Moral patiency is operationalizable through perceived vulnerability to harm.

Evidence

Participants then judged moral agency and patiency for each of the 14 targets. Assessing patiency. An adaptation of the Wong–Baker FACES Pain Scale (Wong & Baker, 1988) was used as one measure of patiency (see Figure 3). Participants indicated how much pain they thought the target felt by circling the appropriate face. Patiency was also assessed through judgments of vulnerability; participants were asked to evaluate “How easy would it be to take advantage of this person?” on a 7-point scale ranging from extremely hard to extremely easy. We reasoned that perceptions of vulnerability reflect the ease with which a target can be seen to be on the receiving end of a bad moral action—that is, as a moral patient. — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 62

Categorization

• DEFINE: The vulnerability question (‘How easy would it be to take advantage of this person?’) is a clean, reusable probe for measuring who counts as a moral patient — directly useful for the reader’s paradigm design.
• XREF: Provides the measuring instrument ingredient the reader needs when adapting this paradigm to test ideological framing of religious groups. — connects to: Moral patiency rests on a target’s perceived capacity for pain and pleasure. — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 14; Moral patiency is fundamentally the capacity to receive moral action — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 105; Moral agency and patiency can be cleanly measured through resistance-to-pain and responsibility scenarios — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 126 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Vulnerability-as-patiency links to the reader’s ‘On Sacrifice’ piece — moral patients are the sacrificial subjects, defined by how easily the collective can act upon them.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 62

Broader Connections

• Moral patiency is fundamentally the capacity to receive moral action #qualifies (0.72) — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 105
• Moral inhibition is neutralized by making victims remote and invisible #qualifies (0.71) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 550
• Moral agency and patiency can be cleanly measured through resistance-to-pain and responsibility scenarios #corroborates (0.70) — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 126