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Nature has two inter-related meanings in philosophy and natural philosophy. On the one hand, it means the set of all things which are natural, or subject to the normal working of the laws of nature. On the other hand, it means the essential properties and causes of individual things. Bacon and other opponents of Metaphysics claim that all attempts to go beyond nature are bound to fall into the same errors, but Metaphysicians themselves see differences between different approaches. We classified definitions of purity into three categories: “explicitly contra-harm,”“implicitly contra-harm,” or “stand-alone.” A definition was coded as “explicitly contra-harm” if it outright described purity violations as moral violations that did not involve harm. For example, the definition offered by Graham et al. (2009) describes “issues related to food, sex, clothing, prayer, and gender roles as moral issues, even when they involve no harm to any person” (p.1030; italics added for emphasis). Similarly, the definition of purity offered by Haidt (2007) describes purity as “intuitions about bodily and spiritual purity and the importance of living in a sanctified rather than a carnal way” (p. 1001) and states that “morality is about more than harm and fairness” (p. 998; italics added for emphasis). Thus, this definition explicitly refers to purity as something other than just harm. Likewise, Vasquez and colleagues (2001) described purity violations saying: “Some breaches did not violate rights or involve physical harm, but were instead disrespectful, analogous to Community, and disgusting, analogous to Divinity” (p. 96). Again, purity violations are explicitly described as not causing harm (note that Vasquez and colleagues explicitly state that purity and divinity are used interchangeably; pg 98.). Already in classical times, philosophical use of these words combined two related meanings which have in common that they refer to the way in which things happen by themselves, "naturally", without "interference" from human deliberation, divine intervention, or anything outside what is considered normal for the natural things being considered. Phusis is the Greek word for Nature, and Aristotle is drawing attention to the similarity it has to the verb used to describe natural growth in a plant, phusei. Indeed the first use of the word involves a plant: ὣς ἄρα φωνήσας πόρε φάρμακον ἀργεϊφόντης ἐκ γαίης ἐρύσας, καί μοι φύσιν αὐτοῦ ἔδειξε. "So saying, Argeiphontes [=Hermes] gave me the herb, drawing it from the ground, and showed me its nature." Odyssey 10.302-3 (ed. A.T. Murray).
Unfortunately, many of purity’s explanations and definitions are tautological, explaining purity-related questions by invoking the concept of purity or impurity. Consider this quote from a classic paper on intuitionism: Whether it was intended or not, Aristotle's inquiries into this subject were long felt to have resolved the discussion about nature in favor of one solution. In this account, there are four different types of cause: Operationalizations of purity were similarly coded as “explicitly contra-harm,”“implicitly contra-harm,” or “stand-alone.” An operationalization was coded as “explicitly contra-harm” if they included vignettes or questions which explicitly stated that the behavior was not harmful. For instance, The Moral Foundations Questionnaire ( Graham et al., 2009) measures purity by asking people whether they condemn acts that are described as disgusting, but explicitly not harmful: “It bothers me when people do something disgusting, even if no one is harmed” (item 1, p.1044). Some vignettes used to describe purity violations also explicitly describe the violation as harmless. For example, to assess moral condemnation of a purity violation, Sabo and Giner-Sorolla (2017) presented participants with vignettes including “consensual sibling incest” (p. 136). Here, the behavior in question is explicitly described as not harmful when it states “Experiments 1 through 4 define purity code violations as abnormal acts that involve an immoral use of one’s body without harming specific others” (p. 135). Elicitors of disgust (137 articles; 86.7% of total articles). Another understanding often referenced in conjunction with purity is disgust. Various forms of purity violations (e.g., those involving pathogen avoidance, or deviant sexual acts) have been described as elicitors of disgust. Thus, because disgust has become so tied to the examples of purity violations, the understanding of eliciting disgust has in and of itself become definitive of moral impurity. For instance, an early description of purity violations offered by Haidt and colleagues (1993) described purity violations as “acts that are disgusting or degrading to one’s spiritual nature” or as “disgusting actions [which] pollute the temple of the body” (p. 614, 615). MFT has also operationalized purity directly as disgust with the item: “Whether or not someone did something disgusting” ( Graham et al., 2009, p.1044). The link between purity and disgust developed from the idea that our moral judgment system evolved from our behavioral immune system designed to identify harmful (disgusting) substances in our natural environment ( Rozin et al., 1999). Later, MFT offered a more nuanced perspective on this idea, arguing that different moral foundations should be tied to different corresponding emotion systems (i.e., a link between disgust and purity violations and anger and justice violations; Haidt & Graham, 2007).Operationalizations of purity were classified either as a “single operationalization” or as a “chimera operationalization.” Single operationalizations involved sets of scale items or vignettes in which it was clear that all items or vignettes tapped into one singular construct—purity is “x.” For example, the scale items developed by Boer and Fischer (2013) to measure purity all tap respect for God. They explain that their items to assess purity included “general religiosity, religious experiences, and beliefs or the evaluation of religious behaviors, such as church attendance” (p. 1120). Similarly, Casciaro and colleagues (2014) measured purity solely based on pathogen avoidance by having participants complete a task that involved turning word fragments into meaningful words, which could be completed as words related to physical cleansing: “W _ _ H, S H _ _ E R, and S _ _ P” (p. 714). As mentioned earlier, the most popular, canonical, and first acts used to represent impurity were “carefully written to be harmless” ( Haidt et al., 2000, p. 5). These scenarios of loving incest, masturbation with unwitting pets, and necrophilia revealed that acts without obvious interpersonal harm were nevertheless seen as immoral. Judgments of these acts not only helped inspire intuitionism and pluralism but also led to the popular Moral Foundations Theory ( Graham et al., 2013), which restricts the role of harm to only one of five hypothesized moral mechanisms. Although research reveals that interpersonal harm occupies at least 95% of people’s everyday moral concerns ( Hofmann et al., 2014), it is true that moral psychologists had neglected these bizarre sexual scenarios. They had also neglected a number of immoral acts often discussed by philosophers, such as harmless lies ( Kant, 1797), breaking promises to the dead ( Narveson, 1963), and justifying the torture of children ( Le Guin, 1973).
Progress or Return" in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss. (Expanded version of Political Philosophy: Six Essays by Leo Strauss, 1975.) Ed. Hilail Gilden. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989. In the Chandogya Upanishad, Aruni asks metaphysical questions concerning the nature of reality and truth, observes constant change, and asks if there is something that is eternal and unchanging. From these questions, embedded in a dialogue with his son, he presents the concept of Ātman (soul, Self) and universal Self. [14] [15]Vignette: “ Someone meditates to keep her mind free of impure thoughts ” ( Cannon et al., 2011, p. 327) To take the critical example of human nature, as discussed in ethics and politics, once early modern philosophers such as Hobbes had described human nature as whatever you could expect from a mechanism called a human, the point of speaking of human nature became problematic in some contexts.
Vignette: “Sign a piece of paper that says ‘ I hereby sell my soul, after my death, to whoever has this piece of paper’ ( Graham et al., 2009, p. 1045)Feelings of physical purity seem to embody personal morality and integrity [...]. For instance, the mere act of washing one’s hands after committing an immoral action appears to alleviate guilt and other negative feelings [...], literally washing away one’s sins.” ( Preston & Ritter, 2012, p. 1365) Jayatilleke, K.N. (1963). Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge (PDF) (1st ed.). London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. pp. 112–113. The artificial, like the conventional therefore, is within this branch of Western thought, traditionally contrasted with the natural. Technology was contrasted with science, as mentioned above. And another essential aspect to this understanding of causation was the distinction between the accidental properties of a thing and the substance - another distinction which has lost favor in the modern era, after having long been widely accepted in medieval Europe. Shweder’s cross-cultural research sparked two developments in moral psychology. Most relevant to Shweder’s initial work is the cultural developmental theory of moral psychology ( Jensen, 2015b), which treats divinity as one of three clusters of values (divinity, autonomy and community) revealed in moral reasoning and rhetoric. These values are understood not as mutually exclusive or competing but instead as co-existing, complementary, and even mutually reinforcing themes of discussion. In other words, rhetoric condemning the same act (e.g., gay marriage), can be framed in terms of divinity (gay marriage violates God’s will), community (gay marriage destroys fabric of society), or autonomy (gay marriage hurts children). The framework provided by cultural-development theory treats divinity not as a specific psychological mechanism or “domain” that is distinct from harm but rather as an important value often raised in discussions and justifications of moral judgment.
To examine how purity is understood in moral psychology, we retrieved all papers that contained the word “purity” either in the title, abstract, or text, and which were published between 1990 and 2019 in any peer-reviewed journal contained within the PsycInfo archive. Our search yielded a final corpus of 158 papers which defined moral purity in the main text, with 135 of these papers operationalizing/measuring moral purity. 3As Bacon knew, the term "laws of nature" was one taken from medieval Aristotelianism. St Thomas Aquinas for example, defined law so that nature really was legislated to consciously achieve aims, like human law: "an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community and promulgated". [39] In contrast, roughly contemporary with Bacon, Hugo Grotius described the law of nature as "a rule that [can] be deduced from fixed principles by a sure process of reasoning". [40] And later still, Montesquieu was even further from the original legal metaphor, describing laws vaguely as "the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things". [41] Thomas Hobbes a b Feuchtwang, Stephan (2016), "Chinese religions", in Woodhead, Linda; Kawanami, Hiroko; Partridge, Christopher H. (eds.), Religions in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations (3nded.), London: Routledge, p.146, ISBN 978-1-317-43960-8
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