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Cubist Consequentialism: The Pros and Cons of an Agent–Patient Template for Morality

Gray, Young, and Waytz (this issue) make a compelling case for why mind perception is a vital component of moral judgment. The agent–patient dyad is a useful tool that helps identify and organize the psychological processes that often operate when people confront moral stimuli. One strength of the idea is that it is thoroughly psychological; it provides an overarching framework geared toward describing the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that compose individuals’ experiences with morality, and therefore it connects research on morality with mainstream theories about basic processes. It also offers a precise and parsimonious account of the conditions necessary to initiate moral evaluation. That said, the implicit consequentialism in the agent–patient dyad may not account well for moral motivation and the way people perceive their own moral actions. In addition, the exclusive focus on harm may limit the capacity of the approach to explain the origins of moral disagreement, or differences in how people think about harm in different contexts. In sum, the agent–patient dyad is one possible psychological template for morality, but morality may be too diverse to distill down to a single essence. In our commentary, we begin with a discussion of what we see as the major contributions of the mind perception approach and then shift to a discussion of aspects of morality that the agent–patient dyad seems less able to explain.