Beyond Hypocrisy: Sacrifice and Outrage As Tools for Building Moral Capital

How do we measure good and evil from a sociological perspective? These concepts are complex and multifaceted, making them intriguing subjects of analysis. Building on the notion of moral capital, we propose a provocative framework in which good and evil are measured by the effort and resources an individual, organisation, or state is willing to expend to gain moral recognition or avoid blame. In this context, we reinterpret sacrifice and moral outrage as standard techniques within the economics of morality. We argue that these phenomena are crucial to the functioning of states and societies, both due to the strategic significance of perceptions of moral responsibility in geopolitical contexts and the potential internal instabilities driven by moral panic.

Our analysis is based on two empirical studies. The first, a large-scale survey on public perceptions of brand responsibility, identifies three dominant attitudes among respondents: (a) committed activists, (b) passive observers, and (c) conformists. Interestingly, each one of them corresponds to typical responses to cognitive and emotional dissonance. The second study, consisting of case analyses, measures practical efforts expended in demonstrating moral goodness and evading blame. This study also confronts the empirical results obtained in the aforementioned research processes with conclusions coming from the interviews with a group of AI-agents, thus offering an innovative comparison between human and machine perceptions of moral effort. Our findings contribute to understanding how sacrifice and outrage function as deliberate strategies for building and protecting moral capital.