People are often described as if morality were distributed across humanity in the same way as height, intelligence, or many other measurable traits. At one end would be exceptionally immoral people, at the other exceptionally moral people, while most of humanity would supposedly cluster somewhere around the middle.
It is an attractive picture. It is also probably wrong.
There is no good reason to assume that morality follows a Gaussian, or normal, distribution. In fact, there is a more fundamental problem: unlike height, morality is not a single measurable characteristic. There is no universally accepted moral equivalent of centimeters, kilograms, or IQ points.
What we call morality consists of many different traits, judgments, behaviors, motivations, and circumstances. Once those are separated, the idea of putting everybody onto one neat bell curve begins to fall apart.
There is no single unit of morality
Imagine trying to assign every person a morality score between 0 and 100. What exactly would that number represent?
Would honesty count more than generosity? Should someone who regularly gives money to charity but cheats on their spouse score higher or lower than someone who never donates but is extraordinarily loyal to friends and family? How should we compare courage, compassion, fairness, forgiveness, cruelty, selfishness, and willingness to sacrifice for strangers?
There is no objective conversion table.
Even philosophers disagree about what morality fundamentally requires. A utilitarian may emphasize consequences and well-being. A deontologist may emphasize duties and rights. A virtue ethicist may focus on character. Different societies also place different weights on loyalty, authority, liberty, equality, purity, individual autonomy, and communal obligations.
Before asking how morality is distributed, therefore, we would first have to decide what exactly we were measuring.
Moral traits can have completely different distributions
Individual aspects of moral behavior do not necessarily have the same statistical shape.
Consider attitudes toward murder. In most societies, an overwhelming majority of people strongly reject intentionally killing innocent people. Responses would therefore pile up close to one end of the scale. That would produce something very different from a symmetrical bell curve.
Now consider charitable giving. Many people may donate relatively little, while a smaller group gives unusually large amounts. The resulting distribution could be strongly skewed.
Some moral attitudes could even become bimodal. On controversial questions, two large groups might cluster around opposing positions with relatively fewer people occupying the middle.
Other behaviors could have long tails. Most people might engage in modest acts of generosity, while a tiny minority devote enormous amounts of their lives or resources to helping others. At the opposite extreme, a very small number of individuals can inflict extraordinary amounts of suffering.
There is therefore no reason to expect one statistical distribution to describe every moral dimension.
The same person can be moral and immoral
The situation becomes even more complicated because moral behavior is highly context-dependent.
A person may be extremely generous toward family members while showing little concern for strangers. Someone may be honest in ordinary life but lie when enormous financial incentives appear. A soldier may risk his life to save another soldier while participating in violence against members of another group. Someone may strongly defend human rights in one context while ignoring violations committed by people they identify with.
Human beings are not moral constants.
Our behavior changes according to social pressure, incentives, fear, authority, group identity, anonymity, personal relationships, and perceived consequences.
That is why experiments in psychology and behavioral economics can produce dramatically different behavior from the same kinds of people simply by changing the circumstances.
If morality were a stable quantity residing inside every individual, such variation would be much harder to explain.
Morality is also strongly shaped by social environments.
Some behaviors become almost universal because societies punish deviation from them. Others become common because institutions reward them. Religious traditions, legal systems, families, schools, peer groups, and political cultures all influence what people regard as acceptable.
This creates statistical clustering.
Suppose almost everyone in a society strongly condemns theft. Their attitudes will cluster near one extreme because social norms strongly reinforce that position. That tells us something about their beliefs, but it does not necessarily tell us how they would behave if stealing became socially accepted, impossible to detect, or enormously profitable.
History repeatedly demonstrates how quickly moral behavior can change when institutions and incentives change.
People who appear ordinary under normal conditions may participate in terrible acts under authoritarian systems, wars, ethnic conflicts, or powerful group pressure. Conversely, individuals sometimes behave with remarkable courage when helping someone carries enormous personal risk.
The distribution of behavior is therefore partly a distribution of situations.
Moral extremes may produce heavy tails
Another possibility is that some forms of morality resemble what statisticians call heavy-tailed distributions.
In a normal distribution, extremely unusual observations become progressively rarer very quickly. But human history contains individuals whose effects are disproportionately enormous.
One person can save thousands of lives through medicine, philanthropy, political action, or technological innovation. Another individual can contribute to suffering on a scale vastly beyond anything an ordinary person could accomplish.
Power makes this problem even larger.
The moral consequences of someone’s behavior depend not merely on character but also on opportunity. An ordinary cruel person may harm a handful of people. A cruel dictator can harm millions. Conversely, someone controlling enormous resources may produce benefits far beyond what an equally compassionate person without those resources could accomplish.
Measured by consequences, the extremes could therefore become enormous.
That looks much less like a tidy bell curve.
Moral character is probably multidimensional
A better analogy may be personality.
Psychologists generally do not describe personality using one number stretching from “little personality” to “lots of personality.” Instead, personality can be divided into several dimensions.
Something similar makes more sense for morality.
Imagine a multidimensional space containing variables such as empathy, honesty, fairness, altruism, aggression, loyalty, concern for strangers, respect for rights, willingness to cooperate, sensitivity to suffering, and resistance to social pressure.
Every person would occupy a particular position within that space.
Two people could therefore have very different moral profiles without either being straightforwardly “more moral” in every respect.
One person might be highly compassionate but dishonest. Another might be exceptionally honest but emotionally indifferent to suffering. A third might strongly respect rules while caring little about whether those rules produce good outcomes.
Reducing all of this to a single number inevitably throws away information.
Why we nevertheless imagine a bell curve
There is an intuitive reason people may expect morality to follow a normal distribution.
Many biological and psychological traits roughly resemble bell curves because they result from large numbers of contributing factors. Most people end up somewhere near the middle, while increasingly extreme values become rarer.
It is tempting to assume the same thing about morality.
But that reasoning works only when the variable itself is clearly defined and reasonably continuous.
Height qualifies. Morality does not.
Moral behavior can involve thresholds. Someone either commits murder or does not. Someone either returns a lost wallet or keeps it. Someone either intervenes when another person is attacked or walks away.
Many morally important events are categorical rather than smoothly continuous.
Social norms can also push entire populations toward one side of a distribution, while political polarization can split populations into several clusters. Extreme opportunities can create long tails. Different moral characteristics can correlate only imperfectly with one another.
All of these mechanisms undermine the expectation of a simple Gaussian curve.
There may be no such thing as an “average moral person”
We routinely talk about morally good people, bad people, saints, heroes, criminals, hypocrites, and ordinary people.
Those categories can be useful in everyday conversation, but statistically they may hide enormous complexity.
The supposedly average person might be highly moral in some dimensions and mediocre in others. Another person could arrive at a similar overall judgment through an entirely different combination of characteristics.
Even more importantly, someone’s behavior tomorrow may depend heavily on circumstances that do not exist today.
The search for a universal moral bell curve therefore begins with an assumption that may itself be mistaken: that morality is one quantity distributed among people.
It probably is not.
Humanity occupies a moral landscape, not a moral curve
A better way to imagine human morality is not as a line running from evil to good, with most people packed into the middle.
Imagine a landscape with many dimensions.
People occupy different positions depending on empathy, honesty, altruism, aggression, loyalty, fairness, social conformity, concern for distant strangers, and countless other characteristics. Their positions can also move when circumstances change.
Some dimensions may approximately resemble normal distributions. Others may be highly skewed, clustered, bimodal, or heavy-tailed. Some may barely resemble conventional statistical distributions at all.
This does not mean morality cannot be studied scientifically. Moral psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, sociology, and other fields already investigate many components of moral judgment and behavior.
It means something more modest but important: we should be careful about assuming that something as complicated as human morality can be compressed into one number and plotted as a beautiful symmetrical bell curve.
Human beings are considerably messier than that.
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