People more readily punish good moral agents than moral patients.

Evidence

The contrariety of moral agency and patiency leads to the surprising finding that people are more willing to assign pain to good moral agents and to deprive them of pleasure than they are to deliver these harmful penalties to moral patients or to neutral targets (Study 7). Overall, then, these studies uncovered repeated instances of moral typecasting in person perception: Seeing greater moral agency in a person undermines perceptions of that person as a moral patient, just as seeing greater moral patiency in the person reduces perceptions of that person as a moral agent. — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 147

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 147
• XREF: connects to: People retain their moral standards while selectively suspending them for harm. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 63; Human morality is contingent rather than invariant across circumstances. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality: The…, 390; Society punishes impropriety more harshly than inhumanity (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Society punishes impropriety more harshly than inhumanity #corroborates (0.86)
• People exploit agent-and-patient casting to manage their own moral reputations #expands (0.78) — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 168
• Human morality is contingent rather than invariant across circumstances. #qualifies (0.74) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 390
• People retain their moral standards while selectively suspending them for harm. #expands (0.72) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 63
• Selective moral disengagement lets the same person be both good and bad at once #expands (0.70) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 530