Skip to main content
Log in

The Role of Practical Reason in an Empirically Informed Moral Theory

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Aims and scope Submit manuscript

    We’re sorry, something doesn't seem to be working properly.

    Please try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, please contact support so we can address the problem.

Abstract

Empirical research paints a dismal portrayal of the role of reason in morality. It suggests that reason plays no substantive role in how we make moral judgments or are motivated to act on them. This paper explores how it is that an empirically oriented philosopher, committed to methodological naturalism, ought to respond to the skeptical challenge presented by this research. While many think taking this challenge seriously requires revising, sometimes dramatically, how we think about moral agency, this paper will defend the opposite reaction. Contrary to what recent discussions lead us to expect, practical reason is not simply a philosophical fiction lacking empirical roots. Empirical research does not exclude the possibility that practical reason can play a substantive role; rather, there is evidence that it can help us both to determine our first personal moral judgments and to motivate us to act on them.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. For a more thorough analysis of the range of empirical evidence supporting this conclusion, see Prinz (2007, chap. 1).

  2. See also Bargh and Ferguson (2000) for further development of this thesis.

  3. For example, Prinz claims that “reasoning is integral to moral judgments”, but only because “reasoning is often necessary to determine whether a particular form of conduct is an instance of some more general action type towards which we already have a moral sentiment” (Prinz 2006, p. 36).

  4. See, for instance, Huebner et al. (2009), as well as many of the articles in the 2006 special volume on Empirical Research and the Nature of Moral Judgment in Philosophical Explorations 9(1).

  5. However, they are skeptical about our powers to do so, given their recognition of the limited capacities we have for exerting conscious control over our behavior, a concern echoed in Doris (2009). This is a genuine concern, in response to which I have two main suggestions: The first is that, given the importance of morality to our lives and others, we are warranted in devoting our limited resources to deliberating over moral matters; the second (which I discuss in later sections) is that it is worth pursuing ways in which we can develop automatic action-sequences which we associate with our (reasoned) moral judgments, making it the case that once we deliberate upon what is the right thing to do, we set into motion automatic action-sequences, thus mitigating the cognitive energy requisite to doing the right thing.

  6. Conscious attentional effort is most important when committing to or pursuing new goals, as opposed to habitual goals, where a script has already been established and can be automatically activated (Banfield et al. 2004; Bargh and Gollwitzer 1994)

  7. There is a third possible use of reason in goal selection: reason could be invoked to select goals independently of any reflection on one’s desires. I’m skeptical that we can find genuine instances of this in the empirical research.

  8. Indeed, many psychologists identify self-regulation with self-control, holding that self-regulation occurs only when there are competing influences that make self-regulation requisite. Others argue that self-regulation ought to be understood more broadly, to include cases where regulation is necessary in the face of a non-impulse, such as for the coach potato who lacks any drive (Carver and Scheier 1996).

  9. For full defense of this claim, see Besser-Jones (in press).

  10. This analysis helps to explain the amorality of psychopaths: they lack the basic input (derived from affective components) from which to reason from.

  11. This is true, even if we take the empirical literature to show that moral judgments are “cognitively impenetrable”, that is, to show that moral judgments have their root in affective mechanisms and cannot be swayed by beliefs or reasoning processes. The process of goal selection takes as given moral judgments; reasoning is involved in deciding how one should regard and/or embrace one’s moral judgments. My argument here thus does not depend on any particular view on the cognitive basis of moral judgments.

  12. Darwall notes that Allen Gibbard first raised this example.

  13. Scheffler makes a parallel point, arguing that this person, who takes a “purely instrumental view of [her] own actions”, quite simply does not see herself as being subject to the norms in question (2004, p. 231). To be subject to norms is to abandon instrumental reasoning; it is to stop assessing every action “in terms of its causal instrumentality”, i.e. in terms of its immediate potential to satisfy her desires (Scheffler 2004, p. 231).

References

  • Banfield JF, Wyland CL, Macrae CN, Munte TF, Heatherton TF (2004) The cognitive neuroscience of self-regulation. Handbook of self-regulation: Research, theory, and applications, 62–83

  • Bargh JA, Chartrand TL (1999) The unbearable automaticity of being. Am Psychol 54(7):462–479

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bargh JA, Ferguson MJ (2000) Beyond behaviorism: on the automaticity of higher mental processes. Psychol Bull 126(6):925–945

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bargh JA, Gollwitzer PM (1994) Environmental control of goal-directed action: automatic and strategic contingencies between situations and behavior. In: Nebraska symposium on motivation. Nebraska symposium on motivation, vol 41. Nebraska, Lincoln, pp 71–124

    Google Scholar 

  • Bargh JA, Morsella E (2009) Unconscious behavioral guidance systems. In: Agnew C, Carlston D, Graziano WG (eds) Then a miracle occurs: focusing on behavior in social psychological theory and research. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 89–118

    Google Scholar 

  • Baron J (1998) Judgment misguided: intuition and error in public decision making. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Baumeister RF, Bratslavsky E, Muraven M, Tice DM (1998) Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource? J Pers Soc Psychol 74:1252–1265

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Besser-Jones, Lorraine (in press) The motivational state of the virtuous agent. Philosophical psychology

  • Blair RJR (1995) A cognitive developmental approach to morality: investigating the psychopath. Cognition 57(1):1–29

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carver CS, Scheier MF (1996) Self-regulation and its failures. Psychol Inq 7(1):32–40

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cima M, Tonnaer F, Hauser MD (2010) Psychopaths know right from wrong but don’t care. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 5(1):59–67

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Darwall SL (2006) The second-person standpoint: morality, respect, and accountability. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Doris JM (2002) Lack of character: personality and moral behavior. Cambridge University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Doris JM (2009) Skepticism about persons. Phil Issues 19(1):57–91

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Faber RJ, Vohs KD (2004) To buy or not to buy? In: Baumeister RF, Vohs KD (eds) Handbook of self-regulation: research, theory, and applications. Guilford, New York, pp 509–524

    Google Scholar 

  • Fendrich JM (1967) A study of the association among verbal attitudes, commitment and overt behavior in different experimental situations. Soc Forces 45(3):347–355

    Google Scholar 

  • Fitzsimons GM, Bargh JA (2004) Automatic self-regulation. In: Baumeister RF, Vohs KD (eds) Handbook of self-regulation: research, theory, and applications. Guilford, New York, pp 151–170

    Google Scholar 

  • Greene JD (2008) The secret joke of Kant's soul. In: Sinnott-Armstrong W (ed) The Neuroscience of morality: emotion, disease, and development, vol 3. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 35–80

    Google Scholar 

  • Greene J, Haidt J (2002) How (and where) does moral judgment work? Trends Cogn Sci 6(12):517–523

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Greene JD, Sommerville RB, Nystrom LE, Darley JM, Cohen JD (2001) An fMRI study of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science 293:2105–2108

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haidt J (2001) The emotional dog and its rational tail. Psychol Rev 108(4):814–834

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haidt J (2003) The emotional dog does learn new tricks: a reply to Pizarro and Bloom (2003). Psychol Rev 110(1):197–198

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heatherton TF, Baumeister RF (1996) Authors’ response: self-regulation failure: past, present, and future. Psychol Inq 7(1):90–98

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huebner B, Dwyer S, Hauser M (2009) The role of emotion in moral psychology. Trends Cogn Sci 13(1):1–6

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Joyce R (2001) The myth of morality. Cambridge University Press, New York

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Knobe J, Leiter B (2007) The case for Nietzschean moral psychology. In: Leiter B, Sinhababu N (eds) Nietzsche and morality. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 83–109

    Google Scholar 

  • Kraus SJ (1995) Attitudes and the prediction of behavior: a meta-analysis of the empirical literature. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 21(1):58

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kruglanski AW, Thompson EP, Higgins ET, Atash MN, Pierro A, Shah JY, Spiegel S (2000) To “do the right thing” or to “just do it”: locomotion and assessment as distinct self-regulatory imperatives. J Pers Soc Psychol 79(5):793–815

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maes S, Karoly P (2005) Self-regulation assessment and intervention in physical health and illness: a review. Appl Psychol 54(2):267–299

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Millgram E (2001) Practical reasoning: the current state of play. In: Millgram E (ed) Varieties of practical reasoning. MIT, Cambridge, pp 1–26

    Google Scholar 

  • Nichols S (2002) How psychopaths threaten moral rationalism, or is it irrational to be amoral? Monist 85:285–303

    Google Scholar 

  • Nichols S (2004) Sentimental rules: on the natural foundations of moral judgment. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Prinz J (2006) The emotional basis of moral judgments. Philosophical Explorations 9(1):29–43

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Prinz J (2007) The emotional construction of morals. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Scheffler S (2004) Doing and allowing. Ethics 114(2):215–239

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vohs KD, Baumeister RF (2004) Understanding self-regulation. In: Baumeister R, Vohs KD (eds) Handbook of self-regulation: research, theory, and applications. Guilford, New York, pp 1–9

    Google Scholar 

  • Vohs KD, Ciarocco NJ (2004) Interpersonal functioning requires self-regulation. In: Baumeister RF, Vohs KD (eds) Handbook of self-regulation: research, theory, and applications. Guilford, New York, pp 392–407

    Google Scholar 

  • Wicker AW (1969) Attitudes versus actions: the relationship of verbal and overt behavioral responses to attitude objects. J Soc Issues 25(4):41–78

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zimmerman BJ, Schunk DH (2001) Self-regulated learning and academic achievement: theoretical perspectives. Erlbaum, Hillsdale

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented to an audience at the University of Guelph. Thanks to the philosophy department there for helpful feedback, as well as to Paul Thagard, Patricia Marino, Joshua Knobe, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier drafts.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lorraine Besser-Jones.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Besser-Jones, L. The Role of Practical Reason in an Empirically Informed Moral Theory. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 15, 203–220 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9284-9

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9284-9

Keywords

Navigation