In a long piece on the 'moral instinct', Steven Pinker suggests we think about how much money someone would have to pay us to do certain things. One of the five pairs of alternatives he gives is this:
Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.Pinker says the second action 'feels more repugnant', so confirming one of Jonathan Haidt's 'primary colors of our moral sense', namely, authority.Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.
Now, I've never performed this exercise, slapping someone in the face as part of a comic routine - or in any other circumstances, come to that - so I can't be sure what it would feel like. But I'm pretty confident I wouldn't find it more difficult to slap the face of an authority figure than I would the face of a friend. If anything the opposite: the friend, after all, is a friend, whereas it's possible the authority figure in question might be one whom I neither like nor esteem. Perhaps this is an eccentric weighting of values on my part. More likely it's quite common within a democratic culture. (Thanks: SL.)
