Group size determines the moral duty each person owes to another in need.
Evidence
The amount of help we owe to one another depends also on the number of people involved in a particular situation. In a group of, say, ten friends, when one is in need, nine friends can help. When this is so, each must provide a ninth of the help needed. The smaller the group, the greater the duty of each towards a member in need; the larger the group, the lesser the duty. This groupsize factor should play a role in explaining why people feel they have more duty towards their friends than towards their colleagues, towards their colleagues than towards their fellow citizens, and so on (Haidt & Baron 1996). — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 102
Categorization
- XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s framework on religious in-group/out-group moral obligations and how the Big God mechanism extends duty across group boundaries. — connects to: Humans hold systematic moral intuitions about proportionate sharing, helping, and punishment. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality: The…, 6; Moral obligation to help scales with recipient benefit relative to actor cost. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality: The…, 82; A set of individuals can be society to varying degrees. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 51 (+4 more)
- DEFINE: Clarifies the groupsize factor as a formal mechanism — a tenth of the burden each — rather than a vague intuition about closeness.
Related
- Larger social groups require proportionally more brain tissue to manage (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Morality extends beyond fairness among strangers to relational obligations
#expands(0.80) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 333 - A set of individuals can be society to varying degrees.
#expands(0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 51 - Any social group can act as individual or aggregate depending on its relational frame.
#expands(0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 631