Reflective moral equilibrium and psychological theory

Ethics

Volumn 109, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 846-857

  Van Roojen, Mark ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0033160155     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/233950     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Tamara Horowitz, "Philosophical Intuitions and Psychological Theory," Ethics 108 (1998): 367-85. Page references in the text are to this paper.
2. Quinn's argument can be found in "Actions, Intentions, Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing," Philosophical Review 98 (1989), reprinted in his Morality and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 149-74. While I am defending Quinn's use of thought experiments in his argument, I don't wish to take a position on his overall interpretation of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing.
3. Quinn's argument can be found in "Actions, Intentions, Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing," Philosophical Review 98 (1989), reprinted in his Morality and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 149-74. While I am defending Quinn's use of thought experiments in his argument, I don't wish to take a position on his overall interpretation of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing.
4. Prospect theory is a nonstandard sort of decision theory defended by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk," Econometrica 47 (1979): 263-91.
5. I actually have quite a bit of trouble figuring out from her text exactly what the second component is supposed to be and what she has to say about it. I believe her idea is that one option in each choice involves saving five people, while the other option in each choice involves failing to save five people. These features make up the second component which the examples have in common. In any case, the text is clear that the first component involves a comparison of the value of a death due to killing as opposed to a death due to letting die. And that is really the component doing the explanatory work on the prospect-theoretical account.
6. A slightly different interpretation would contrast judgments grounded in one sort of psychological mechanism or competence with those grounded in another. Someone might think that certain moral judgments resulted from mechanisms that are universal, much as some linguists postulate universal linguistic mechanisms to explain linguistic judgments. On such a view, such moral mechanisms or competences could interact with other components of the person's psychology to generate moral judgments in particular cases. If this is the idea, Horowitz might be distinguishing judgments depending on such subpersonal mechanisms or competences from those that depend on other mechanisms. On this reading, Horowitz would be claiming that the judgments do not stem from specifically moral competences or mechanisms. My arguments in the text would have the same upshot against this way of making the distinction as well. For more on subpersonal moral competences and parallels with linguistics, see Gilbert Harman, "Moral Philosophy and Linguistics," forthcoming.
7. Someone might think that I am being uncharitable in attributing to her a more ambitious argument which attempts to undermine drawing normative conclusions from thought experiments like Quinn's. Rather, the objection would go, all she is doing is offering prospect theory as a psychological explanatory theory which displaces the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing as a competing psychological explanation. Against this I have several replies: first, on my reading of her argument, Horowitz makes both a more modest empirical explanatory claim and the more ambitious claim that the modest claim undermines any attempt to reach normative conclusions from such thought experiments. Hence, textual evidence that she makes the modest claim is not in conflict with my interpretation. Second, a purely modest reading of her argument ignores claims she does make, such as when she replies to the anonymous objector in the way I quote above. Whatever the point there is, it is aimed at anyone who tries to argue for moral principles from examples like Quinn's. And if Horowitz's ambitions were not to undermine normative claims reached through such reasoning, the better response to the objection regarding reflective equilibrium would just be that that process is irrelevant to her argument since its conclusions are normative while hers are psychological. Further, such textual evidence comes from her concluding paragraphs: "It is therefore possible that prospect theory . . . provides the correct account of the reasoning engaged in by people who come to have Quinn's intuitions concerning his Rescue Dilemmas. If this is so, then Quinn's philosophical thought experiments do not provide us with an argument for his philosophical conclusions" (p. 385). Given that Quinn's philosophical conclusions were normative, the most charitable reading of Horowitz's claims is one in which she also means to take issue with his normative arguments.
8. Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 60.
9. Gilbert Harman in The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) notes the same sort of distinction between facts to be explained when we are talking about moral observations and their explanation: "It is . . . important to note an ambiguity in the word 'observation.' You see the children set the cat on fire and immediately think, 'That's wrong.' In one sense, your observation is that what the children are doing is wrong. In another sense, your observation is your thinking that thought. Moral principles might explain observations in the first sense but not in the second sense" (p. 8). I thank the editor of Ethics for reminding me of this passage.
10. I suspect that the anonymous reader cited by Horowitz as complaining that her argument presupposes a mistaken view of reflective equilibrium aimed to make something like this point.
11. Am I denying that Quinn's argument depends on the "assumption that people who share his intuitions in the case of Rescue Dilemma 1 and Rescue Dilemma 2 do so because they accept, however inexplicably, the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing" (Horowitz, p. 369)? Well, yes and no. Quinn is doing two things in the first section of his paper. He was clarifying the content of a doctrine that he thought was widely accepted, and he was arguing for it. Insofar as he was clarifying what he thought was a widely held set of views, he assumed that his reactions to the cases were expressions of those views. But in his argument for the doctrine from those dilemmas, the assumption does not play a role. At least this seems to me the best reading of what is going on. It is somewhat understandable that Horowitz reads him differently. Quinn's own discussion seems to me to run the two roles together somewhat. He sometimes speaks in the same breath of what we may do and of what we will tolerate someone doing (see Quinn, p. 365, for example). But even if Quinn himself does not stay sufficiently clear on the point, insofar as Horowitz wants her argument to apply to any argument from the same examples to similar conclusions, we should be careful to keep the two projects apart.
12. Whether it does or not is actually also a tricky question, even should prospect theory offer a correct psychological explanation of our moral judgments over a particular range of cases. This is because it is not obvious what it amounts to for a certain principle or set of principles to control our intuitive judgments when those judgments do not result from conscious consultation of the principle. Depending on what this sort of explanation entails, it could be compatible with equally correct explanations employing different principles. For example, if the claim is cashed out in terms of the response depending counterfactually on the judgment rendered agreeing with the principles employed in prospect theory, principles which necessarily lead to the same choices will offer equally good explanations. If the claim is that the biological process which realizes the thought process has a structure that mirrors the structure of the reasoning employing the principle, it would be possible for a structure to be isomorphic to the structure of different explanations invoking different principles.
13. For an interesting discussion of debunking explanations, see S. L. Hurley, Natural Reasons: Personality and Polity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 288-313.
14. You might think that Horowitz rules this possibility out insofar as she is trying to explain our responses to the same cases that Quinn and others use the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing to justify. But she explicitly notes that she claims only to explain the cases that Quinn himself employs to support the doctrine, and leaves open the possibility that other doing/allowing verdicts would not be similarly explicable. On this see the quotation in the next footnote.
15. "The requirement that prospect theory account for all of these cases would be question begging" (p. 380).
16. Our belief that it is, is not obviously an empirically justified belief, but rather a substantive and seemingly a priori claim about what sorts of differences could be rational to take into account when choosing courses of action.
17. All of this may justify a worry that prospect theory is not actually a rival theory at any level to theories which rely on a distinction between doing and allowing. Instead such theories might offer us a reason or an explanation of why we should or do frame choices involving killings differently from cases with similar outcomes that come about by our allowing deaths to occur.
18. It is important to see that my claim here is not just about the truth of the responses but about the validity or fallaciousness of the reasoning involved in reaching them. Even if incorrect ways of framing outcomes lead prospect-theoretic reasoning not to be generally reliable, the lack of reliability is due to the framing and not to the differential treatment of options once framing has occurred. Thus, where we have no reason to think that the framing of options involves a mistake, we have no reason to think that the reasoning is unreliable or invalid.
19. I thank the editor of Ethics for suggesting that this sort of argument might have been what Horowitz intended.
20. "In deciding whether to kill the person or leave the person alone, one thinks of the person's being alive as the status quo and chooses this as the neutral outcome. . . . But in deciding whether to save a person who would otherwise die, one thinks of the person's being dead as the status quo and chooses this as the neutral outcome" (pp. 377-78).
21. Again, this is a possibility that Horowitz specifically concedes as noted in n. 14.
22. Actually we should be a bit careful here. If my earlier argument is correct, there are two things we might explain, the truth of the contents of the judgments and the fact that we make judgments with those contents. Explanation of either might be overdetermined, but for the explanation of the truth of the normative judgment to be overdetermined we would also have to accept the prospect-theoretic explanation as an example of good reasoning. We would likely need an argument that it is.