John Mikhail on Moral intuitions

Evolutionary Psychology in the Service of Moral Philosophy:A Possible Future for Ethics? William S. Lewis Someone may ask, "What is the difference, then, between moral philosophy and moral psychology?" The answer may be that there is no interesting difference and that the issue is of interest only to university administrators. —Gilbert Harman, "Three Trends in Moral and Political Philosophy" (2003) In "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" (1891), William James provides a rough taxonomy of the state of ethical philosophy at the time that he was writing. Making a division between psychological approaches that identify the good with the feeling of pleasure derived by a naturally evolved organism and metaphysical approaches that hold that the good is conceptual, James argues that both are equally goods and that each implies similar obligation.1 James's solution, therefore, to the problem of which type of good must be honored is a pragmatist one: both are seen to have an effect on the organism and are thus equally real. Both are therefore equally worthy of consideration and respect. [End Page 48] Today, it may be harder to make the same kind of sweeping survey of the state of ethics and to solve the problem of casuistry in one stroke. In some department, somewhere, every type of moral philosophy is actively defended. However, for almost four decades, the "brain-borne" or metaphysical approach to ethics has been dominant in academic philosophy, and the evolutionary psychological understanding of happiness has played a secondary role. Now, deontologists, contractarians, utilitarians, experimental philosophers, and many virtue theorists work on how to conceptualize the good properly. Meanwhile, evolutionary moral psychologists have taken up the other part of James's project, albeit with little of his concern as a moral philosopher about finding how to achieve the most good. Instead, these scientists look to clues in our own and in other species' development in order to determine why we perceive certain activities and actions to be good (e.g., caring for others) and others to be bad (e.g., cheating on exams). The question this essay takes up is that of whether Ethics as a discipline has something to learn from the literature in evolutionary moral psychology and if this mode of explanation should be part of its future. Its primary thesis is that Ethics does have much to learn because the sciences that study the evolutionary mechanisms by which ethical judgments are produced will allow us, in a naturalist and pragmatist fashion, to better understand the possibilities for achieving our ethical goals. They will do so not because they demonstrate that all effective and achievable moralities must be anchored in evolutionarily derived moral faculties or intuitions but because these sciences can help to reveal the means by which our culturally derived ethical ideals might be realized as well as indicate the innate psychological and psychosocial stumbling blocks and hurdles to these ideals' realization. In "The Moral Philosophy and the Moral Life," James proves a keen diagnostician of the aim of moral philosophers as well as a keen analyst of the main questions to which moral philosophy must find answers if it is to be successful. Regarding the goal of moral philosophy, he notes that it aims "to find an account of the moral relations that obtain among things, which will weave them into the unity of a stable system, and make of the world . . . a genuine universe from the ethical point of view."2 In order to construct such a system, James notes that the moral philosopher must answer questions about the psychological origin of our moral judgments, about the meaning of our primary ethical terms such as good and obligation, and about how to rank competing goods and duties in order that we may [End Page 49] act correctly.3 In order to assess the importance of evolutionary moral psychology for moral philosophy, this essay will primarily be concerned with what James labels the origin question. However, the semantic and casuistic questions will be returned to when this essay argues that evolutionarily derived moral sentiments mean and demand something different than do second-order moral sentiments and that the latter should be given primacy over the...

The aim of this paper is to answer the question of whether moral intuitions, understood in terms of Jonathan Haidt's Social Intuitionist Model (SIM), have any normative power. The conclusion is no. And there are many separate arguments in favor of it. First, these moral intuitions cannot be objective, justifying reasons that are expected to arise in the course of making a ‘real’ moral judgment. Second, we do not even know if they actually represent the grounds for moral judgments. There are too few reasons to exclude the possibility that, when we make moral judgments, we unconsciously follow moral rules, which can be objective moral reasons. Furthermore, in Haidt's terms, moral intuitions are most probably heuristic by nature. But if they are, it is even more problematic for their normativity because they can lead to mistakes. There is also a lacuna in the research concerning problems with resolving moral dilemmas in which two strong moral intuitions are involved. Third, philosophers claim that there is some other kind of justified moral intuitions and psychologists often mistakenly mix together these two phenomena. In this paper, all of these arguments will be examined and they will serve to justify the lack of normativity of moral intuitions in the SIM.

Several papers in this issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics focus on dilemmas of various sorts. Our feature article and accompanying commentaries discuss the dilemma facing Japanese citizens in...

Hall, Gartner & Forlini 1 apply ethical philosophy to tobacco harm reduction. There are parallels between the ethical analysis of product bans and of misinformation (or disinformation) about the risks of products that are available in legal market-places 2-4. I agree that vaping products can be marketed in ways that will reduce the harms of smoking, minimize causal gateway effects and promote smoking cessation. Marketing's 4Ps (Product, Place, Promotion and Price) can alter product preferences 4, 5. Tobacco harm reduction principles should be included in public health approaches 5, 6 as one ‘pillar’ of public health 7, but objections to harm reduction remain widespread [8]. Challenges to progress arise in part because thorough moral assessments are uncommon by individuals or organizations. Research on moral psychology argues that rapidly processed ‘moral intuitions’ which are influenced by emotions are critical to moral judgments, and ‘moral reasoning’ is less often the creator of moral judgments than the defender of moral intuitions 9. The classic moral principles of autonomy, beneficence/non-maleficence and justice are involved in moral psychological issues of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity, but moral psychology identifies additional important moral principles such as loyalty to group/community, respect for authority and appreciation for sanctity/purity 10. On the continuum from ‘conservative’ to ‘liberal’ positions, none of the moral values disappear, but the relative importance of these values change 10. When community standards (loyalty and authority) are violated (by disagreeing with the opinions of a distinguished medical society), contempt can be felt. When there is a ‘contamination of the pure’ (by recommending e-cigarettes which are not perfectly safe), disgust can be felt. When individual rights are violated (harm, unfairness), anger arises. The interplay of the moral emotions of disgust, contempt and anger contribute to individual positions on harm reduction issues 11, 12. An example of the emotions arising in harm reduction disputes are depicted in this dramatic dialogue, which provides links to an audio performance on the journal website 13. Individuals working in institutions or organizations are also constrained by the biases and role responsibilities of their employers or organizations. Public and professional roles can affect the moral principles that are stressed and the positions that need to be defended, especially in adversarial contexts 14. Those who work for certain ‘Disease Control and Prevention’ organizations (public or private) would probably be most vigilant for any indications of negative consequences of e-cigarettes. They would be primed (and most rewarded) to find (a) any indication that e-cigarettes might act as a causal gateway to cigarettes and (b) any evidence that e-cigarettes are ‘not safe’. It would not be surprising if their workers would be reluctant to emphasize evidence that e-cigarettes could be preventing smoking or that they are much safer than cigarettes. In contrast, those aligned with advocating e-cigarettes for harm reduction would be similarly disinclined to promote any findings consistent with the possibility of a causal gateway to cigarettes or nicotine addiction. Organizations have, in effect, party-lines and preferred positions, and these influences act to truncate the extent to which complete, ethical analyses are conducted or published on any issue. Organizations in keeping with role responsibilities are likely to have their preferred principles and their own moral intuitions that limit what they think, do and are prepared to recommend. Although thorough assessments of philosophical ethics and policy implications may change some opinions, abiding biases in individuals and organizations promote truncation of evaluations, reduce objectivity and impair progress. Players (individuals and organizations) should (a) try to consider an application of moral reasoning that is as complete as possible and (b) try not to jump to conclusions when they have encountered their ‘hot-button’ preferred issues. In conflicts where participants believe they are ‘doing good’ that urgently needs to be done, one can also expect instances of ‘white hat bias’ 15. White hat bias refers to the ‘distortion of information in the service of what may be perceived to be righteous ends’ 15. Righteous zeal may be another kind of moral psychological influence (charged with anger, contempt or disgust) that further clouds the turbulent waters of applied science on controversial issues. None.

An argument that moral reasoning plays a crucial role in moral judgment through episodes of rational reflection that have established patterns for automatic judgment foundation. Rationalists about the psychology of moral judgment argue that moral cognition has a rational foundation. Recent challenges to this account, based on findings in the empirical psychology of moral judgment, contend that moral thinking has no rational basis. In this book, Hanno Sauer argues that moral reasoning does play a role in moral judgment—but not, as is commonly supposed, because conscious reasoning produces moral judgments directly. Moral reasoning figures in the acquisition, formation, maintenance, and reflective correction of moral intuitions. Sauer proposes that when we make moral judgments we draw on a stable repertoire of intuitions about what is morally acceptable, which we have acquired over the course of our moral education—episodes of rational reflection that have established patterns for automatic judgment foundation. Moral judgments are educated and rationally amenable moral intuitions. Sauer engages extensively with the empirical evidence on the psychology of moral judgment and argues that it can be shown empirically that reasoning plays a crucial role in moral judgment. He offers detailed counterarguments to the anti-rationalist challenge (the claim that reason and reasoning play no significant part in morality and moral judgment) and the emotionist challenge (the argument for the emotional basis of moral judgment). Finally, he uses Joshua Greene's Dual Process model of moral cognition to test the empirical viability and normative persuasiveness of his account of educated intuitions. Sauer shows that moral judgments can be automatic, emotional, intuitive, and rational at the same time.

Mr. Wilson's Heresies The Moral Sense is an intellectually courageous book that will have relatively few friends among anthropologists or moral philosophers. It is an intellectually courageous book because it commits many heresies, in particular these four: (1) The heresy of moral cognitivism, which claims that moral appraisals should be interpreted and evaluated in terms of their degree of accuracy in representing some domain of moral truth. As I understand The Moral Sense it suggests that moral sense is not merely a feeling or a sensation but is a kind of sixth sense, which, like our other senses, is a source of valid knowledge about something (namely, goodness) that is objective, natural, or real. (2) The heresy of intuitionism, which claims that valid or truthful moral appraisals are produced rapidly and unconsciously and that moral men and women know good (and/or are inclined to do good) spontaneously or reflexively, without being motivated by conclusions of deliberative reason. (3) The heresy of romanticism, which claims that the mind is in heart and that moral truths are represented to senses (and motivate action) by means of emotions, via feelings such as repugnance, indignation, or shame. (4) The heresy of pluralism, which claims that ultimate goods of morality are many, not one, and that plurality is a terminal (rather than an intermediary) state. When joined with heresy of cognitivism, heresy of pluralism implies that there are universally valid moral goods (for example, fairness, sympathy, duty and self-control) but these various goods cannot be reduced, aggregated or translated into any single common denominator of moral evaluation, and cannot be rank ordered in terms of their relative efficiency as alternative means to some more ultimate moral end (such as pleasure, happiness, or utility). The heresy of pluralism also implies that those various universally valid and ultimate moral goods cannot be simultaneously maximized, either because they are inherently in conflict with each other (for example, fairness and sympathy drive out duty and self-control) or because they are practically difficult to combine in this or that setting, culture or institutional context. Permit me to confess from outset that I am a fan of all of those heresies, including a fifth heresy, heresy of thinking that it makes sense to commit all four heresies in same book, or with same breath. Shortly before I became aware of publication of The Moral Sense, Jon Haidt and I wrote a review essay predicting and looking forward to development of a cognitive-pluralist-intuitionist theory of moral psychology,(1) whose main tenets are brilliantly set forth in The Moral Sense. I find it exhilarating to discover that our prophecy had come true even before it had been made. I also find Wilson's four-fold classification of virtues extremely insightful, and credible. The broad domains of moral sensibility that he portrays (fairness, sympathy, duty and self-control) are consistent with a tripartite division of moral domain (the Big Three of Morality) that my associates and I have induced from research on moral intuitions and judgments in India and United States, where we distinguish an ethics of autonomy (including fairness and sympathy) from an ethics of community (including duty) from an ethics of divinity (including self-control).(2) Wilson's abstraction nicely captures some of formal characteristics of substantive moral sensibilities and raises possibility that diverse aspects of personal functioning (for example, planning, foresight and dependability) may well be in service of same moral ideal (for example, self-control). Permit me to also acknowledge up front that, based on my reading of The Moral Sense, I fancy that Wilson and I probably differ a bit in personal temperament. …

How morality signals, benefits, binds, and teaches

An ethical analysis of scientific research projects is not a retrospective corollary that for reasons of completeness must not be omitted from a manual on the basics of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. It is, rather necessitated by man’s self-image as a moral protagonist, obligated to justify and take responsibility for his/her actions. The issue here is not solely the personal responsibility of the individual scientist or individual moral intuitions. Insofar as they promulgate the moral standards of the society concerned and its culturally accepted ethos, moral intuitions have prima facie an important function for moral judgments. Considerations of social acceptability, which particular research procedures may or may not find in a given historical situation, cannot, however, replace an ethical analysis of research practice. This has to be subject to rational validation of arguments and practical conclusions; it does not ask about the chance of social acceptability or the actual practicability of research interests, but about normative validity, about what should be the case because it can be justified in a rational discourse with intersubjectively verifiable, generalizable arguments. An ethical analysis accordingly targets not only the offering of advice to academic organizations or political decision-making bodies, but also the individual’s capacity for moral judgment. It comprehends itself as a guide to better moral judgment, by encouraging critical reflection on one’s own moral intuitions, checking their validity in a reflective process of argumentation, and ultimately revising them where appropriate (or finding them confirmed on a reflective meta-level).

The recent, influential Social Intuitionist Model of moral judgment (Haidt, Psychological Review 108, 814–834, 2001) proposes a primary role for fast, automatic and affectively charged moral intuitions in the formation of moral judgments. Haidt’s research challenges our normative conception of ourselves as agents capable of grasping and responding to reasons. We argue that there can be no ‘real’ moral judgments in the absence of a capacity for reflective shaping and endorsement of moral judgments. However, we suggest that the empirical literature indicates a complex interplay between automatic and deliberative mental processes in moral judgment formation, with the latter constraining the expression and influence of moral intuitions. We therefore conclude that the psychological literature supports a normative conception of agency.

The emerging field known as experimental philosophy has expanded into moral philosophy: by presenting experimental subjects with vignettes describing scenarios with moral implications, data about people's moral intuitions are gathered and analyzed. This paper examines the adequacy of applying the common methodology of experimental philosophy to the study of moral thought. By employing Raimond Gaita's notion of moral seriousness and his distinction between form and content, it argues that the kind of empirical research on moral intuitions conducted by experimental philosophers fails to take into consideration some fundamental characteristics of moral thinking.

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Are Economists Influenced by Their Moral Worldviews? Evidence from the Moral Foundations of Economists Questionnaire

Drawing on an analogy to language, I argue that a suite of novel questions emerge when we consider our moral faculty in a similar light. In particular, I suggest the possibility that our moral judgments are derived from unconscious, intuitive processes that operate over the causal-intentional structure of actions and their consequences. On this model, we are endowed with a moral faculty that generates judgments about permissible and forbidden actions prior to the involvement of our emotions and systems of conscious, rational deliberation. This framing of the problem sets up specific predictions about the role of particular neural structures and psychological processes in the generation of moral judgments as well as in the generation of moral behavior. I sketch the details of these predictions and point to relevant data that speak to the validity of thinking of our moral intuitions as grounded in a moral organ.

Covering moral intuition, self-evidence, non-inferentiality, moral emotion, and seeming states, Hossein Dabbagh defends the epistemology of moral intuitionism. His line of analysis resists the empirical challenges derived from empirical moral psychology and reveals the seeming-based account of moral intuitionism as the only tenable one. The Moral Epistemology of Intuitionism combines epistemological intuitionism with work in neuroethics to develop an account of the role that moral intuition and emotion play in moral judgment. Culminating in a convincing argument about the value of understanding moral intuitionism in terms of intellectual seeming and perceptual experience

A commonly held view is that moral judgments should not change based on what other people think. In moral philosophy, Social Domain Theory presents a version of this view: it defines as moral those judgments that are insensitive to the presence/absence of consensus. We designed two studies to measure the consensus-sensitivity of moral judgments (N = 731). We measured peoples’ personal judgments and expectations about others’ judgments using a within-subjects design that manipulated whether an action aligned with or violated the local normative consensus. Across six diverse vignettes (five covering “moral” domains) participants consistently shifted their judgments in response to local consensus. To assess the robustness of this consensus effect, we also varied whether an authority endorsed the action, whether it involved harm, and whether it took place in an unfamiliar or temporally distant context, as qualified versions of Social Domain Theory stipulate that moral judgments may depend on these factors. In our studies, authority endorsement had a negligible impact. Even harmful acts became more acceptable when presented as consensus-supported. Sensitivity to consensus was further amplified in temporally distant or alien settings, suggesting that outside their own cultural milieu, subjects place greater weight on communal endorsement. Taken together, these findings challenge the sharp boundary often drawn between moral and conventional domains: moral judgments, though constrained by harm, still flex in light of perceived social approval. Our findings suggest the need for an alternative account of the distinction between moral and conventional judgments.