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4 - See No Evil, Speak No Evil?

Cross-National Micro- and Macrofoundational Evidence of Morality’s Ubiquity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2023

Brian C. Rathbun
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Summary

In this chapter, with Caleb Pomeroy, I take a number of theories from moral and social psychology grounded in evolutionary claims and show that they illuminate critical components of international relations and foreign policy behavior. First, it is almost impossible to talk about threat and harm without invoking morality. Second, state leaders and the public will use moral judgments as a basis, indeed the most important factor, for assessing international threat, just as research shows they do at the interpersonal level. We test the first claim using a word embeddings analysis of several large textual corpora. Whether it be speeches before the United Nations or private deliberations of American foreign policy officials, when policymakers and politicians talk about harm and threat, they simultaneously use words indicating judgments about immorality in the same way that everyday citizens do. The second claim rests on Fiske’s “warmth-competence” model, which identifies moral characteristics as the most important criteria by which we form our impressions of others. An original survey experiment on the Russian public shows we do the same with nation-states. We buttress these findings by analyzing two observational surveys of Chinese respondents and another three survey experiments with Russian and American respondents.

Type
Chapter
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Right and Wronged in International Relations
Evolutionary Ethics, Moral Revolutions, and the Nature of Power Politics
, pp. 98 - 127
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • See No Evil, Speak No Evil?
  • Brian C. Rathbun, University of Southern California
  • Book: Right and Wronged in International Relations
  • Online publication: 29 July 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009344722.004
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  • See No Evil, Speak No Evil?
  • Brian C. Rathbun, University of Southern California
  • Book: Right and Wronged in International Relations
  • Online publication: 29 July 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009344722.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • See No Evil, Speak No Evil?
  • Brian C. Rathbun, University of Southern California
  • Book: Right and Wronged in International Relations
  • Online publication: 29 July 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009344722.004
Available formats
×