3 Reasons That Good Intentions May Lead to Bad Outcomes

Individuals often interpret human behavior based on their alignment with societal, political, or group-sanctioned moral beliefs. This tendency to conform to morality is seen as a panacea for individual and societal issues. However, applying this ethical approach has historically and currently led to disagreement and invalidation in human interaction. This has resulted in aggression, the destruction of cultural achievements, and the suppression of truth-seeking endeavors. This highlights the limitations of morality in explaining and resolving conflicts.

The mismatched interaction between the mind and the evolving reality represents the confounding variable for moral attribution

This post argues that the overlooked mismatched interaction between the mind (cognition of human reality) and the evolving reality represents the confounding variable responsible for the invalidation and frustrations we experience in meeting our needs for emotional, mental, and physical resources, among other domains. This cognitive factor mediates and restrains the effects of moral beliefs on decision-making and related actions. The misunderstanding about the differences between cognition of reality and moral appraisals of reality has led to at least three errors in misattributing experiences and identifying accurate solutions.

The first reason includes mistaking moral appraisals of human behavior as equivalent to or synonymous with understanding the objective causality rules of reality governing human behavior and mental activities. For example, some research construed prejudice and racism as caused by moral breaches such as violating fairness and equity (Sun, 1993; and three conceptual issues with the definitions of racism).

The misunderstanding of the differences between moral beliefs and cognitive representations of human reality carries significant consequences despite both being integral parts of belief systems. Cognitions of human reality, encompassing interpersonal, mental, and contextual experiences, are intricate, involving cognitive structural representations and developmentally multidimensional processes. They can evolve through the discovery of new realities and the revision or falsification of previous knowledge. In contrast, moral beliefs are two-dimensional judgments. They are impervious to falsification by new information because morality is about “what should be,” a concept influenced by political interests and subjectively perceived, interpreted, and applied in any society at any stage of human history. Moral appraisals of events or behavior can never definitively prove or disprove what is true or false, leading to potential misunderstandings and conflicts (e.g., The limits of morality in explaining and solving conflict).

Perceived reality regulates and restricts the validity of morality: A historical evidence

The second reason involves the false belief that moral beliefs and mental representations of reality possess separate mental authorities in administering psychological activities. However, the validity of morality in regulating human behavior entirely depends upon the accuracy of the perceiver's cognition about reality regarding what is, how, and why it is related to target behaviors. Research in developmental psychology (e.g., Kohlberg’s studies on moral development) and human events in history show that our cognition of reality regulates moral judgments (see How reality judgment regulates moral judgment). Moral beliefs become invalid in communication when they are based on misperceived or misrepresentations of reality, which include the mind’s objective disconnection or mismatch with reality but the actors’ unawareness of the discrepancy.

In addition to some historical instances described in the previous research about how the use of dominant moral beliefs as the guideline to explain and regulate human experiences hindered progress and discovery, it’s worth briefly mentioning a lesson drawn from the destructive cultural revolution in China (CR) during the 1966-1976 period in which people applied morality regarding right and wrong as the replacement for understanding what is true or false at the societal and individual levels.

Inspecting some relevant historical records and scholarly observations (e.g., Fairbank, 1992; Spence, 1991; Wooldridge, 2021; Yang, 2021) about CR have shown that it has generated immense human sufferings, cultural disasters, and the collapses of economic, legal, educational and administrative institutions in the country because of two joint factors. On the one hand, almost all individuals in the country were imbued with the moral conviction that participating in one of the world’s most bloodthirsty experiments in purist egalitarianism created a fairer and brighter society. Political and moral criteria were used to divide citizens into people and class enemies, to incite interpersonal violence and destruction of countless cultural artifacts, and to judge current and past communications of all individuals as the basis of assigning their political status. Furthermore, the ideology-based judgments of good or evil undermined and repressed the process of discovering accurate scientific knowledge because political morality was assumed to guide the truth about the mental, social, and natural worlds.

On the other hand, however, politically based moral practices were built on distorted or false knowledge about individuals, human nature, history, and world situations, with total ignorance about how individuals’ ethical and other value judgments were controlled by their limited cognitive spectrum about human reality, conditions, and the natural world.

All the concepts or categories represent parts of maps but not of the territories

The third reason includes the misbelief that what we know is accurate and complete, with the inability to understand why perceived reality based on socially sustained categories, concepts, and attributions is incomplete, inaccurate, or false. Our cognition of human reality is always incomplete because of the following reasons:

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1. All the concepts or categories we use to describe the world at both the societal and individual levels represent parts of maps but not of the territories or actual reality. What we know is the product of individual degrees of awareness of reality strongly shaped and restricted by societal, political, historical, and cultural forces.
2. All individuals represent beings with developing cognitions of the mental, interpersonal, social, and natural worlds. In other words, the unit of analysis involves the individual mind’s relations with reality.

In short, all human communications involve at least two living systems in contexts that process one another’s messages by determining a degree of their truthfulness before making right or wrong moral appraisals of the messages. Thus, the solution to conflict involves creating and sustaining a milieu where people can constantly challenge, verify, falsify, and discover new information. Only by recognizing all individuals’ activities and experiences as restricted by their developing awareness of reality can we develop new cognitions that guide our interactions and allow us to embrace auspicious opportunities and resources for well-being and relationships and to evade, deflect, or transform ominous occasions.