Moral Psychology: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (MIT Press)

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In the first set of comments, Cass Sunstein is much less optimistic about the normative value of heuristics. Sunstein highlights several cases in which heuristics are unreliable and lead to moral error, especially cases that stem from heuristics such as "do what the majority does" or "do not distort the truth" Both Sunstein and Julia Driver and Don Loeb in their subsequent comments devote most of their critical focus to Gigerenzer's application of his view to consequentialism. In a model essay for combining philosophical theorizing about morality with empirical results from other disciplines, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong takes aim at moral intuitionism in his paper "Framing Moral Intuitions".

He defines moral intuitions as moral beliefs that are strong high degree of confidence and immediate non-inferential Sinnott-Armstrong concedes that most humans have moral intuitions understood in this manner, but the interesting question is whether such beliefs are non-inferentially justified, i.

While moral intuitionists on Sinnott-Armstrong's taxonomy claim that some moral intuitions are justified non-inferentially, he attempts to show instead that no moral intuitions are so justified. His argument relies on the following general principle: If the process that produced a belief is not reliable in the circumstances, and if the believer ought to know this, then the believer is not justified in forming or holding the belief without inferential confirmation From this we get the following master argument: The framing effects in which Sinnott-Armstrong is mainly interested are word and context effects.

A word effect influences moral intuitions, for example, when the words used to describe what a belief is about impact whether a person holds the belief. An instance of a context effect is when a person's belief depends upon the order in which two or more scenes are presented to him or her Wording and context do not affect the truth of the beliefs in these cases, but if they have a significant impact upon whether we form those beliefs in the first place, then according to Sinnott-Armstrong it is plausible to hold that moral beliefs influenced by framing effects will often be incorrect and cannot reliably track the truth.

As support for 3 , he thoroughly summarizes a range of recent studies by Horowitz , on rescue cases , Petrinovich and O'Neill , on trolley problems , and Haidt and Baron , on lying. In his comments on Sinnott-Armstrong, William Tolhurst begins by questioning how the conclusion in 5 is supposed to follow from the premises, but he devotes most of his attention to the claim that.

Nothing Sinnott-Armstrong has provided by way of argument gives us sufficient reason to believe that the percentage of moral intuitions formed in ordinary circumstances that result from framing effects is a significant fraction of all such moral intuitions Russ Shafer-Landau also takes aim at Sinnott-Armstrong's master argument, and claims that the conclusion in 5 , by telling us that moral intuitions in many circumstances are unjustified, tells us nothing that we did not already know.

Instead Shafer-Landau proposes a revised argument on Sinnott-Armstrong's behalf: He then proceeds to call into question the first premise. It is worth noting that in his reply to the commentators, Sinnott-Armstrong does give a more carefully developed, twelve step version of his argument.

Account Options

Operative Principles and the Causal Structure of Moral Actions" to argue for a version of moral nativism. Drawing on what they take to be a suggestion from John Rawls, they try to forge a helpful analogy between Chomskyan approaches to language and the psychology of moral judgments. Children are born with linguistic principles such as rules for verb construction, although in the child the principles are operative but not expressed In the moral case, Hauser et al.

On their approach, there is an innate, universal moral faculty that forms moral verdicts about perceptions of situations on the basis of operative but unexpressed moral principles. According to the weaker model as I understand it the operation of the moral faculty is necessary for moral judgments, but other components such as the emotions might also be necessary and are causal products of the appraisals made by the faculty.

2009.07.28

On the stronger model, on the other hand, the moral faculty generates a moral judgment just using the operative moral principles , Crucial for their view in either version, however, is the work of the unconscious appraisal mechanism, which analyzes such things as the causes and consequences of actions. Furthermore, this "moral faculty is equipped with a universal set of principles, with each culture setting up particular exceptions by means of tweaking the relevant parameters" It follows that damage to such a system would seriously impair our moral capabilities. To empirically support their view, Hauser et al.

The two sets of commentaries are perhaps the most critical in the volume. Ron Mallon argues that there is no evidence for a specialized moral faculty, understood as being informationally encapsulated, having principles that are obscure to conscious reasoning, and existing in a certain discrete brain location.

Rather, cognitive science gives us good reason to think that "multiple or diffuse internal mechanisms operate in such a way that we can accurately describe them as performing the function" of the moral faculty Jesse Prinz raises five potential disanalogies between morality and language, and also questions the four allegedly analogous respects between the two offered by Hauser et al. He then proceeds to sketch what he would later call his constructive sentimentalist account and outlines how a non-nativist might account for the trolley data Prinz Simplifying greatly, on their view moral judgments arise from quick and automatic moral intuitions.

These intuitions are defined as. Haidt and Bjorklund postulate five sets of basic intuitions: Conscious moral judgments formed on the base of such intuitions in turn give rise to conscious moral reasoning to rationalize in a post hoc manner the conclusions that have already been reached. This moral reasoning can causally influence the agent's subsequent moral intuitions and judgments, but Haidt and Bjorklund claim that such influence is "hypothesized to occur somewhat rarely outside of highly specialized subcultures" In addition, there is a strong social dimension to their theory -- one person's intuitions might be shaped by another's judgment the "social persuasion link" or reasoning the "reasoned persuasion link" or both Indeed, Haidt and Bjorklund claim that the "reasons that people give to each other are best seen as attempts to trigger the right intuitions in others" In support of their view, Haidt and Bjorklund cite three main forms of empirical evidence: They conclude by addressing the questions of how morality develops and why people vary in their moral views.

At the very end of their paper, they draw some quick and as the commentators note, very controversial philosophical implications from social intuitionism about, among other things, the metaphysics of moral facts and the nature of moral inquiry. In the first set of comments, Dan Jacobson raises a host of important criticisms, but one of his main worries is that. In addition, he criticizes the seeming equation on the social intuitionist model of reason giving with persuasion In a very interesting commentary, Darcia Narvaez argues that social intuitionism overemphasizes the role of intuitions in moral thought without paying adequate attention to the role of deliberative reasoning and the way in which other factors such as principles and goals the agent's own and others play a role in decision making and deliberation prior to judgment.

To use her memorable expression, "Instead of intuition's dominating the process, intuition danced with conscious reasoning, taking turns doing the leading" Let us pursue this last point a bit further. In their response, Haidt and Bjorklund graciously acknowledge the force of Narvaez's objection, and revise their view to apply just to moral judgments as opposed to moral decisions This distinction is never specified very precisely, but the idea appears to be that moral judgments are moral evaluations of others their behavior, character, etc.

Haidt and Bjorklund claim that social intuitionism is primarily intended as an account of the former, and that there is good reason to think there is not one moral faculty responsible for both judgments and decisions Nevertheless a critic might object that such a distinction does not get the phenomenology correct.

On the one hand, there seem to be automatic "moral decisions" about how to act that involve little or no prior conscious reflection. Indeed Haidt and Bjorklund provide a nice example of such a case: On the other hand, there are plenty of cases in which "moral judgments" about the morality of third-person behavior involve "private, internal, conscious weighing of options and consequences" For instance, someone might read about a case of physician-assisted suicide and, after reflectively weighing the various considerations raised in the story, come to a conclusion about the morality of the doctor's action.

More straightforwardly, Narvaez gives a list of twelve moments of conscious deliberation in her own life about how to act, a list that Haidt and Bjorklund seem to accept as familiar , For each item on the list, however, we can easily arrive at a third-person analog in which just as much conscious deliberation might be involved.

For instance, one item is the following What can I do to make it worthwhile for everyone? Another person might consciously deliberate just as much about the following: What can the department chair do to make it worthwhile for everyone?

Did the department chair act in the best way possible? Similarly, another item is this But we can easily imagine the following question requiring even more conscious deliberation in some cases: In general it is hard to see how the distinction between moral judgments and moral decisions really helps Haidt and Bjorklund. Ultimately, I suspect that they would be better off simply abandoning this distinction and following Narvaez in claiming that intuitions are often just one of several factors some conscious and some not that typically go into the formation of many moral conclusions, and that the precise contribution that each factor makes can vary significantly from one case to the next.

He begins by examining and quickly dismissing early sentimentalist accounts of moral judgments such as emotivist views before moving to contemporary neosentimentalist positions. There the representative example is Gibbard's norm-expressivism, according to which "what a person does is morally wrong if and only if it is rational for him to feel guilty for doing it, and for others to resent him for doing it" quoted in Nichols, , emphasis in original.

Nichols argues, however, that this approach is too demanding since it requires an agent to " i attribute guilt, ii evaluate the normative appropriateness of emotions, and iii combine these two capacities to judge whether guilt is a normatively appropriate response to a situation" Further, there is good empirical evidence for thinking that young children can make genuine moral judgments more precisely, what Nichols calls core moral judgments concerning violations of harm norms , whereas they do not possess an understanding of guilt until significantly later in life.

As an alternative approach, Nichols begins to outline his sentimental rules account, whereby core moral judgments have two central components. One is an affective system that is triggered by perceptions of suffering in others; a motivation for positing this system comes from studies of psychopaths who have difficulty drawing the moral versus conventional distinction and also have deficits in affective response The other central component is an agent's normative theory, or body of information about what actions are wrong.

Since our affective system also reacts to natural disasters and accidents, something more is needed to form a genuine moral judgment Finally towards the end of his paper and his book , Nichols turns to the evolution of norms and advances the "affective resonance" hypothesis: Norms that prohibit actions to which we are predisposed to be emotionally averse will enjoy enhanced cultural fitness over other norms As evidence for this hypothesis, Nichols examines in some detail the cultural evolution of etiquette norms At this point we can raise a few questions for Nichols about his treatment of these two alleged components of core moral judgments.

Similarly, he seems to reject the claim that both components operating together occurently are necessary for core moral judgments , Instead it may be enough if the affective system is present at some crucial earlier developmental stage , Even so, however, we are never given an argument for why such an affective system is necessary at any point for the production of core moral judgments, where the necessity here is presumably nomological rather than conceptual necessity since Nichols is not giving a conceptual account of moral judgments.

Instead, at best his arguments for the role of an affective system would seem to show that such a system is extremely common or frequently present in subjects making core moral judgments. Similarly, even if both components are indeed necessary in some way, Nichols says nothing to convince us that together they are jointly sufficient. Without any clear reasons to accept either the necessity or the sufficiency of his view, it is not clear to what extent Nichols provides an actual empirical account of our capacity to form core moral judgments. For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways.

Since the s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these three volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in this emerging interdisciplinary field. The neuroscience of morality is in its infancy, with the first brain imaging studies of moral development undertaken only in The contributors to volume 3 sample the best work in this very new field, discussing a variety of approaches, including functional imaging, lesion studies, abnormal psychology, and developmental neuroscience.

Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author s of the original essay.

Topics include the neural basis of moral emotions and moral judgments as well as comparisons of normal adult moral judgments with those made by children, adolescents, and people with psychopathy, brain damage, and autism. Index to Volume 1. Index to Volume 2. Index to Volume 3.

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