Realism on change in moral intuitions

University of Chicago Law Review

Volumn 77, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 1643-1653

  Darley, John ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79955719410     PISSN: 00419494     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Note

References (56)

1. Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, and David A. Hoffman, Some Realism about Punishment Naturalism, 77 U Chi L Rev 1531 (2010).
2. See also Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, and David A. Hoffman, A Core of Agreement, 77 U Chi L Rev 1655 (2010).
3. Paul H. Robinson, Owen D. Jones, and Robert Kurzban, Realism, Punishment, and Reform, 77 U Chi L Rev 1611 (2010).
4. See also Owen D. Jones and Robert Kurzban, Intuitions of Punishment, 77 U Chi L Rev 1633 (2010).
5. Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman, 77 U Chi L Rev at 1567 (cited in note 1).
6. Id at 1602 (emphasis omitted).
7. See Paul H. Robinson and John M. Darley, The Utility of Desert, 91 Nw U L Rev 453, 456 (1997) (arguing that a legal code that "tracks the community's perceived principles of justice" leads to greater social compliance with the law).
8. See Daniel Kahneman, Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics, 93 Am Econ Rev 1449, 1451 (2003) (describing the intuitive process as "governed by habit, and ⋯ therefore difficult to control");
9. Steven A. Sloman, Two Systems of Reasoning, in Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman, eds, Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment 379, 391 (Cambridge 2002);
10. Keith E. Stanovich and Richard F. West, Individual Differences in Reasoning: Implications for the Rationality Debate?, in Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahneman, eds, Heuristics and Biases 421, 436
11. Steven A. Sloman, The Empirical Case for Two Systems of Reasoning, 119 Psych Bull 3, 6 (1996).
12. Kahneman, 93 Am Econ Rev at 1460 (cited in note 6) (explaining that people rely on heuristics in decisionmaking, "which reduce the complex task of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations"
13. quoting Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, 185 Sci 1124, 1124 (1974).
14. Kahneman, 93 Am Econ Rev at 1450 (cited in note 6).
15. See, for example, Jonathan Haidt and Fredrik Bjorklund, Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions about Moral Psychology, in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, ed, 2 Moral Psychology: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity 181, 188-89 (MIT 2008).
16. See also Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, and Marc Hauser, The Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgment: Testing Three Principles of Harm, 17 Psych Sci 1082, 1087 (2006).
17. See Jonathan Haidt, The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment, 108 Psych Rev 814, 814 (2001).
18. See id at 817 ("The central claim of the social intuitionist model is that moral judgment is caused by quick moral intuitions and is followed (when needed) by slow, ex post facto moral reasoning.").
19. See, for example, Kevin M. Carlsmith, John M. Darley, and Paul H. Robinson, Why Do We Punish? Deterrence and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment, 83 J Personality & Soc Psych 284, 295 (2002);
20. John M. Darley, Kevin M. Carlsmith, and Paul H. Robinson, Incapacitation and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment, 24 L & Hum Behav 659, 676 (2000).
21. See Darley, Carlsmith, and Robinson, 24 L & Hum Behav at 662 (cited in note 12).
22. See id at 671.
23. Dale T. Miller, Disrespect and the Experience of Injustice, 52 Ann Rev Psych 527, 535 (2001) (citations omitted).
24. The case for naïve realism in opinion disagreement has been most extensively made in Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, Human Interference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment 196-227 (Prentice Hall 1980). Emily Pronin has demonstrated that the years psychologists have spent teaching that decisions are often made by heuristics and therefore possibly biased and wrong have had an influence-each person believes that others are swayed by biases, while he himself is much less so.
25. Emily Pronin, How We See Ourselves and How We See Others, 320 Sci 1177, 1178 (2008).
26. BKH make this point better than I do: [P]articipants may recognize that the moral hierarchies of others vary, but they are unlikely to prize other people's mores and commitments more highly than their own; at best they may view other value structures as strange or foreign, at worst as false and debased. And while those involved in such moral disputes may understand that their preferred outcomes derive from their values, they will often have trouble articulating the source of their values. Their values will seem, at least to them, to be natural. Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman, 77 U Chi L Rev at 1567 (cited in note 1). I therefore converge with BKH on the recognition that actors are phenomenological naturalists about many of their moral intuitions.
27. Id at 1602 (complaining that this outlook leads to needless paralysis among reformers).
28. See Joshua D. Greene, et al, The Neural Bases of Cognitive Conflict and Control in Moral Judgment, 44 Neuron 389, 397 (2004);
29. Joshua D. Greene, et al, An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment, 293 Sci 2105, 2107 (2001).
30. See Greene, et al, 44 Neuron at 390 (cited in note 19) (indicating that the long reaction times for such dilemmas supported an inference that "cognitive control" was engaged).
31. See id at 393-94.
32. See id at 390 (explaining how the hypothetical exposes tension between an emotional aversion to killing a baby and a rationalist desire to minimize the overall number of deaths).
33. See id at 393-94.
34. See Greene, et al, 44 Neuron at 390 (cited in note 19).
35. For a more precise description of the harmful actions to which the intuitive system is responding, see Joshua D. Greene, et al, Pushing Moral Buttons: The Interaction between Personal Force and Intention in Moral Judgment, 111 Cognition 364, 365 (2009).
36. See, for example, Daniel W. Van Ness, New Wine and Old Wineskins: Four Challenges of Restorative Justice, 4 Crim L F 251, 257-60 (1993) (arguing that the modern criminal justice system is overly concerned with "public order" to the detriment of other communal values).
37. See, for example, Daniel M. Farrell, The Justification of General Deterrence, 94 Phil Rev 367, 368-69 (1985).
38. See notes 6-7 and accompanying text.
39. A recent review summarizes the processes involved in overcoming stereotype intuitions. See Gordon B. Moskowitz, On the Control over Stereotype Activation and Stereotype Inhibition, 4 Soc & Personality Psych Compass 140, 141 (2010).
40. Donald B. Kraybill, Why the Amish Forgive So Quickly, Christian Sci Monitor 9 (Oct 2, 2007).
41. Id.
42. For an account of these differences and a theory of how they come about, see generally John T. Jost, et al, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, 129 Psych Bull 339 (2003) (identifying several psychological characteristics, such as fear of loss and intolerance of ambiguity, that describe conservatives across all cultures).
43. Thalia Wheatley and Jonathan Haidt, Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe, 16 Psych Sci 780, 780 (2005) ("Half of the groups were instructed to feel disgust when reading the word often; half were instructed to feel disgust when reading the word take.").
44. See id at 781.
45. In this light, consider the Supreme Court's decision striking down a Texas sodomy statute, with Justice Antonin Scalia in dissent. See Lawrence v Texas, 539 US 558, 599 (2003) (Scalia dissenting).
46. See P.N. Johnson-Laird, Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness 10 (Harvard 1983) (describing how humans "understand the world by constructing working models of it in their minds" and thus different people can have different "models" of the same reality). One of the more famous studies in psychology shows how, seeing a film of a penalty-ridden football game, partisans of each side perceived that the other side "started it."
47. See Albert H. Hastorf and Hadley Cantril, They Saw a Game: A Case Study, 49 J Abnorm & Soc Psych 129, 133 (1954).
48. Consider also Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman, and Donald Braman, Whose Eyes Are You Going to Believe? Scott v. Harris and the Perils of Cognitive Illiberalism, 122 Harv L Rev 837, 841-42 (2009).
49. See, for example, Julie H. Goldberg, Jennifer S. Lerner, and Philip E. Tetlock, Rage and Reason: The Psychology of the Intuitive Prosecutor, 29 Eur J Soc Psych 781, 783 (1999) (claiming that "intuitive prosecutors" are created when observers learn that "justice was not served after an anger-eliciting event").
50. Joseph Henrich, et al, Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment, 327 Sci 1480, 1481 (2010).
51. See id at 1483-84.
52. Id at 1480.
53. See id at 1483.
54. See Henrich, et al, 327 Sci at 1482 (cited in note 38).
55. David Garland offers a persuasive account of the transformations in our thinking that brought about these changes in punitive practices. See David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory 287 (Chicago 1990).
56. See Robinson and Darley, 91 Nw U L Rev at 471-88 (cited in note 5).