Léo Fitouchi, Jean-Baptiste André, Nicolas Baumard (2021), Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46 (online 2022-09-16; issue 2023); preprint on PsyArXiv — DOI-10.1017/S0140525X22002047
Key takeaways
- Societies moralise harmless bodily pleasures because people hold folk theories that indulgence erodes the self-control cooperation requires, so puritanism is part of cooperative morality rather than a separate purity/disgust domain.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-132. What follows is what the work says about itself.
The authors ask why many societies condemn apparently harmless pleasures — lust, gluttony, alcohol, drugs, music and dance — and exalt temperance, modesty and piety, which existing theories treat as outside the cooperative function of morality. They argue that puritanical norms arise from lay beliefs that cooperation requires self-control and that indulgence weakens it, so restraining pleasure is moralised as a way of protecting cooperation. They derive testable predictions for each behaviour in the “puritanical constellation” and use the theory to explain why puritanism declines in rich societies.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 80 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-132 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as a clearly stated, falsifiable, well-sourced BBS target theory of why “purity” norms exist. Much of its evidence is correlational or the authors’ own vignettes, and several predictions (intoxicants, piety) are explicitly untested.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-132, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — t=80s is among the higher dwell times here, but the preprint skim captures the theory and a deeper read matters only if the record takes up evolutionary genealogies of morality.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-132 is that reading):
- A debunking or vindicating genealogy of a class of moral norms; relevant to metaethical arguments that use evolutionary explanations of moral judgment.
- Check how much of §4’s support is existing evidence and how much is prediction, and what the BBS commentaries objected to.
- Borderline scope: this is theoretical evolutionary and cognitive science of morality rather than philosophy; the caller may want to drop it under the “empirical cognitive science alone” rule.
Access when seeded: PubMed and Crossref gave metadata and the abstract (BBS online 2022-09-16). HAL’s open copy is behind a bot challenge. Read the PsyArXiv/OSF preprint (osf 2stcv, created 2021-06-16, same title; 74-page accepted-style manuscript): section heads throughout, §1.3, §2.1, the openings of §§4–5 and §7. Section numbers are from the preprint and may differ from the published version. published: is the preprint date; the journal version appeared 2022-09-16.