Moral reasoning on the ground

Ethics

Volumn 122, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 273-312

  Campbell, Richmond ^a   Kumar, Victor ^b  

^a DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84858028387     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/663980     Document Type: Article

References (115)

1. The story, based on firsthand accounts, is taken from David Howarth, We Die Alone (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 98-114.
2. Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, and Joshua Greene, "Multi-System Moral Psychology," in The Moral Psychology Handbook, ed. J. Doris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 47-71, 67.
3. Keith Stanovich and Richard West, "Individual Differences in Reasoning: Implications for the Rationality Debate?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2000): 645-65
4. Shelly Chaiken and Yaacov Trope, eds., Dual Process Theories in Social Psychology (New York: Guilford, 1999).
5. Jonathan Haidt, "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment," Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814-34
6. "The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology," Science 316 (2007): 998-1002
7. Joshua Greene, "The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul," in Moral Psychology, vol. 3, ed. W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 35-79
8. Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt, "How (and Where) Does Moral Judgment Work?" Trends in Cognitive Science 6 (2002): 517-23
9. Joshua Greene, Sylvia Morelli, Kelly Lowenberg, Leigh Nystrom, and Jonathan Cohen, "Cognitive Load Selectively Interferes with Utilitarian Moral Judgment," Cognition 107 (2008): 1144-54
10. Cushman, Young, and Greene, "Multi-System Moral Psychology." For a recent critical review of this literature and its implications for normative moral theory
11. Selim Berker, "The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience," Philosophy and Public Affairs 37 (2009): 293-329
12. Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell, "On the Normative Significance of Experimental Moral Psychology," Philosophical Psychology, forthcoming.
13. A dual process model of some cognitive capacity does not entail that our mind consists in just these two kinds of systems. Some mental processes may resist neat categorization into processes characteristically produced by system 1 or system 2.
14. A less minimalist list of various properties in each cluster is provided in Haidt, "Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail," 818.
15. Greene, "Secret Joke of Kant's Soul." For criticism
16. Kumar and Campbell, "On the Normative Significance of Experimental Moral Psychology."
17. A similar view of moral intuition is defended by James Woodward and John Allman, "Moral Intuition: Its Neural Substrates and Normative Significance," Journal of Physiology-Paris 101 (2007): 179-202
18. John Allman and James Woodward, "What Are Moral Intuitions and Why Should We Care about Them? A Neurobiological Perspective," Philosophical Issues 18 (2008): 164-85.
19. Lawrence Kohlberg's influential theory of moral development presents humans as engaging in different kinds of moral reasoning at successive stages of moral development, reaching conclusions about right and wrong first by appeal to authority and convention and later through universal principles of justice.
20. Kohlberg, "The Development of Children's Orientation toward a Moral Order," pt. 1,
21. "Sequence in the Development of Moral Thought," Vita Humana 6 (1963): 11-33
22. Elliot Turiel, The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
23. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
24. Jonathan Baron, "Nonconsequentialist Decisions," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1994): 1-42.
25. Jonathan Haidt, Frederik Bjorklund, and Scott Murphy, "Moral Dumbfounding: When Intuition Finds No Reason" (unpublished manuscript, University of Virginia, 2000). We criticize this view in the next section.
26. Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, and Marc Hauser, "The Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgment," Psychological Science 17 (2006): 1082-89
27. Marc Hauser, Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, R. Kang-Xing Jin, and John Mikhail, "A Dissociation between Moral Judgments and Justifications," Mind and Language 22 (2007): 1-21.
28. Greene, "Secret Joke of Kant's Soul."
29. Compare Jonathan McGuire, Robyn Langdon, Max Coltheart, and Catriona Mackenzie, "A Reanalysis of the Personal/Impersonal Distinction in Moral Psychology Research," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009): 577-80
30. Berker, "Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience," 308-11. For responses to these criticisms,
31. Joshua Greene, "Dual Process Morality and the Personal/Impersonal Distinction: A Reply to McGuire, Langdon, Coltheart and Mackenzie," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009): 581-84
32. "Notes on 'The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience' by Selim Berker," http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-Notes-on-Berker-Nov 10.pdf.
33. Greene et al., "Cognitive Load Selectively Interferes with Utilitarian Moral Judgment."
34. Joshua Greene, R. Brian Sommerville, Leigh Nystrom, John Darley, and Jonathan Cohen, "An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment," Science 293 (2001): 2105-8
35. Joshua Greene, Leigh Nystrom, Andrew Engell, John Darley, and Jonathan Cohen, "The Neural Bases of Cognitive Conflict and Control in Moral Judgment," Neuron 44 (2004): 389-400.
36. Michael Koenigs, Liane Young, Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Fiery Cushman, Marc Hauser, and Antonio Damasio, "Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex Increases Utilitarian Moral Judgments," Nature 446 (2007): 908-11. For critical discussion,
37. Jorge Moll and Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, "Moral Judgments, Emotions and the Utilitarian Brain," Trends in Cognitive Science 11 (2007): 319-21
38. Joshua Greene, "Why Are VMPFC Patients More Utilitarian? A Dual-Process Theory of Moral Judgment Explains," Trends in Cognitive Science 11 (2007): 322-23
39. Jorge Moll and Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, "Response to Greene: Moral Sentiments and Reason; Friends or Foes?" Trends in Cognitive Science 11 (2007): 323-24.
40. Greene et al., "Neural Bases of Cognitive Conflict and Control in Moral Judgment."
41. Guy Kahane, Katja Wiech, Nicholas Shackel, Miguel Farias, Julian Savulescu, and Irene Tracey, "The Neural Basis of Intuitive and Counterintuitive Judgments," Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, electronically published March 18, 2011, doi:10.1093/scan/nsr005.
42. For example, a diachronic structure is also implied by a skill-based analysis of moral competence that does not entail dual process. While we believe that such an analysis is appropriate for understanding changes in the speed and accuracy at which information is processed in system 2, it cannot account for the system 1 character of moral responses that appear in very early stages of moral development. We cannot pursue this matter here.
43. Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983).
44. Bernard Williams, "A Critique of Utilitarianism," in Utilitarianism: For and Against, ed. J. J. C. Smart and B. Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 77-150, 98-100.
45. Robert McCauley and Joseph Henrich, "Susceptibilty to the Muller-Lyer Illusion, Theory-Neutral Observation and the Diachronic Penetrability of the Visual Input System," Philosophical Psychology 19 (2006): 1-23.
46. W. H. R. Rivers, "Observations on the Senses of the Todas," British Journal of Psychology 1 (1905): 321-96
47. Marshall Segall, Donald Campbell, and Melville Herskovits, "Cultural Differences in the Perception of Geometric Illusions," Science 139 (1963): 769-71.
48. Allman and Woodward, "What Are Moral Intuitions and Why Should We Care about Them?" 169.
49. Ibid., 170-72.
50. Elliot Turiel, The Culture of Morality: Social Development, Context, and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
51. Paul Bloom, "How Do Morals Change?" Nature 464 (2010): 490
52. G. E. Hughes, "Moral Condemnation," in Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. A. I. Melden (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958), 108-34, 125.
53. Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman, "Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non-philosophers," Mind and Language, forthcoming
54. Lewis Petrinovich and Patricia O'Neill, "Influence of Wording and Framing Effects on Moral Intuitions," Ethology and Sociobiology 17 (1996): 145-71.
55. The opposite order effect does not generally obtain. Those who are given the bystander case first, and say that it is OK to flip the switch, go on to say, as usual, that it is wrong to push the fat man from the footbridge. Arguably, the judgment about the footbridge case is firmer than the judgment about the bystander case. Thus, subjects are less likely to revise their initial opinion about the footbridge case. It would be interesting to know what would happen if subjects were given the chance to reconsider the bystander case. Is the desire to be consistent so strong that they would change their minds about a case about which they had already registered a position?
56. In experiments by Haidt et al., e.g., subjects are presented with moral narratives that evoke an emotional response but in which the usual justifications for moral appraisal are unavailable
57. Subjects arrive at a moral opinion and search without success for different ways to justify it.
58. Haidt, Bjorklund, and Murphy, "Moral Dumbfounding"
59. Cushman, Young, and Hauser, "Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgment"
60. Hauser et al., "Dissociation between Moral Judgments and Justifications." According to Haidt's social intuitionist model, moral reasoning occasionally influences our moral opinions, but only when intuition is weak or when such reasoning reinforces group conformity (Haidt, "Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail," 818-19). For empirical criticism of Haidt's model,
61. David Pizarro and Paul Bloom, "The Intelligence of the Moral Intuitions: Comment on Haidt," Psychological Review 110 (2003): 193-96
62. Herbert Salzstein and Tziporah Kasachkoff, "Haidt's Moral Intuitionist Theory: A Psychological and Philosophical Critique," Review of General Psychology 8 (2004): 273-82
63. Cordelia Fine, "Is the Emotional Dog Wagging Its Rational Tail, or Chasing It?" Philosophical Explorations 9 (2006): 83-98
64. Darcia Narvaez, "The Social Intuitionist Model and Some Counter-Intuitions," in Moral Psychology, vol. 2, The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, ed. W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 233-40. Greene's view of moral reasoning, as we have seen, is somewhat different. For him, reasoning in support of "deontological" judgments is post hoc rationalization, but reasoning can guide judgments when they are confronted with dilemmas that involve competing values and bring them to engage in cost-benefit analysis. Despite these differences, neither Haidt nor Greene examines the effect of moral reasoning on emotional moral responses over any significant length of time.
65. Work on implicit racial attitudes suggests that many prejudices are deeply entrenched and cannot be overcome completely.
66. Patricia Devine, "Stereotypes and Prejudice: Their Automatic and Controlled Components," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56 (1989): 5-18.
67. Pizarro and Bloom, "Intelligence of the Moral Intuitions"
68. Jonathan Haidt, "The Emotional Dog Does Learn New Tricks: A Reply to Pizarro and Bloom," Psychological Review 110 (2003): 197-98.
69. Pizarro and Bloom argue that reasoning can exert control over moral intuitions through (1) cognitive appraisals that change the significance of descriptive facts and (2) control over the input on which our intuitions operate. Moral consistency reasoning is a different phenomenon.
70. Haidt, "Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail," 817-19.
71. Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972): 229-43
72. Animal Liberation (1975; repr., New York: Ecco, 2003),
73. "Morality, Reason, and the Rights of Animals," in Primates and Philosophers, ed. F. de Waal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 140-58. The famine case is discussed in more detail below.
74. Judith Jarvis Thomson, "A Defense of Abortion," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971): 47-66. Psychologists have conducted experiments on subjects' responses to Thomson's violinist case and Singer's drowning child case. We discuss how moral consistency reasoning might be used to construct debunking arguments from this research in Kumar and Campbell, "On the Normative Significance of Experimental Moral Psychology."
75. Although a change in religious belief can also turn on consistency reasoning.
76. Richmond Campbell, "God, Evil, and Humanity," Sophia 23 (1984): 21-35.
77. Is consistency reasoning specific to the moral domain or, more broadly, the normative domain? We suspect that consistency reasoning is applied primarily to the moral domain but that it is also applied to other normative domains. Campbell's evolutionary account suggests that the "proper" domain of consistency reasoning is morality and that its "actual" domain includes other areas of normative thought and discourse (Richmond Campbell, "The Origin of Moral Reasons," in Logic, Ethics and All That Jazz: Essays in Honour of Jordan Howard Sobel, ed. L. Johansson, J. Osterberg, and R. Sliwinski, Uppsala Philosophical Studies 57 [Uppsala: Philosophy Department, Uppsala University, 2009], 67-97).
78. Thus, determining whether free expression would result in "grave" danger or whether a law threatens "severe" restrictions on free expression would enlist system 1. But application of the principle to these inputs, to infer that the law is morally indefensible, requires only system 2.
79. Our description of inconsistency detection is sufficiently general so as to be neutral with respect to how moral norms are internally represented, whether by linguistically structured rules, connectionist prototypes, action-oriented schemata, etc.
80. We offer this model of consistency reasoning as a working hypothesis. We are open to revisions of this model and open, too, to the possibility that different instances of consistency reasoning will recruit systems 1 and 2 in different ways.
81. Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality."
82. Greene, "Secret Joke of Kant's Soul."
83. To judge that there is an apparent inconsistency is to judge that there seems to be no morally relevant difference between the two cases. There may, however, turn out to be a hidden morally relevant difference.
84. Social location isn't the same thing as proximity. Individuals belonging to a particular community may find themselves in a distant place and, some people may believe, are more entitled to support from their home community than are people native to that place.
85. Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," 232-33.
86. In this respect, consistency reasoning is also distinct from "universalization" reasoning described by R. M. Hare, who claims that moral judgments should be identical for cases sharing all universal properties: "Moral judgments are, I claim, universalizable in only one sense, namely that they entail identical judgments about all cases identical in their universal properties" (Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point [Oxford: Clarendon, 1981], 108). Consistency reasoning is logically much more demanding, requiring identical judgments in cases where not all universal properties are shared, as Singer intends in his example of the drowning child. Hence, the normative demands of consistency reasoning, to be discussed in Sec. V, will be stronger.
87. Thanks to an anonymous editor for pressing this objection.
88. Our negative response to moral inconsistency is markedly different from dissonance reduction discussed in the psychological literature and by some philosophers, e.g.,
89. David Velleman, "From Self Psychology to Moral Philosophy," in Action and Freedom, ed. James E. Tomberlin, Philosophical Perspectives 14 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 349-77. There the agent is not aware of dissonance reduction, unlike the moral case in which the agent reacts consciously to "dissonance." Moreover, the "dissonance" in the latter case arises, not in beliefs about ourselves but in moral beliefs and feelings regarding situations external to us.
90. An anonymous reviewer has cautioned that genuinely collaborative cross-disciplinary research between philosophers and experimental psychologists is required to devise appropriate empirical tests for our model of consistency reasoning. We agree and offer the following preliminary suggestions about testing with that in mind.
91. Leda Cosmides, "The Logic of Social Exchange: Has Natural Selection Shaped How Humans Reason? Studies with the Wason Selection Task," Cognition 31 (1989): 187-276
92. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, "Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange," in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 163-228.
93. Thalia Wheatley and Jonathan Haidt, "Hypnotically Induced Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe," Psychological Science 16 (2005): 780-84
94. Jennifer Lerner, Julie Goldberg, and Philip Tetlock, "Sober Second Thought: The Effects of Accountability, Anger, and Authoritarianism on Attributions of Responsibility," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 24 (1998): 563-74.
95. Researchers could adapt well-known techniques for measuring tacit responses, e.g., implicit association tests (e.g., Devine, "Stereotypes and Prejudice").
96. Campbell, "Origin of Moral Reasons," offers an evolutionary explanation of this function, but the claim here does not depend on it.
97. Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, "Intuitive Ethics: How Innately Prepared Intuitions Generate Culturally Variable Virtues," Daedalus 133 (2004): 55-66.
98. For explanation of how natural selection could bring about the transition, see Campbell, "Origin of Moral Reasons."
99. Richmond Campbell and Jennifer Woodrow suggest how such social resolution of normative conflict about new cases through a basic form of recursive consistency reasoning might have evolved by natural selection ("Why Moore's Open Question Is Open: The Evolution of Moral Supervenience," Journal of Value Inquiry 37 [2003]: 353-72).
100. Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 65-68.
101. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 20-21, 48-51. An anonymous editor has suggested that Rawls did not think of inconsistency in the RE model as always involving a general principle. Perhaps, but our aim is philosophical rather than exegetical: to make clear important limitations of the principle-based model of moral inconsistency.
102. Norman Daniels, "Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics," Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979): 256-82.
103. We could similarly transform WRE into a descriptive model (DWRE) by treating the implicit moral norms for determining inconsistency and its resolution as norms assumed to be justified by those who see themselves as endorsing a moral principle that conflicts with a particular moral judgment of theirs and who are motivated to resolve the conflict. DWRE would predict a move toward WRE.
104. We thank an anonymous editor for pressing us on this point.
105. "I shall not even ask whether the principles that characterize one person's considered judgments are the same as those that characterize another's" (Rawls, Theory of Justice, 50).
106. For discussion of the latter, see, e.g., Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
107. Richmond Campbell, Illusions of Paradox (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 169-75
108. "The Problem of Moral Judgment," in Engaged Philosophy: Essays in Honour of David Braybrooke, ed. S. Sherwin and P. Schotch (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 249-72,
109. "What Is Moral Judgment?" Journal of Philosophy 104 (2007): 321-49
110. Victor Kumar, "Reduction of Moral Judgment" (unpublished manuscript, University of Arizona, 2011).
111. Others have developed hybrid theories in which either the cognitive element (David Copp, "Realist-Expressivism: A Neglected Option for Moral Realism," Social Philosophy and Policy 18 [2001]: 1-43) or the motivation element (Michael Ridge, "Ecumenical Expressivism: Finessing Frege," Ethics 116 [2006]: 302-36) is more central to moral judgment. Our view is more robustly hybrid.
112. For application of the hybrid theory to these examples, see Campbell, "What Is Moral Judgment?"
113. For a unified normative model with WRE as a special case, see Richmond Campbell, "Naturalizing Moral Inconsistency: Two Models and a New Direction" (unpublished manuscript, Dalhousie University, 2011).
114. The argument that a dual process model supports a hybrid conception of moral judgment is developed in more detail in Kumar, "Reduction of Moral Judgment."
115. Here and throughout, we mean justifying some change rather than a particular change. Which particular change to create consistency would be justified, as we have noted earlier, depends on the relative strength of one's substantive moral commitments and whether they are themselves justified.