The Immorality of Too Much Money

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 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 U.S. (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.