g., rejecting your in-group, or bad mouthing your in-group, or harming your in-group, or leaving your in-group for another group, running away in battle)

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6. DISHONESTY

• Lying (e.g., being dishonest, or spreading false information, or allowing others to come to false conclusions)

• Perjury (e.g., claiming that someone did something they didn’t do in order to help yourself)

• Promise breaking (e.g., to violate a contract or go back on a promise)

• Cheating (e.g., getting an unfair advantage, violating rules that everyone else has to follow, or giving what one person has earned to a different person instead)

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7. BAD CHARACTER

• Irresponsibility (e.g., failing to take care of your children, or do your job, or keep your promises)

• Inaction (e.g., not intervening when something bad is happening and you have the power to stop it)

• Wastefulness (e.g., letting food or resources go to waste, using more than is needed, or not making use of your talent or potential)

• Faithlessness (e.g., not believing in God or gods, not believing in the existence of good and evil, not believing that there is such a thing as moral being morality)

• Ignorance (e.g., stupidity, irrationality, lack of knowledge, narrow-mindedness, intolerance of other opinions)

• Selfishness (e.g., not caring about other people, or choosing the benefit of oneself over the benefit of one’s community, or refusing to help others who are in need when you have a lot of resources, or rejecting being part of any community, excessively promoting oneself, or bragging)

• Recklessness (e.g., allowing things of value to come into danger due to lack of forethought or caring, taking excessive risks)

• Sinful emotion (e.g., excessive anger, lust, greed, jealousy, pride, laziness, arrogance, materialistic desire)

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EXAMPLES OF MORAL SYSTEMS

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The Ten Commandments forbid items from 8 of these sub-categories:

• Practicing other faiths (“thou shalt have no other gods before me”)

• Disrespect of God (“thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images…not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain…remember the sabbath day”)

• Disrespect of authority (“honor thy father and thy mother”)

• Murder (“thou shalt not kill”)

• Infidelity (“thou shalt not commit adultery”)

• Stealing (“thou shalt not steal”)

• Perjury (“thou shalt not bear false witness”)

• Sinful emotion (“thou shalt not covet”)

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The golden rule (“Do to others what you want them to do to you”) doesn’t directly forbid any of these items, but making reasonable guesses for what most people would want done to them, it likely ends up forbidding at least some items from every one of the high-level categories above.

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The “Five Precepts” for lay followers of some traditions of Buddhism ask you to refrain from these sub-categories:

• Murder (“I undertake the training rule to abstain from killing.”)

• Stealing (“I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking what is not given.”)

• Sexual impurity (“I undertake the training rule to avoid sexual misconduct.”)

• Lying and Perjury (“I undertake the training rule to abstain from false speech.”)

• Bodily impurity (“I undertake the precept to refrain from intoxicating drinks and drugs which lead to carelessness.”)

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As I understand it, for some (but not all) Sikhs, the main sub-categories of religious prohibitions are:

• Bodily impurity (cutting hair, taking intoxicants)

• Practicing other faiths (e.g., eating meat of animals killed in a ritualistic manner, engaging in superstitious rituals, and animal sacrifice)

• Sinful emotion (obsessive greed/materialistic desire)

• Selfishness (living a life disconnected from society as a recluse or non-family oriented living, bragging)

• Slander

• Lying

• Infidelity

This piece was first written on April 18, 2018, and first appeared on my website on September 15, 2025.