Can reasonable people disagree about right and wrong? The determinants and implications of perceiving moral reasonableness.

When people disagree about deeply held moral convictions, conflicts can seem inevitable. This paper proposes that conflicts can be avoided, and respectful exchanges can follow, if people perceive stances they disagree with as morally reasonable: arrived at through good-faith deliberation. Reasonableness, central to law and philosophy, has received little attention in psychological research on morality. Across five studies (plus three replication studies, Total N = 853), this research examined whether people can perceive moral disagreements as reasonable and, if so, what the predictors, implications, and psychological underpinnings of such perceptions are. As hypothesized, (H1) participants perceived moral disagreements as more reasonable when issues were more difficult (e.g. involved conflict, more novel, or more informationally obscure); (H2) they expressed less hostility and more willingness to socialize when they saw a disagreeing stance as morally reasonable; and (H3) they saw the disagreeing stance as more reasonable when the stance was reached through good-faith deliberation. Under some circumstances, participants even saw stances they disagreed with as more reasonable than stances they agreed with. Unlike related constructs such as mere agreement, moral convictions, ethical subjectivism, and intellectual humility, perceptions of moral reasonableness are perceptions of how another person reached their stance and have stronger social implications than perceptions of empirical reasonableness. Efforts to understand and mitigate political and moral conflicts will want to incorporate how perceptions of reasonableness can be used and abused-for peaceful, political, or personal ends-to alter how reasonable or unreasonable a moral stance appears to others.