Integrated draft of “Experimental Moral Philosophy” for SEP

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On this blog, I’ve been posting draft sections of the entry “Experimental Moral Philosophy” for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions, comments, and criticisms here and by email.  Here’s something closer to the final draft.  I’ve incorporated feedback to the extent that I can and integrated the parts into a unified article.  It’s not quite done yet, as it needs to be merged with Don Loeb‘s work-in-progress on experimental approaches to meta-ethics, but it’s pretty close.

Without further ado…

Experimental Moral Philosophy

Draft 29 April 2013[1]

1 Introduction

Experimental moral philosophy began to emerge as a movement in the last decade of the twentieth century, a branch of the larger experimental philosophy (X-Phi, XF) movement.  From the beginning, it has been embroiled in controversy on a number of fronts.   Some doubt that it is philosophy at all.  Others acknowledge that it is philosophy but think that it has produced modest results at best, and confusion at worst.

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What I said to Simon Cotton

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Today, I commented on Simon Cotton‘s terrific paper, “Non-Domination and Economic Justice: An Egalitarian Critique,” at the Princeton University Center for Human Values.  Below are the comments, along with some links.

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In his paper, Simon Cotton criticizes a brand of republicanism associated with our own Philip Pettit by arguing for the inadequacy of Frank Lovett’s (2010) General Theory of Domination and Justice.  Today, I will briefly summarize the relevant parts of Lovett’s theory, catalogue Cotton’s criticisms of it, and make a few programmatic suggestions.

First, what does it mean to say that justice – at least economic justice – is a matter of non-domination?  Although neither Cotton nor Lovett approach the matter in a formal way, I find it useful to do so.  Lovett begins by proposing a biconditional analysis of justice: a society counts as just if and only if no one dominates anyone in that society.

1Next, Lovett defines domination in terms of social relations, dependence, and arbitrary power.  One agent is said to dominate another just in case they are in a dependent social relationship in which the former exercises arbitrary power of the latter.

2

From this it follows that a society is just if and only if no one exercises arbitrary power over another person in a dependent social relationship.

3

Lovett then goes on to claim – and this is a crucial move – that justice thus defined entails and is entailed by provision of a basic income to all members of the society.

4

Why is this?  According to Lovett, the provision of a basic income makes people no longer dependent.  In our formalism, that means that the second conjunct of the definition of domination is false, and hence that domination does not occur, and hence that justice obtains.

Cotton offers five criticisms of this theory.  Two question the sufficiency of non-domination.  In other words, they claim that the right-hand side of the first biconditional does not entail the left-hand side.  The other three question the necessity of the basic income.  In other words, they claim that the left-hand side of the final biconditional does not entail the right-hand side.

According to the first criticism, it’s possible for a society to lack domination and yet for there to be people – potentially many people – who suffer direct harm as a result of others’ behavior.  Provided that those inflicting the harm are not in a social relation with those they harm, no domination occurs, and hence there is no complaint of injustice to be made.  Cotton – I think correctly – claims that this is an unappealing consequence of Lovett’s theory.  But how, one might ask, could one agent directly harm another without there being a social relation between them?  The answer to that question depends on Lovett’s definition of a social relation.  According to Lovett, “whenever two or more persons or groups are, in some significant respect, fully related to one another strategically, […] they are in a social relationship” (2010, p. 35).  What does this mean?  In game theory, I stand in a strategic relationship to you if what counts as my best move depends on what you do.  Let’s say that a relationship is pairwise strategic if each participant stands in a strategic relationship to at least one other agent, and fully strategic if each participant stands in a strategic relationship to each other agent.  In the two-person case, these are equivalent.  We are now in a position to see why Cotton’s criticism goes through.  Imagine a large manufacturing conglomerate that spews pollution into a stream that feeds a local farmer’s crops, thereby destroying her livelihood.  The farmer stands in a strategic relation to the conglomerate (if they pollute, she needs to find a new job, but if they don’t pollute, she can go on farming).  But the conglomerate does not stand in a strategic relation to her (nothing she says or does makes a difference to their practices or bottom line).  The relationship is not fully strategic, and therefore does not constitute a social relation, and therefore cannot involve domination, and therefore cannot constitute an injustice.  At least, not on Lovett’s theory.  This is implausible, which suggests that non-domination is insufficient to guarantee justice.

Cotton’s second criticism is that non-domination is consistent with members of the society being in dire need, which intuitively constitutes an injustice but does not do so on Lovett’s definition.  The basic idea here is that there are likely to be people who are not in a position to enter social relationships such as employment because they are, for instance, severely disabled, and also likely to be people who are in a position to enter only non-dominating but still highly undesirable social relationships.  In both cases, it would seem that there is a failure of justice even though there is no domination.  In the former case, the person cannot be in a dependent social relation characterized by the exercise of arbitrary power because she cannot be in a social relation at all.  Nevertheless, one might think, justice requires that she not simply be left to starve or to depend on charity.  In the latter case, the problem seems to be that there needs to be a welfare threshold below which it is an injustice to subsist, even if one is not below that threshold because of domination.

Both of these arguments suggest that some further conjunct or conjuncts need to be introduced on the right-hand side of the first biconditional.  Perhaps justice obtains if and only there is no domination and no one is arbitrarily harmed and everyone subsists at or above an absolutely-determined acceptable level.

The remaining three arguments all challenge the necessity of a basic income for guaranteeing non-domination.  One way to summarize Cotton’s points in this connection is this: domination is defined in terms of three conditions.  The basic income is one way of ensuring that the second of these three conditions does not hold.  But, purely from a logical point of view, there are other ways of ensuring that the three conditions are not simultaneously met.  We could ensure that the first condition (social relation) does not hold.  We could ensure that the third condition (arbitrary exercise of power) does not hold.  Or we could find a different way to ensure that the second condition (dependence) does not hold.

So, for example, in his third argument, Cotton points out that regulations could be instituted to limit or eliminate employers’ ability to exercise arbitrary power over employees.  In particular, this could be done by requiring that labor contracts be “sufficiently complete,” or by directly legislating the “rules, procedures, and/or goals” that constrain and guide decision-making in the workplace (p. 22).  Similarly, in his fourth argument, Cotton points out that non-dependence could be guaranteed via competition policies that dictate that workers’ best alternatives to employment be sufficiently good not just in relative but in “absolute terms” (p. 27).  Finally, in his fifth argument, Cotton suggests that even in relationships other than employment, such as charity, Lovett’s non-domination constraint and provision of basic income doesn’t do the job because it doesn’t guarantee a level of subsistence above the minimal threshold identified in his second argument.

In closing, I want to offer three suggestions.

The first is on Lovett’s behalf.  It seems to me that his definition of a social relation is just too strict.  Cotton’s criticisms would not go through so easily if a pair of agents could be in a social relation provided that at least one of them was significantly and strategically related to the other.  For instance, the case of the farmer would qualify as domination under this definition.

The second suggestion is also on Lovett’s behalf.  Perhaps he could revise his notion of what counts as a basic income to handle both the second and the fifth argument.  In particular, perhaps the basic income could be set in such a way that it is enough to keep whoever receives it above the absolute threshold Cotton points to.  I’m not an economist, so I’m not in a position to say what that threshold is, nor am I in a position to say whether it would be feasible to provide such a guarantee.  Nevertheless, this seems to be one promising way of responding to both argument two and argument 5.

My third and final suggestion is that Cotton go on to give a more positive account, now that he has provided such a compelling negative account.  What, at least in sketch, would constitute justice, if not merely non-domination?  From his discussion, it seems that there are at least three further criteria he might like to add: non-harm, a subsistence threshold, and predictable and comprehensive social rules or norms.  I invite him to say which of these he takes to be necessary and why.

 

On buying beer

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(Cross-posted at the philosophers’ cocoon)

When I was on the market last year, one of the many lovely people I met was an assistant professor who had a policy about beer.  His policy was to never let grad students pay for beer, if he could help it.  At first, this struck me merely as extremely generous.  I’ve come to think of it, though, as one of the more admirable policies a professor can have.  Here’s the thing about beer: philosophers drink a lot of it.  We actually have good taste when it comes to beer, which is rare among academics, or people for that matter.  We also like to talk shop over beer.  So having a beer with a colleague — especially someone more senior than you — is an important part of professionalization and networking.  You can end up with co-authors, letter-writers, sympathetic referees, and host of other things by having a beer with senior colleagues from time to time.

This can easily lead to intended and unintended forms of exclusion.  People who don’t drink get excluded.  People who need to get home to take care of their kids, their parents, or their ailing partner get excluded.  Perhaps most common: people, such as grad students, who can’t afford it get excluded.  That sucks.  I’m also mindful of how absurdly lucky those of us who have well-paying tenure-track jobs are.  In grad school, I had two side-jobs to make living in NYC affordable.  I was on the verge of leaving the discipline for two years while I struggled on the job market.  Those of us who won the lottery need to keep firmly in mind that we are the beneficiaries of the “imperceptible updraft of inexplicable luck.”  For these reasons, among others, I’ve adopted this policy as well.

On top of this, I think it’s also important that it be common knowledge within one’s department that one has this policy.  If the point is to encourage grad students (and others who are in precarious positions, such as VAPs and post-docs) to come out and do the networking thing, it’s important that they know in advance that they’re not going to have to pay.  Otherwise, only the adventurous, the well-enough-off, and the lucky end up benefiting.

What other small but consequential policies do y’all have or suggest?

Friendship as a model for the other virtues

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Here’s a draft of the first section of a work-in-progress, tentatively titled “Friendship as a Model for the Other Virtues,” which I will be contributing to Jon Webber and Alberto Masala‘s collection, The Architecture of Personality and Ethical Virtue.

Normally, I throw in a thematic picture or two.  In this case, 15 minutes of searching on google images failed to turn up anything that was maudlin to the point of being nauseating, so it’s just text.

As always, questions, comments, criticisms, etc. are most welcome.

Friendship as a model for the other virtues

Draft, 25 March 2013, please do not circulate or quote without permission

Friendship might seem like a bizarre virtue – or not a virtue at all.  In Aristotle’s discussion of the various moral virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics, we see courage, temperance, generosity, magnificence, magnanimity, pride, wit, and justice.  These would all seem to be, in the first instance and primarily, monadic properties of individual agents.  To be courageous is to be disposed to think, feel, desire, deliberate, act, and react in characteristic ways.  Even if no one else is courageous, it would still be possible – though extremely difficult – for you to be courageous.  Of course, if there are no threats to be opposed, you may never have a chance to express your courage.  Furthermore, it would surely be easier to develop courage in the company of others who either are or strive to be courageous.  And it may also be easier to develop or sustain courage when others think of you as courageous and signal those thoughts to you.  But, one might think, even if none of these enabling facts obtains, it would still be possible, conceptually speaking, to be courageous.  Or consider generosity.  To be generous is to be disposed to think, feel, desire, deliberate, act, and react in characteristic ways.  Even if no one else is generous, it would still be possible – though extremely difficult – for you to be generous.  Of course, if there were no other people who needed or wanted or would appreciate what you have, or if you were so down on your luck that you had no resources to offer, you may never have a chance to express your generosity.  Furthermore, it would surely be easier to develop generosity in the company of others who are or strive to be generous (and, for that matter, grateful).  And it may also be easier to develop or sustain generosity when others think of you as generous and signal those thoughts to you.  But, one might think, even if none of these enabling facts obtains, it would still be possible, conceptually speaking, to be generous.

 

Friendship appears to be different.  It seems to be, in the first instance and primarily, a dyadic relation between two people.[1]  To be a friend is to be disposed to think, feel, desire, deliberate, act, and react in characteristic ways towards a particular person, who is likewise disposed to think, feel, desire, deliberate, act, and react in those same characteristic ways towards you.  If no one else is a friend, then it is conceptually impossible – not just difficult – for you to be a friend as well (NE VIII:2, 1155a).  It is not just easier to develop friendship in the company of others who are doing so as well; it is in fact impossible to become a friend without there being someone else who also becomes a friend, namely your friend.

 

Being a friend isn’t just a matter of your first-order cognitive, affective, evaluative and behavioral dispositions; to be a friend means to have particular de re attitudes towards another person (your friend), and for that person to have congruent de re attitudes towards you (NE VIII:2, 1156a).  That is, for you to be my friend, you need to think of me as your friend, to wish me well for my own sake, to wish me well in virtue of my good character (or, in other types of friendship, in virtue of my contributing to your utility or pleasure), and so on.  Likewise, I need to think of you as my friend, to wish you well for your own sake, to wish you well in virtue of your good character (or in virtue of your contributing to my utility or pleasure), and so on.

 

But even that is not enough: not only must both you and your friend have these attitudes, but the existence of these attitudes must be mutual or perhaps even common knowledge between you (NE IX:5, 1166b).  If I wish you well for your own sake and in virtue of your good character, and you wish me well for my own sake and in virtue of my good character, but neither of us knows how the other feels, we are not friends.  Instead, we merely harbor mutual but unrecognized good will towards one another.  To be your friend, I need know that you wish me well for my own sake and in virtue of my good character, and you need to know that I wish you well for your own sake and in virtue of your good character (NE VIII:3, 1156b).

 

In fact, even that is not enough.  We could satisfy this description and yet still not be friends.  If we each think of each other in this way, and each find out through reliable testimony that the other does as well, it would still seem strange to say that we are friends.  I also need to know that you know that I wish you well for your own sake and in virtue of your good character, and you need to know that I know that you wish me well for my own sake and in virtue of my good character.  It’s arguable that even this is not enough, and that what needs to hold is that we share common knowledge of our attitudes: I know that you wish me well for my own sake and in virtue of my good character, and that you know that I know that you wish me well for my own sake and in virtue of my good character, and that I know that you know that I know that you wish me well for my own sake and in virtue of my good character, and so on.  I will not press this point here, for even if all that’s required is two orders of mutual knowledge (I know that you know, and you know that I know), my point still holds that friendship is an interesting virtue because it requires reciprocated de re attitudes and some kind of mutual recognition of the existence of this reciprocation.  Friendship is not just causally but constitutively dependent on there being another person who has the same virtue.  It is also not just causally but constitutively dependent on there being another person towards whom you harbor certain de re attitudes, and who reciprocates them.  It is not just casually but constitutively dependent on your thinking of yourself as someone’s friend.  Finally, it is also not just causally but constitutively dependent on there being between you and your friend at least two orders of mutual knowledge of these attitudes.

 

One might worry that these arguments press too hard on the relational aspects of the virtue of friendship.  Surely, one might think, I can be a friendly person even if everyone else is an asshole and either snubs or betrays my attempts at friendship.  There is an important sense in which, even in such an unlucky social environment, I can still be a friendly person.  This is a fair point, and one which should lead us to distinguish between the disposition or trait of friendliness or agreeableness, which is arguably a monadic property of an individual, and the virtue of friendship, which clearly is not.  One test that seems to do a good job of drawing this distinction is to ask whether the person in question is friendly or a friend.  There is a double dissociation between these.  Someone might be friendly but still not have any friends.  Conversely, it’s possible for someone to be dispositionally grumpy or unagreeable but nevertheless to be a friend.

 

In this paper, I explore the prospects for using the interesting features of friendship identified above as a model for all moral virtues.[2]  This exploration is motivated on three independent grounds.  The first is historical.  Of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics, fully two are devoted to discussing the virtue of friendship.  This is twice as much attention as justice receives, and as much as all of the other moral virtues combined.  Yet contemporary neo-Aristotelian treatments of virtue rarely address friendship, and give it short shrift when they do.  Annas (1993, pp. 249-260) devotes twelve of the five-hundred or so pages of her book to friendship, and mentions it only twice in her (2011, pp. 76, 151) book.  Geach (1977, p. 80) mentions it once.  Hurka (2001, pp. 35-6, 200) mentions it in only a couple passages.  Hursthouse (1999, p. 11) calls friendship an “awkward exception” because it is relational.  MacIntyre (1981, pp. 123, 156-8), the granddaddy of the virtue ethics revival, mentions friendship only twice.  Russell (2009) barely engages friendship in his massive tome.  Slote (2001) only discusses friendship in the context of broader discussions of love, community, and achievement.  Snow (2008), despite the fact that her book is titled Virtue as Social Intelligence, never once uses the word ‘friendship’.  Adams (2006, pp. 25-7, 69-92) is the exception that makes the rule.  The main topic of discussion in the contemporary literature on friendship is the extent to which various moral theories induce “moral schizophrenia” by calling on us to be motivated by abstract principles – such as maximizing good outcomes or acting from duty – that seem incompatible with the warmth and intimacy of friendship (Stocker 1976).  It would be surprising if this bias in the scholarship did not distort our understanding of character and the other virtues.

 

Second, as I have argued elsewhere (Alfano 2013, forthcoming), there are empirical grounds for doubting whether virtue as conceived in currently-dominant neo-Aristotelian theories is an achievable ideal.  As John Doris (1998, 2002), Gilbert Harman (1999), and I (2013) have argued, most people’s behavior does not seem to be structured by robust, global dispositions such as honesty – at least when they are tested in a decontextualized laboratory context.  Seemingly trivial and normatively irrelevant situational influences, such as mood modulators and ambient sensory stimuli, predict and explain people’s cognitive, affective, evaluative, and behavioral responses as well as – and sometimes better than – personality variables.  This is not the place to delve deeply the dialectic between philosophical situationists and defenders of neo-Aristotelian ethics.  Instead, I merely want to point out that there is suggestive empirical evidence – much of which I canvass in my (2013) book – for the phenomenon of factitious virtue.  A factitious virtue simulates its neo-Aristotelian counterpart through the stabilizing influences of self-concept and social expectations.  Someone may not be disposed to think, feel, and act as a generous person would think, feel, and act except insofar as she both thinks of herself as generous (self-concept) and knows both that others think of her as generous and that they know that she knows that they think of her as generous.  When this happens, she does not have the trait of generosity construed on neo-Aristotelian grounds, but she does have factitious generosity.

 

Factitious generosity thus mirrors several of the more striking structural features of friendship.  You cannot be a friend unless another person thinks of you as a friend, and you know that they do, and you know that they know that they do.  You cannot be factitiously generous unless another person thinks of you as generous, and you know that they do, and you know that they know that they do.  You cannot be a friend if you don’t think of yourself as a friend.  You can’t be factitiously generous if you don’t think of yourself as generous.[3]  It may be possible to satisfy both the historical motive and the empirical motive by reconstructing all moral virtues on the model of friendship – as essentially and constitutively social.[4]

 

The third motive for exploring the friendship model of virtue is the compelling evidence that has begun to pile up for the idea that many seemingly individual psychological phenomena are better understood as extending beyond the limits of the skin of the person to whom those phenomena are attributed.  In the 1970s, Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1975) popularized the idea that mental content is external, that the meaning and reference of some words is not determined solely by what’s in the heads of people who use those words.  In the 1980s, Nozick (1981) and Dretske (1981) introduced the notion that one’s justification for a given belief might not be determined solely by what’s in one’s head.  In the 1990s, Clark and Chalmers (1998) suggested that the mind itself might extend beyond the limits of the skin.  Pritchard argues in his (forthcoming) article that cognitive abilities – which we might think of as intellectual virtues or parts thereof – may extend.  I have argued (Alfano forthcoming) that the phenomenon of stereotype threat is evidence that cognitive processes extend.  The current proposal is that we should explore the extent to which this research program can be applied to ethics, that is, the extent to which it makes sense to say that some psychological dispositions that we might reasonably call moral virtues also extend beyond the limits of the skin of their possessor.


[1] It is worth noting in this connection that in Spencer’s Faerie Queene, in which each book is devoted to a different virtue as exemplified by its protagonist, only one book has a pair of protagonists.  Redcross exemplifies holiness, Guyon temperance, Britomart chastity, Artegall justice, and Calidore courtesy.  Only in book four do we become acquainted with Cambel and Telemond, who together embody friendship.

[2] What about intellectual virtues?  I think that similar arguments work for them, at least for the “responsibilist” or motivational intellectual virtues, such as creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and so on – though probably not for purely (or at least primarily) cognitive intellectual virtues, such as intelligence.  I explore these issues in my (2013) book and in my (forthcoming) article on stereotype threat and intellectual virtue.

[3] As factitiously generous?  I’m not sure.

[4] All?  Perhaps not humility and modesty, which seem to involve a paradox of self-reference insofar as it’s hard, though maybe not impossible, to be humble and modest and to think of yourself as humble and modest.  I explore this paradox of self-reference with some of my colleagues in Alfano et al. (forthcoming).

On the “pope emeritus,” some fitting words from book four of Zarathustra

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Ratzi the Nazi has retired.

a face of evil

Good riddance.  His replacement seems only marginally better, but only time will tell.  Here are some apropos words to mark the occasion, from book for of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge translation):

“What does the whole world know today?” asked Zarathustra.  ”This perhaps, that the old God no longer lives, the one in whom the whole world once believed?”

“You said it,” answered the old man gloomily.  ”And I served this old God until his final hour.  But now I am retired, without a master, and yet I am not free, nor merry for a single hour unless in my memories.  And so I climbed into these mountains to finally have a festival for myself, as is proper for an old pope and church father: for know this, I am the last pope! — a festival of pious memories and divine worship.  But now he himself is dead, this pious human being, this saint in the woods who constantly praised his god with singing and growling.  I did not find him when I found his hut — but two wolves were in it, howling at his death — for all animals loved him.  Then I ran away.  Did I arrive in vain in these woods and mountains?  Then my heart resolved to seek another, the most pious of all those who do not believe in God — to seek Zarathustra!”

What I said to Alex Betts

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Here are my comments on Alex Betts’s paper, “The Sources of Normativity in World Politics: Rethinking States’ Obligations Towards Refugees,” which I am giving at the Workshop on the Ethics and Politics of the Global Refugee Regime, organized by Robert Keohane, Luara Ferracioli, and Lami Abdelaaty at Princeton.  As readers of the blog will realize, this is a topic well outside my domain of comfort and expertise….

 

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Experimental philosophers clean up in grant competition

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The Fuller Theological Seminary recently ran a grant competition to which both experimental philosophers and psychologists applied.  The topic of research was “Intellectual Humility,” an understudied intellectual virtue.  Last I checked, there were about 30 finalists, of whom 16 or so were expected to receive funding; sources now indicate that at least four teams that had xphi people on them received funding:

Joshua Alexander received funding to write a book about intellectual humility.

Thomas Nadelhoffer, Jen Wright, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Lawrence Ngo, Jeremy Frimer, and Trisha Folds-Bennett received funding to do empirical work.

Edouard Machery and Steve Stich received funding to study experimental philosophy and intellectual humility.

Mark Alfano, Daniel Lapsley, Paul Stey, Brian Robinson, and Markus Christen received funding to empirically investigate intellectual humility as an “elusive” virtue.

(Apologies for lack of links; I found out about the sucesses through the facebook, and so wasn’t sure about website for some of the people involved.)

I don’t yet know much by way of details of the other teams’ projects, but I can say a bit about my own: we are concerned that there is something like a paradox of self-reference when it comes to virtues like modesty and humility (and their intellectual counterparts).  Someone who indicates agreement, in response to a personality survey, with, “I am a humble person,” is not all that likely to be humble.  We consider this a contingent, empirical truth, not a conceptual one, but we think it’s a robust generalization nonetheless.  The basic strategy for our research is therefore to show that even the best explicit test of intellectual humility has less predictive power than an implicit test of intellectual humility.  Our behavioral outcome draws on resources from both social psychology (the Asch paradigm) and cognitive psychology (the vast literature on reasoning and patterns of fallacies and illusory inferences).  Brian Robinson discusses this in a bit more detail at his blog.

I’ll let the other successful teams detail their projects as they see fit in the comments.

The linguistic analogy

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Here’s a draft of the section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the so-called linguistic analogy.  As always, questions, comments, suggestions, and objections are most welcome.

 

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Mikhail’s Elements of Moral Cognition 

John Rawls (1971) suggested that Noam Chomsky’s (1957) generative linguistics might provide a helpful analogy for moral theorists – an analogy that Gilbert Harman (2000, 2008; Roedder & Harman 2010) has speculatively explored and which experimentalists have recently investigated (Hauser 2006; Hauser, Young, & Cushman 2008; Mikhail 2007, 2008, 2011).  There are several points of purported contact:

 

L1: A child raised in a particular linguistic community inevitably ends up speaking an idiolect of the local language despite lack of explicit instruction, lack of negative feedback for mistakes, and grammatical mistakes by caretakers.

 

M1: A child raised in a particular moral community inevitably ends up judging in accordance with an idiolect of the local moral code despite lack of explicit instruction, lack of negative feedback for moral mistakes, and moral mistakes by caretakers.

 

L2: While there is great diversity among natural languages, there are systematic constraints on possible natural languages.

 

M2: While there is great diversity among natural moralities, there are systematic constraints on possible natural moralities.

 

L3: Language-speakers obey many esoteric rules that they themselves would not recognize.

 

M3: Moral agents judge according to esoteric rules (such as the doctrine of double effect) that they themselves would not recognize.

 

L4: Drawing on a limited vocabulary, a speaker can express a potential infinity of thoughts.

 

M4: Drawing on a limited moral vocabulary, an agent can express a potential infinity of moral judgments.

 

Pair 1 suggests the “poverty of the stimulus” argument, according to which there must be an innate language (morality) faculty because it would otherwise be impossible for children to learn what and as they do.  However, as Prinz (2008) points out, the moral stimulus may be less penurious than the linguistic stimulus: children are typically punished for moral violations, whereas their grammatical violations are often ignored.  Nichols, Kumar, & Lopez (unpublished manuscript) lend support to Prinz’s contention with a series of Bayesian moral-norm learning experiments.

 

Pair 2 suggests the “principles and parameters” approach, according to which, though the exact content of linguistic (moral) rules is not innate, there are innate rule-schemas, the parameters of which may take only a few values.  The role of environmental factors is to set these parameters.  For instance, the linguistic environment determines whether the child learns a language in which noun phrases precede verb phrases or vice versa.  Similarly, say proponents of the analogy, there may be a moral rule-schema according to which members of group G may not be intentionally harmed unless p, and the moral environment sets the values of G and p.  As with the first point of analogy, philosophers such as Prinz (2008) find this comparison dubious.  Whereas linguistic parameters typically take just one of two or three values, the moral parameters mentioned above can take indefinitely many values and seem to admit of diverse exceptions.

 

Pair 3 suggests that people have knowledge of language (morality) that is inaccessible to consciousness but implicitly represented, such that they produce judgments of grammatical (moral) permissibility and impermissibility that far outstrip their own capacities to reflectively identify, explain, or justify.  One potential explanation of this gap is that there is a sub-personal “module” for language (morality) that has proprietary information and processing capacities.  Only the outputs of these capacities are consciously accessible.

 

Pair 4 suggests the linguistic (moral) essentiality of recursion, which allows the embedding of type-identical structures within one another to generate further structures of the same type.  For instance, noun phrases can be embedded in other noun phrases to form more complex noun phrases:

 

the calico cat –> the calico cat (that the dog chased) –> the calico cat (that the dog [that the man owned] chased) à the calico cat (that the dog [that the man {who was married to the heiress} owned] chased)

 

Moral judgments, likewise, can be embedded in other moral judgments to produce novel moral judgments:

 

“Thou shalt not kill” (Deuteronomy 5:13) –> “Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: But I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment.” (Matthew 5:21-2)

 

Another example: plausibly, if it’s wrong to x, then it’s wrong to persuade someone to x and wrong to coerce someone to x, and therefore also wrong to persuade someone to coerce someone to x.  Such moral embedding has been experimentally investigated by John Mikhail (2007, 2008, 2011), who argues on the basis of a large number of experiments using variants on the “trolley problem” (Foot 1978) that moral judgments are generated by imposing a deontic structure on one’s representation of the causal and evaluative features of the action under consideration.

 

As with any analogy, there are points of disanalogy between language and morality.  Within a given dialect, lay judgments about whether a given sentence is grammatical tend to be nearly unanimous, whereas, even within a given “moral dialect,” there is a great deal of variance in lay judgments about whether a given action is permissible.  Moral judgments are also, at least sometimes, corrigible in the face of argument, whereas grammaticality judgments seem to be incorrigible.  People are often tempted to act contrary to their moral judgments, but not to their grammaticality judgments.  Recursive embedding seems to be able to generate all of language, whereas recursive embedding may only be applicable to deontic judgments about actions, and not, for instance, judgments about norms, institutions, situations, and character traits.  Indeed, it’s hard to imagine what recursion would mean for character traits: does it make sense to think of honesty being embedded in courage to generate a new trait?  If it does, what would that trait be?

 

References:

 

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.

Foot, P. (1978). Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; Oxford: Blackwell.

Harman, G. (2000). Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harman, G. (2008). Using a linguistic analogy to study morality. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, volume 1, pp. 345-352. MIT Press.

Hauser, M. (2006). Moral Minds: How Nature Designed a Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. New York: Ecco Press/Harper Collins.

Hauser, M., Young, L., & Cushman, F. (2008). Reviving Rawls’s linguistic analogy: Operative principles and the causal structure of moral actions. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, volume 2, pp. 107-144. MIT Press.

Mikhail, J. (2011). Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls’s Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment. Cambridge University Press.

Mikhail, J. (2008). The poverty of the moral stimulus. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, volume 1, pp. 353-360. MIT Press.

Mikhail, J. (2007). Universal moral grammar: Theory, evidence, and the future. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 143-152.

Nichols, S., Kumar, S., & Lopez, T. (unpublished manuscript). Rational learners and non-utilitarian rules.

Prinz, J. (2008). Resisting the linguistic analogy: A commentary on Hauser, Young, and Cushman. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, volume 2, pp. 157-170. MIT Press.

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Roedder, E. & Harman, G. (2010). Linguistics and moral theory. In J. Doris (ed.), The Moral Psychology Handbook, pp. 273-296. Oxford University Press.

experimental moral philosophy & emotion

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Here’s a draft of the section of “Experimental Moral Philosophy,” (for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) on the emotions that I just drafted.  As always, questions, comments, suggestions, and criticisms are most welcome.

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Experimental inquiries into morality and emotion overlap in myriad, distantly-related ways.  We can only hope to gesture at many of the interesting questions that have been investigated in this context.  For instance, are moral judgments always motivating?  In other words, does it follow that, insofar as you judge that x is morally right (wrong), you are – perhaps only defeasibly, but to some extent – motivated to x (avoid xing)?  An affirmative answer is often labeled “internalist,” whereas a negative answer is labeled “externalist.”  Emotions are intrinsically motivational, so if experimental investigation could show that emotion was implicated in all moral judgments, that would be a point in favor of internalism.[1]  Another question we will not discuss in depth: is emotionally-driven reasoning in general better or worse than “cold,” affectless reasoning?  Greene et al. (2001, 2004) seem to presuppose that cold reasoning is typically or even always better, but we see little reason to make such a sweeping judgment.

 

Instead of trying to address all of the relevant questions, we focus on a particular application based on what have come to be known as dual-system models of cognition, reasoning, decision-making, and behavior.  While the exact details of the two systems vary from author to author, the basic distinction is between what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1, which is fast, automatic, effortless, potentially unconscious, often affect-laden, and sometimes incorrigible, and System 2, which is slow, deliberative, effortful, typically conscious, and associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration (2011, pp. 20-21).  Whereas System 2 exhibits a degree of functional unity, System 1 is better conceived as a loose conglomeration of semi-autonomous dispositions, states, and processes, which can conflict not only with System 2 but also with each other.

 

The dual-system approach has been employed by various experimental moral philosophers and experimental moral psychologists, including Joshua Greene (2008, 2012), Jonathan Haidt (2012; Haidt & Björklund 2008), Joshua Knobe (Inbar et al. 2009), Fiery Cushman (Cushman & Greene forthcoming), and Daniel Kelly (2011).  We will focus in particular on one process that relies heavily on System 1, disgust, to show what experimental moral philosophy of the emotions can do.

 

Disgust is an emotion that seems to be unique to human animals.  It involves characteristic bodily, affective, motivational, evaluative, and cognitive patterns.  For instance, someone who feels disgusted almost always makes a gaping facial expression, withdraws slightly from the object of disgust, experiences a slight reduction in body temperature and heart rate, and feels a sense of nausea and the need to cleanse herself.  In addition, she is motivated to avoid and even expunge the offending object, experiences it as contaminating and repugnant, becomes more attuned to other disgusting objects in the immediate environment, is inclined to treat anything that the object comes in contact with (whether physically or symbolically) as also disgusting, and is more inclined to make harsh moral judgments – both about the object and in general.  There are certain objects that basically all normal adults are disgusted by (feces, decaying corpses, rotting food, spiders, maggots, gross physical deformities), but there is also considerable intercultural and interpersonal variation beyond these core objects of disgust, including in some better-studied cases cuisines, sexual behaviors, out-group members, and violations of social norms.  Furthermore, the disgust reaction is nearly impossible to repress, is easily recognized, and – when recognized – empathically induces disgust in the other person.[2]

 

In a recent monograph, Kelly (2011) persuasively argues that this seemingly bizarre combination of features is best explained by what he calls the “entanglement thesis” (chapter 2) and the “co-opt thesis” (chapter 4).  First, the universal bodily manifestations of disgust evolved to help humans avoid ingesting toxins and other harmful substances, while the more cognitive or symbolic sense of offensiveness and contamination associated with disgust evolved to help humans avoid diseases and parasites.  According to the entanglement thesis, these initially distinct System 1 responses became entangled in the course of human evolution and now systematically co-occur.  If you make the gape face, whatever you’re attending to will start to look contaminated; if something disgusts you at a cognitive level, you will flash a quick gape face.  Second, according to the co-opt thesis, the entangled emotional system for disgust was later recruited for an entirely distinct purpose: to help mark the boundaries between in-group and out-group, and thus to motivate cooperation with in-group members, punishment of in-group defectors, and exclusion of out-group members.  Because the disgust reaction is both on a “hair trigger” (it acquires new cues extremely easily and empathically, p. 51) and “ballistic” (once set in motion, it is nearly impossible to halt or reverse, p. 72), it was ripe to be co-opted in this way.

 

Dan Kelly’s “Yuck!”

If Kelly’s account of disgust is on the right track, it seems to have a number of important moral upshots.  One of the more direct consequences of this theory is what he calls “disgust skepticism” (p. 139), according to which the combination of disgust’s hair trigger and its ballistic trajectory mean that it is extremely prone to incorrigible false positives that involve unwarranted feelings of contamination and even dehumanization.  Hence, “the fact that something is disgusting is not even remotely a reliable indicator of moral foul play” but is instead “irrelevant to moral justification” (p. 148).

 

Many theories of value incorporate a link between emotions and value.  According to fitting-attitude theories (Rönnow-Rasumussen 2011), something is bad if and only if there is reason to take a con-attitude (e.g., dislike, aversion, anger, hatred, disgust, contempt) towards it, and good if and only if there is reason to take a pro-attitude (e.g., liking, love, respect, pride, awe, gratitude) towards it.  According to response-dependence theories (Prinz 2007), something is bad (good) just in case one would, after reflection and deliberation, hold a con-attitude (pro-attitude) towards it.  According to desire-satisfaction theories of well-being (Heathwood 2006), your life is going well to the extent that objects towards which you harbor pro-attitudes are promoted and preserved, and objects towards which you harbor con-attitudes suffer or are harmed.  If Kelly’s disgust skepticism is on the right track, it looks like it would be a mistake to lump together all con-attitudes.  Perhaps it still makes sense to connect other con-attitudes, such as indignation, with moral badness, but it seems unwarranted to connect disgust with moral badness.  Thus, experimental moral philosophy of the emotions leads to a potential insight into the evaluative diversity of con-attitudes.

 

Another potential upshot of the experimental research derives from the fact that disgust belongs firmly in System 1: it is fast, automatic, effortless, potentially unconscious, affect-laden, and nearly incorrigible.  Moreover, while it is exceedingly easy to acquire new disgust triggers whether you want to or not, there seems to be no reliable way to de-acquire them, even if you want to.  Together, these points raise worries about moral responsibility.  It’s a widely accepted platitude that the less control you have over your behavior, the less responsible you are for that behavior.  At one extreme, if you totally lack control, many would say that you are not responsible for what you do.  Imagine an individual who acts badly because he is disgusted: he gapes when he sees two men kissing, even though he reflectively does not endorse homophobia; the men see this gape and, understandably, feel ostracized.  Would it be appropriate for them to take up a Strawsonian (1962) reactive attitude towards him, such as indignation?  Would it be appropriate for him to feel a corresponding attitude towards himself, such as guilt or shame?  Of course, if his flash of disgust is something that he recognizes and endorses, the answers to these questions may be simpler, but what are we to say about the case where someone is, as it were, stuck with a disgust trigger that he would rather be rid of?  We will not try to answer this question here; instead, we intend it to show that, while experimental moral philosophy of the emotions may provide new insights, it also raises thorny questions.

 

References:

 

Cushman, F. & Greene, J. (forthcoming). Finding faults: How moral dilemmas illuminate cognitive structure. Social Neuroscience.

Greene, J., Nystrom, L., Engell, A., Darley, J., & Cohen, J. (2004). The neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment. Neuron, 44, 389-400.

Greene, J., Sommerville, B., Nystrom, L., Darley, J.,  Cohen, J. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293, 2105-2108.

Greene, J. (2008). The secret joke of Kant’s soul. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, volume 3, pp. 35-80. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Greene, J. (2012). Reflection and reasoning in moral judgment. Cognitive Science 36:1, 163-177.

Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon.

Haidt, J. & Björklund, F. (2008). Social intuitionists answer six questions about moral psychology. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, volume 2, pp. 181-218. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Heathwood, C. (2006). Desire satisfaction and hedonism. Philosophical Studies, 128:3, 539-463.

Inbar, Y., Pizarro, Knobe, J. & Bloom, P. (2009). Disgust sensitivity predicts intuitive disapproval of gays. Emotion, 9:3, 435-443.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

Kelly, D. (2011). Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Nichols, S. (2004). Sentimental Rules. Oxford University Press.

Prinz, J. (2007). The Emotional Construction of Morals. Oxford University Press.

Rönnow-Rasumussen, T. (2011). Personal Value. Oxford University Press.

Strandberg, C. & Björklund, F. (forthcoming). Is moral internalism supported by folk intuitions? Philosophical Psychology, 1-17.

Strawson, P. (1962) Freedom and resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy, 48, 1-25.


[1] See Nichols (2004, ch. 5) and Strandberg & Björklund (forthcoming) for an experimentally-motivated argument against internalism.

[2] See Kelly (2011, especially chapter 1) for a comprehensive literature review