Source
Fitouchi, André & Baumard (2021), LIT-101 (Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46), read in NOTE-132. The BBS commentaries and the authors’ response were not read.
What was actually shown
The account. Puritanical morality condemns lust, gluttony, intoxicants, immodesty and idleness, and praises temperance and piety. It “does target cooperation, and is reducible to concerns for harm or fairness” (p. 9). People believe that reciprocal and reputation-based cooperation requires delaying gratification, that indulgence erodes the capacity and that discipline trains it. Victimless pleasures are condemned as indirect, probabilistic threats to cooperation.
The direct evidence. The authors’ vignette studies (N > 1,100): perceived change in self-control mediated 100% of the effect of indulgence versus restraint on perceived cooperativeness. For alcohol, the same design gave full mediation for cooperativeness and 71% for perceived moral character.
Against disgust (§2.1). Classic purity vignettes are pathogen-laden. Pathogen-free “spiritual purity” violations do not produce disgust’s facial expression, nausea or “grossed-out” reports. A meta-analysis (Landy & Goodwin 2015) and replications find disgust does not amplify condemnation. Correlations between disgust sensitivity and condemnation vanish once perceived harm is controlled (Schein et al. 2016).
Supporting reviews. Loyalty and Authority predict the moralization of victimless excess about as strongly as Purity does (Mooijman et al. 2018, N > 3,000). Across about 20,000 people in 56 countries, how much a society values self-control predicts how restrictive its hygiene norms are better than pathogen threat does (Eriksson et al. 2021). Stereotyping men as unable to control sexual urges predicts moralizing immodesty, with reproductive strategy, religiosity, conservatism and sexism controlled (Moon et al. 2021).
What could have come out otherwise. Perceived self-control could have mediated little of the effect, leaving a direct path from indulgence to judged cooperativeness. It did not.
What this does not say
- That the belief causes the norms. The mediation evidence is third-person perception of hypothetical targets. It shows that people hold the belief, not that the belief produced puritanical norms historically.
- That the norms work. The account is agnostic about whether self-discipline makes anyone more cooperative (pp. 10, 26). That makes it robust and hard to test at the population level.
- That all of purity is cooperative. Contamination purity is excluded by definition (p. 5), so the case against disgust covers only part of the Sanctity domain. The abstract’s “does not require adding mechanisms unrelated to cooperation” is narrower than it reads.
- That puritanism declines because people come to trust each other. That rests on cross-national correlations, and one key World Values Survey figure is uncited (p. 39).
- That morality is morality-as-cooperation’s seven domains. It reduces puritanism to harm and fairness, which saves “morality is about cooperation” but not that list.
Connections
- Rival. Moral Foundations Theory (THEORY-539) traces Sanctity to pathogen avoidance and disgust.
- The account it rescues. Morality-as-cooperation (THEORY-468) predicted that non-cooperative content is morally neutral, and its own data show purity items moralized (THEORY-632). This is the first worked, tested reply in the record that keeps purity inside cooperation. Curry 2016 already counts patience among the components of reciprocity (LIT-503, p. 33), which gives the mechanism a foothold in the exchange domain.
- Predecessor. Baumard, André & Sperber’s Response (LIT-508, R4.4) sketched sexual restraint as fairness within monogamy. This paper is its developed form.