Abstract
In this article, I focus on two claims made by Appiah in Experiments in Ethics: Doris’s and Harman’s criticism of virtue ethics fails, and moral psychology can be used to identify erroneous moral intuitions. I argue that both claims are erroneous.
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Notes
In this article, I follow Appiah in distinguishing moral psychology from moral philosophy, but I should note that in my mind, moral psychology is both empirical and philosophical (for a similar view, see the introduction of the forthcoming Handbook of Moral Psychology).
I highly recommend reading the endnotes where much of the research on which Appiah relies is described and referenced.
Appiah distinguishes moral and ethical questions as follows (37): Moral questions concern what we should do; ethical questions concern what life we should live.
It might be helpful to think about this assumption in terms of an analysis of variance. The idea, then, is that people’s character accounts for most of the variance in their behavior.
Doris [5] discusses this reply, noting that it raises a specific empirical question: To which extent are people able to comply with these norms?
It might be helpful to think about this in terms of factor analysis. Suppose people really have characters. Then, if one were to analyze someone’s behavior factorially, a single factor would emerge (in contrast to several factors corresponding to the diverse psychological causes).
To clarify, the issue does not concern the unity of the virtues (viz. whether courage, generosity, temperance, etc., necessarily go together). Rather, it concerns the kind of unity among beliefs, desires, values, emotions, etc., that is required for someone to have a given character trait. For instance, to be courageous is to be disposed to have specific beliefs, desires, values, etc., with respect to situations of danger.
Of course, agency can be more or less unified.
Interestingly, in the last chapter of Experiments in Ethics, Appiah argues that the importance of intuitions in moral philosophy is regrettable. For simplicity, I will overlook this claim in what follows.
As Appiah remarks, moral theories have to walk a tight rope between being too conservative (agreeing with many commonsense moral intuitions) and being too reformative (disagreeing with many moral intuitions).
Greene seems to hold that automaticity goes with irrationality, while others propose that it goes with rationality (e.g., [32]).
Examining the implications of this situation is beyond the scope of this article.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank John Doris, Gil Harman, Neil Levy, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong for their comments on a previous version of this article. I would also like to thank the readers of the blog Experimental Philosophy (www.experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com) for their comments on this article—particularly, Anne Jacobson, Lisa Lederer, Tamler Sommers, Jussi Suikkanen. A version of this article was also presented in Princeton.
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Machery, E. The Bleak Implications of Moral Psychology. Neuroethics 3, 223–231 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-010-9063-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-010-9063-7