Moral dumbfounding
Moral judgement and moral reasoning are basically two different processes. People tend to have a knee-jerk reaction for what’s good or bad, often based more on cultural conditioning, prejudice, or gut feelings than any reasonable morality or ethics. When asked to elaborate, you get “moral dumbfounding,” moral reasoning made up ex-post facto to justify moral judgement.
Jesse Bering in Perv cites it this way:
Back in 2001, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt coined the term “moral dumbfounding” to refer to the phenomenon in which we struggle to elaborate on the precise reasons why we believe certain acts are immoral. Emotionally fueled tautologies (or expressions of redundancy that fail to offer any actual clarification, such as “It’s wrong because it’s just nasty,” “You shouldn’t do it, because it’s creepy,” “It’s immoral because it’s plain evil,” and of course “It’s not right, because God says so”) only echo intense social disapproval for certain crimes that shouldn’t be crimes at all when we prioritize the question of harmfulness.
Our moral intuition is grossly fallible, which we would do well to remember, especially since disgust is a culture-bound syndrome.
The paper by Haidt, Björklund, and Murphy: https://www.polpsy.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/haidt.bjorklund.pdf
Note: perhaps Haidt should take some of his own medicine, as he’s now largely the source of the moral panic over teens and smartphone use 🙃 (great rebuttal here: https://torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/the-moral-panic-over-social-media-and-teen-depression/)