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Moral Outrage and Opposition to Harm Reduction

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Abstract

Three public opinion studies examined public attitudes toward prevalence reduction (PR; reducing the number of people engaging in an activity) and harm reduction (HR; reducing the harm associated with an activity) across a wide variety of domains. Studies 1 and 2 were telephone surveys of California adults’ views on PR and HR strategies for a wide range of risk domains (heroin, alcoholism, tobacco, skateboarding, teen sex, illegal immigration, air pollution, and fast food). “Moral outrage” items (immoral, disgusting, irresponsible, dangerous) predicted preference for PR over HR, with disgust the most important predictor. In contrast, preferences were not predicted by whether the risk behavior was common, no one else’s business, or harmless. Study 3 explored whether there are domains where liberals might reject HR. A sample of liberal students preferred HR > PR for heroin, but PR > HR for ritual female circumcision; path analysis suggested that this reversal was explained by moral outrage rather than consequentialist judgments of harm to self and harm to others.

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Notes

  1. For BR, χ2(9) = 256.41, p < .001; for HR, χ2(9) = 93.35, p < .001.

  2. F(1, 49) = 10.80, p < .002.

  3. The coefficient alphas were 0.839 for “moral outrage” and .789 for “risk management”.

  4. For Outrage, F(1, 53) = 8.44, p < .005; for Risk Management, F(1, 53) = 5.78, p < .05.

  5. For evidence on this point, see MacCoun and Reuter (2001, Chapters 3 and 4).

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Acknowledgments

I thank Henry Brady, former Director of the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, for his support, and Jeff Fagan for very helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley School of Law, University of California at Berkeley, 2607 Hearst Ave., Berkeley, CA, 94720-7320, USA

    Robert J. MacCoun

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  1. Robert J. MacCoun
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Correspondence to Robert J. MacCoun.

Additional information

Methodological details of the three studies in this paper appear in the Supporting Document at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/39168036/MacCoun_MoralOutrage_SupportingDocument.pdf.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 3.

Table 3 Experimental variations in Study 2
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MacCoun, R.J. Moral Outrage and Opposition to Harm Reduction. Criminal Law, Philosophy 7, 83–98 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-012-9154-0

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