Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

In Search of Moral Illusions

  • Published:
The Journal of Value Inquiry Aims and scope Submit manuscript

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

Access this article

Log in via an institution

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

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Notes

  1. See F.C. Müller-Lyer, “Optische Urteilstäuschungen,” Archiv für Physiologie Suppl., 263–270 (1889).

  2. See R. Pohl, Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory (Psychology Press, 2004).

  3. W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford University Press, 1930, 2002), p. 41.

  4. Sam Harris, The End of Faith (W.W. Norton, 2004), p. 198.

  5. See C. Sunstein, “Moral heuristics,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 28, (2005), pp. 531–573.

  6. See D. Kahneman & F. Shane, “Representativeness Revisited: Attribute Substitution in Intuitive Judgment.” In Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, Daniel Kahneman. Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 49–81.

  7. See D. Kahneman, “Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics,” American Economic Review, Vol. 93, No. 5, (2003), pp. 1449–1475.

  8. See J. Mikhail, “Universal Moral Grammar: Theory, Evidence and the Future,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 11 No. 4, (2007), pp. 143–152.

    M. Hauser, L. Young & F. Cushman, “Reviving Rawls’ linguistic analogy: Operative principles and the causal structure of moral actions.” In Moral Psychology and Biology, Ed. W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Oxford U. Press, NY, 2008).

  9. See C. Phillips, W. Wagers & E.F. Lau, “Grammatical Illusions and Selective Fallibility in Real-Time Language Comprehension.” In J. Runner (ed.), Experiments at the Interfaces, Syntax & Semantics, Vol. 37, (Emerald Publications, 2010).

  10. See J.D. Greene, “The secret joke of Kant’s soul,” in Moral Psychology, Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality, W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Ed., (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

  11. See J.J. Thompson, “The Trolley Problem,” The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 94, (1985), pp. 1395–1415.

    F.M. Kamm, Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

    S. Bruers & J. Braeckman, “A review and systematization of the trolley problem,” Philosophia, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2014), pp. 251–269.

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

  13. See J. McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities.” In Honderich, T. (ed.), Morality and Objectivity (Routledge, 1984).

  14. See N. Daniels, “Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 76, No. 5, (1979), pp. 256–282.

  15. With ‘further argument’ I mean an argument based on another foundational principle or intuition. Of course, the translation invariance intuition in a particular situation is coherent with similar intuitions in other particular situations, but this coherence is not what I mean with a ‘further argument’ for its validity.

  16. See Z. Pylyshyn, “Is vision continuous with cognition? The case for cognitive impenetrability of visual perception,” Behav Brain Sci., Vol. 22, (1999), pp. 341–365.

  17. For another psychological explanation (a process of directional biasing) and a critique of the hypothesis of perspective adaptation, see: R.H. Day & A.C. Kimm, “Analysis and explanation of the Thiéry – Wundt Illusion,” Perception, Vol. 39, No. 7, (2010), pp. 942–952.

  18. See D. Kahneman & F. Shane, op. cit., pp. 49–81.

  19. See D. Kahneman, op. cit., pp. 1449–1475.

  20. For a more detailed explanation of this illusion, based on a mechanism of time-delay, see M.A. Changizi, A. Hsieh, R. Nijhawan, R. Kanai & S. Shimojo, “Perceiving the Present and a Systematization of Illusions,” Cognitive Science, Vol. 32, No. 3, (2008), pp. 459–503.

  21. See A. Ahluwalia, “An intra-cultural investigation of susceptibility to 'perspective' and 'non-perspective' spatial illusions,” Br. J. Psychol., Vol. 69, No. 2, (1978), pp. 233–241.

    M.H. Segall, D.T. Campbell & M.J. Herskovits, “Cultural Differences in the Perception of Geometric Illusions,” Science, New Series, Vol. 139, No. 3556, (1963), pp. 769–771.

  22. See M. Hauser, L. Young & F. Cushman, “Reviving Rawls’ linguistic analogy: Operative principles and the causal structure of moral actions.” In Moral Psychology and Biology, Ed. W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Oxford University Press, NY, 2008).

  23. See M. Waldmann & J. Dieterich, “Throwing a bomb on a person versus throwing a person on a bomb. Intervention myopia in moral intuitions,” Psychological Science, Vol. 18, No. 3, (2007), pp. 247–253.

    Although in that study, all people on the main and side tracks were actually sitting in buses, which means that not the body of the heavy person, but the bus on the side track is used as a means to block the trolley. Hence, the study is not suitable to discuss a basic right not to be used as merely a bodily means.

  24. See P. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 101.

  25. See P. Unger, op. cit., p. 101.

  26. See M. Waldmann & J. Dieterich, op. cit., pp. 247–253.

  27. M. Waldmann & J. Dieterich, op. cit., p. 249.

  28. See J.D. Greene, “The secret joke of Kant’s soul,” in Moral Psychology, Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality, W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Ed., (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

  29. See J.M. Fischer, “Thoughts on the Trolley Problem.” In: J.M. Fischer & M. Ravizza, Ethics: Problems and Principles, (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1992).

    J.M. Fischer & M. Ravizza, “Ducking harm and sacrificing others,” Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 25, No. 3, (1994).

  30. See e.g. P. Singer, P. “Ethics and intuitions,” The Journal of Ethics. Vol. 9, (2005), pp. 331–352.

    T.M. Scanlon, “Means and ends,” in Moral Dimensions, (Harvard University Press, 2008, ch. 3).

  31. See P. Singer, Animal Liberation, a New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, (New York Review of Books, 2nd ed., 1990).

  32. Note that reference to intelligence, rationality or moral agency does not work, as some Homo sapiens are as rational as some non-human outgroup members. This is the argument from marginal cases.

  33. I refer to its close relatives because the individual itself could be infertile.

  34. J. McMahan, “Our fellow creatures,” The Journal of Ethics, Vol. 9, (2005), pp. 353–380.

  35. J. Rachels, Created From Animals. The Moral Implications of Darwinism, (Oxford University Press, 1990).

  36. J. Rawls, Ibid. (1971).

  37. M. Rowlands, “Contractarianism and animal rights,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 14, No. 3, (1997), pp. 235–247.

  38. See D. Purves & B. Lotto, Why We See What We Do: An Empirical Theory of Vision, (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2002).

  39. See B.E. Whitley & M.E. Kite, The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination, (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2010).

  40. See H. Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981).

  41. See G.A. Quattrone & E.E. Jones, “The perception of variability within in-groups and out-groups: Implications for the law of small numbers,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 38, No. 1, (1980), pp. 141–152.

    M. Rubin & C. Badea, “They're all the same!…but for several different reasons: A review of the multicausal nature of perceived group variability,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 21, (2012), pp. 367–372.

  42. See e.g. S. Plous, “Is there such a thing as prejudice towards animals?” In Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination, Plous (ed.), (McGraw-Hill, New York, 2003).

  43. See S. Gelman, The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  44. See F.J. Gil-White, “Are ethnic groups biological “species” to the human brain? Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 42, No. 4, (2001), pp. 515–555.

  45. S. Gelman, Ibid., 2003.

  46. See P. Bloom, “Why We Like What We Like,” Observer, Vol. 23, No. 8, (2010), p. 3.

  47. See e.g. T. Chappell, “On the Very Idea of Criteria for Personhood,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 49, No. 1, (2011), pp. 1–27.

    C. Cohen & T. Regan, The Animal Rights Debate, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

    For more references and an extensive critique of the ‘argument of kinds’ see also McMahan, Ibid. (2005), and J. Tanner, “Marginal humans, the argument from kinds and the similarity argument,” Facta Universitas, Vol. 5, No. 1, (2006), pp. 47–63.

  48. See C. Sunstein, Ibid. (2005).

  49. See S. Bruers, “Speciesism as a Moral Heuristic,” Philosophia, Vol. 41, No. 2, (2013), pp. 489–501.

  50. See A.G. Greenwald & M.R. Banaji, “Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes,” Psychological Review, Vol. 102, (1995), pp. 4–27.

    P.G. Devine, “Implicit Prejudice and Stereotyping: How Automatic Are They?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 81, No. 5, (2001), pp. 757–759.

  51. See L. Cosmides, J. Tooby & R. Kurzban, “Perceptions of race,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 7, No. 4, (2003), pp. 173–179.

    R. Kurzban, J. Tooby & L. Cosmides, “Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization,” PNAS, Vol. 98, No. 26, (2001), pp. 15387–15393.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Moral Science, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Stijn Bruers

Authors
  1. Stijn Bruers
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stijn Bruers.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Bruers, S. In Search of Moral Illusions. J Value Inquiry 50, 283–303 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-015-9507-8

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-015-9507-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation