Toby Handfield

Among the many things that humans value, some of these values take on a distinctive importance. They resist trade-off with other values, suggesting that they are “beyond price”. Not only do people refuse to trade them against other values, they tend to disapprove of even contemplating tradeoffs: it is taboo to try to calculate at what price one might betray such a value. These values also tend to be associated with strong moral emotions of outrage at those who transgress the value.

Psychologists have used the terms “protected values”, “taboo tradeoffs”, and “sacred values” to refer to these phenomena ([1] [2] [3]). Philosophers would tend to call them absolute deontic duties.

Why do humans have such attitudes? Morality is a complex set of psychological and sociological phenomena, and not all of morality is like this. So why do some values in particular tend to be sacralized?

Evolutionary accounts of moral psychology often emphasise the idea that morality helps us to cooperate ([4]) and to manage temptation for the sake of enlightened self-interest ([5]). Are sacred values an adaptation to a specific sort of cooperative problem? Can we derive predictions, from ecological circumstances, of what sorts of values will be sacralized in a given community?

Signaling theories

Signaling theory has often been used to explain costly human behaviors such as religious rituals and altruistic sacrifice ([6]).

Taking inspiration from the idea that sacred values encourage a sort of “unthinking” conformity with a moral rule, it may be that this is due to a signaling function: if we can show others that we do the right thing without even thinking about it, may be a reliable sign of our propensity to cooperate in future.

There is some experimental and theoretical evidence for a related idea: that people who demonstrate unreflective generosity send a signal of their value as a future cooperation partner ([7]). But whether this approach can be extended to sacred values that do not inspire altruistic behavior is unclear.

Alternatives to signaling theories

As far as I’m aware there are no well developed alternatives to signaling theories to explain sacred value psychology. Part of this project is to make such alternatives more explicit. One obvious idea is some sort of deterrence account to explain moral emotions like outrage: by getting angry at your transgression I make it more plausible that you will be punished for future transgressions. But the evolutionary stability of punishment behaviors itself requires explanation: why should I take on the job of punishing your transgression given that most sacred value transgressions are not directly threatening to my welfare?

Cross cultural work and seeking collaborators

We are actively looking for researchers interested in conducting cross cultural studies on sacred value attitudes. If you may be interested, please contact me!

Related

The coevolution of sacred value and religion