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A study in PNAS Nexus on wealth found something interesting: more equal countries tend to view wealth concentration as immoral. But in places that value loyalty and authority, they don't.

Abstract

In some societies, people find excessive wealth immoral, while others are structured so that having too much money is morally neutral or even praised. Here, we show that moral judgments of excessive wealth are distinguishable from moral judgments of economic inequality and examine how people’s moral concerns and national inequality predict the immorality of excessive wealth around the globe. Using demographically stratified samples from 20 nations (⁠N = 4.351⁠), we find that across all countries, people do not find excessive wealth very immoral, with notable variability such that more equal and wealthy societies (e.g. Belgium, Switzerland) consider having too much money more wrong. People’s equality and purity concerns reliably predicted their condemnation of excessive wealth, whereas loyalty, authority, and proportionality concerns were negatively associated with condemnation of excessive wealth across societies after controlling for the moralization of inequality, religiosity, political ideology, and demographic variables. We conducted a follow-up study in the United States (⁠N = 315⁠), showing that moral purity is more broadly linked to the moralization of excess beyond wealth, even after controlling for different ways of wealth acquisition and spending. Collectively, these cross-cultural results demonstrate that some moral intuitions shape our moral judgment of excessive wealth above and beyond economic inequality.
Interesting. @Undisciplined would probably critique this by saying that the word "excessive" inherently implies a judgment of immorality.
I wonder why the study didn't also study "excessive poverty". I would think that most people have a greater moral problem with having too many people in excessive poverty than having too many people with excessive wealth.
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I'd have to look into it more than I'm inclined to to say for sure, but "excess" only has to imply more than is required for some purpose. I could imagine coming up with definitions that aren't moral exactly, but are meant to gauge moral intuitions.
"Excessive poverty" seems like it would be fraught with smuggled in assumptions.
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