Abstract
In this essay I argue that moral judgment is a natural kind by developing an empirically grounded theory of the distinctive conceptual content of moral judgments. Psychological research on the moral/conventional distinction suggests that in moral judgments right and wrong, good and bad, praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, etc. are conceptualized as (1) serious, (2) general, (3) authority-independent, and (4) objective. After laying out the theory and the empirical evidence that supports it, I address recent empirical and conceptual objections. Finally, I suggest that the theory uniquely accounts for the possibility of genuine moral agreement and disagreement.
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Notes
For evidence that moral judgment explains reasoning in other domains see Knobe (2003a, b), Nadelhoffer (2005), Knobe and Burra (2006), Leslie et al. (2006), Cushman and Mele (2008), Knobe (2010a), Pettit and Knobe (2009), Beebe and Buckwalter (2010), Alicke (2000), Cushman et al. (2005), Knobe and Fraser (2008), Hitchcock and Knobe (2009), Knobe (2010a, b). For evidence that moral judgment explains cooperative, uncooperative, and punitive behavior see; Fischbacher et al. (2001), Keser and van Winden (2000), Brandts and Schram (2001), Fehr and Gachter (2000), Turillo et al. (2002), Fehr and Fischbacher (2004a, b), Pillutla and Murnighan (1996).
Cognitivists tend to pay more attention to the conceptual content of moral judgment than non-cognitivists. The reason, perhaps, is that cognitivists tend to locate the normativity of moral judgment in the content of the judgment rather than the attitude. For cognitivists, after all, moral judgment is just an ordinary belief. Non-cognitivists, by contrast, tend to locate the normativity of moral judgment in attitude rather than content; the content is just the natural property toward which one has a non-cognitive state. However, non-cognitivists who accept this line of thought are misled. Even if moral judgment is a non-cognitive state, one must still identify the moral concepts through which non-cognitive attitudes apprehend their objects, concepts that distinguish moral attitudes from other non-cognitive attitudes of approval and disapproval.
Michael Bukoski objects to my argument here as follows. He agrees, at least for the sake of argument, that one does not generally have moral duties to oneself, but argues that this is a substantive claim, rather than a definitional claim. For example, although I am morally obliged not to kill others, I lack a moral duty not to commit suicide just because the correct norms of morality permit suicide and not because there is some kind of incoherence in the idea of such a duty. The problem with this objection is that it is difficult to make sense of self/other asymmetries on many normative ethical theories. Suppose that we agree that suicide is not morally wrong, you as a substantive matter and I as a definitional matter. The problem is that on many ethical theories, it's difficult to see why killing one's (healthy) self is not morally wrong. It does not maximize utility, it causes harm, it violates Kantian duties to oneself, etc. So, because for many ethical theories there is no substantive basis for permitting suicide, the best explanation is that a prohibition on suicide is invalid on definitional grounds. Although some ethical theories entail self/other asymmetries, this won't explain why many Utilitarians, Kantians and others hold, apparently without blatant inconsistency, that suicide is not morally wrong.
The distinction at play here is roughly between analytic and synthetic truths and while I assume that some version of the distinction obtains, I do not assume that it is sharp. There may be borderline cases of truths that are not clearly analytic or synthetic. Famously, naturalists tend to reject the analytic/synthetic distinction. However, following Harman (1967), Campbell (1998: 145–149), and others, I interpret Quine’s most persuasive arguments in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) as showing not there are no analytic truths, but that there are no analytic truths knowable a priori—in the sense that there are no truths about meaning knowable independent of experience, that cannot be revised on the basis of experience. (I do not reject weaker conceptions of the a priori.) Consistent with this interpretation, my Quinean approach in the essay is to empirically investigate analytic truths associated with the concept of morality.
It is worth noting that in Goodwin and Darley’s study subjects exhibited variation depending on the moral statement they were asked to evaluate. For example, subjects tended to think that disagreement entails error with respect to whether cheating is wrong and whether robbery is wrong, but not with respect to whether euthanasia and abortion are wrong. One possible explanation for this difference is that subjects think some moral norms are objective, whereas others are not. If so, then objectivity is not a defining feature of morality. However, since subjects were mainly objectivists in their responses, it is more likely that their other responses reflected not a perceived lack of objectivity, but doubt about the likelihood of rationally adjudicating disagreement about certain moral matters. This is the salient difference between the two classes of moral statements at issue. It is beyond dispute that cheating and robbery are wrong, but highly controversial whether euthanasia and abortion are. Subjects should be expected to recognize this difference about the way in which these actions are generally regarded, even if their own moral opinions are firm.
Copp (1995) and Campbell (2009) defend views that are similar but also specify further distinguishing features of morality. It would be worthwhile to experimentally test these views, using methods of the sort described above. In this way philosophical theorizing might inform and guide further psychological research.
Notice that some of these features are less precise than what one might expect from a typical philosophical analysis. This lack of precision is in fact a strength of the view. I have identified what is in the ordinary person’s mind when they make a moral judgment. We shouldn’t expect a definition that is any more precise, for that can be constructed only through explication of the ordinary concept of morality.
Standard research on the moral/conventional distinction does not examine the feature of objectivity. So, although we know from Blair’s work that psychopaths tend not to distinguish moral and conventional violations with respect to seriousness, generality, and authority-independence, we do not yet know whether they tend not to with respect to objectivity. See (Kumar 2015b) for further discussion, including objections that arise from Aharoni et al. (2012).
Kelly et al. also tested whether subjects would judge that certain actions would still be judged wrong if relevant authorities condoned them. However, their findings with respect to authority independence are much less powerful. With respect to many of the scenarios, subjects judged that wrongness of harmful actions is authority independent (Kelly et al. 2007: 127–128).
Kelly and Stich offer another, similar objection that does not in fact apply to MCT. Their target view states that transgressions that involve harm, injustice or rights-violations elicit moral judgments; transgressions that do not involve harm, injustice or rights-violations elicit conventional normative judgments. Kelly and Stich argue persuasively that both generalizations are false. However, MCT does not have any substantive implications about what sorts of violations are moral. MCT is a view about how we conceive of violations that are moral, whatever those violations happen to be. Kelly and Stich build harm/injustice/rights into their target theory of moral judgment. But which properties elicit moral judgments varies significantly across cultures. Whatever people regard as morally relevant, though, MCT entails that these factors elicit judgments that conceptualize morality in terms of the four features.
Another type of counterexample is normative judgments in which all four features are present, but that are intuitively classified as non-moral. These are more difficult to produce.
It may seem as if further counterexamples can be drawn from metaethical theories that reject one or another of the four features. Extreme relativists deny that morality is any more general than convention. Extreme subjectivists deny that morality is any more objective than convention. However, neither metaethical theory generates intuitive counterexamples—neither view yields concrete cases of judgments that are intuitively classified as moral. It may be true that, intuitively, some moral issues are not completely general: they generalize only across some cultures, rather than across the entire spectrum of human societies (see Sarkissian et al. 2011). But that still allows for a difference between morality and convention, which is thought to generalize only across local communities. Extreme forms of relativism and subjectivism are revisionary theories. Unlike, say, moral realism, these views revise our pre-theoretical concept of morality. Norms that lack all generality or objectivity are not intuitively classified as moral, and therefore are not candidate counterexamples.
Subjectivism is not the expressivist view that moral judgments express one’s preferences, of course. See Stevenson’s (1942) reply to Moore.
What about people who make atypical moral judgments? (Thanks to Bryan Chambliss for raising this question.) MCT entails vagueness not just about whether people make moral judgments but also about whether people are disagreeing. When one or more parties in a moral discussion are making an atypical moral judgment they are “more or less” disagreeing, just as two people who have distinct but overlapping concepts of “game” may more or less disagree about whether something counts as a game. In a few such cases, the disagreement is not genuine because one person is concerned especially with whether an action has one of the features that is not tokened in the other person’s judgment.
Some readers may balk at this argument, insisting that they have no intuitions about moral twin Earth and that what must be accounted for is agreement and disagreement in the real world. I am sympathetic to this reaction. However, the basic point does not require any such esoteric thought experiment. In one essay, Horgan and Timmons (2000: 150) deploy a similar though less clean objection using Hare’s (1952: 148–149) classic case of the missionaries and the cannibals. Suppose that each group uses moral terms that refer directly to different properties. Then, when the missionaries and cannibals disagree about the morality of eating human flesh, they are not really disagreeing. But, intuitively, they are. And once again, we have a reason to reject semantic externalism about moral terms.
Externalist theories of moral content have a certain broad affinity with my approach in this essay. Externalists often hold that moral properties are natural kind properties that can be investigated empirically. But the view that moral judgment is a natural kind does not entail that the objects of moral judgment, moral properties, are natural kinds.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful feedback I am grateful to an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies, Alex Barber, Michael Buksoski, Richmond Campbell, Bryan Chambliss, John Doris, Terence Horgan, Ben Kearns, Ron Mallon, Peter Railton, Stephen Stich, Mark Timmons, and especially Shaun Nichols. Thanks also to audiences at an annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association, the Moral Psychology Research Group, and the University of Arizona for stimulating discussion.
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Kumar, V. Moral judgment as a natural kind. Philos Stud 172, 2887–2910 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0448-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0448-7