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Debunking debunking: a regress challenge for psychological threats to moral judgment

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Abstract

This paper presents a regress challenge to the selective psychological debunking of moral judgments. A selective psychological debunking argument conjoins an empirical claim about the psychological origins of certain moral judgments to a theoretical claim that these psychological origins cannot track moral truth, leading to the conclusion that the moral judgments are unreliable. I argue that psychological debunking arguments are vulnerable to a regress challenge, because the theoretical claim that ‘such-and-such psychological process is not moral-truth-tracking’ relies upon moral judgments. We must then ask about the psychological origins of these judgments, and then make a further evaluative judgment about these psychological origins… and so on. This chain of empirical and evaluative claims may continue indefinitely and, I will argue, proponents of the debunking argument are in a dialectical position where they may not simply call a halt to the process. Hence, their argument cannot terminate, and its debunking conclusion cannot be upheld.

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Notes

  1. The distinction between global and selective debunking appears in Kahane (2011), though he uses the term ‘local’ instead of ‘selective’. Kahane presents several challenges for the feasibility of selective debunking (at least when motivated by evolutionary concerns). Proponents of debunking have also appealed to the distinction: Lazari-Radek and Singer (2012, 12) approvingly quote the Sidgwick passages above, and present their project as fitting Sidgwick’s characterization of selective debunking.

  2. Similar schema appear in Mason (2011, 450) and Kahane (2011, 106). It might be objected that some of the terms of my schema are vague. This is true—they are vague on purpose. The schema ranges over a number of instances of the argument type (some examples of which appear below). The vague terms of the schema allow agnosticism about differences among the various instances. The regress challenge is meant to apply to all instances of the schema, for which these differences are irrelevant.

  3. Greene argues that neuroscientific evidence shows a correlation between deontological intuition and “up close and personal” forms of harm (e.g. physically pushing a person to his death rather than using a machine). He claims similar origins of other deontological intuitions, such as those about punishment. For critiques of the details of Greene’s argument, see Berker (2009) and Kahane (2012).

  4. Prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979) is a psychological theory about the differential effects of gain- and loss-framing on decision making. Horowitz is discussing Quinn (1989). For critiques of the details of Horowitz’s argument, see Kamm (1998) and van Roojen (1999). See also Sinnott-Armstrong (2008).

  5. The Loop case in question figures centrally in Thomson (1976) and Kamm (2007). Liao and colleagues are cautious about the strength of their conclusion; see also Liao (2008).

  6. The arguments here rely in part on Greene’s, above. See also Singer (2005) and, for criticism, Sandberg and Juth (2011) and Kahane (2014).

  7. The verb ‘cause’ may also deserve some caution, as any particular moral judgment will in fact be the causal result of many different psychological processes. It may be better to say that the quality or manner of judgments M is influenced by process P (see Lewis 2000). I will set aside such issues here.

  8. The terminology comes from Nozick (1981, 178), who defines a person possessing knowledge as one whose belief is subjunctively sensitive to the truth. Here I will not be concerned with whether the judgments in question meet the criteria of moral ‘knowledge’. I also elide any difficulties that may arise from speaking about a process (rather than a full person) as tracking truth. See Street (2006) for an influential use of the term in a way that is identical to my own.

  9. See also Blackburn (1985) and Dworkin (1996) for doubts about the distance between metaethics and ethics.

  10. Greene thinks these sorts of harm are permissible. One might also conclude that these sorts of harm are impermissible, whether or not up close and personal violence is involved. Either way, we get the judgment that up close and personal violence is morally irrelevant. The locution ‘X is a morally irrelevant factor’ operates something like this: ‘the moral status of an action does not change when factor X is altered’. It is hard to see where we might get a conclusion of that sort, other than by comparing moral judgments about cases with X present to moral judgments about cases without X present.

  11. An error theorist might disagree. If you think there just are no moral properties, then obviously you can conclude that a psychological process does not track the moral truth. There is no moral truth to track. And (allegedly) error theorists reach this conclusion without relying on any of their own moral judgments. But notice that error theory does not lead only to selective debunking; it leads to global debunking. I will return to this point in Sect. 5.

  12. Or at least it will never end for practical purposes. Supposing that there are a finite number of psychological processes in the human mind, the regress is not literally infinite. But the number is surely so incredibly vast that no actual human being could ever hope to exhaust it.

  13. Similarly, Ronald Dworkin: “Morality is a distinctive, independent dimension of our experience, and it exercises its own sovereignty. We cannot argue ourselves free of it except by its own leave, except, as it were, by making our peace with it” (Dworkin 1996, 128). See also Nagel (1997).

  14. This seems to be Selim Berker’s point when he deploys a regress challenge against Greene: “[S]hould we perform additional experiments to see what parts of the brain light up when certain people make a judgment that such-and-such-factors-picked-out-by-deontological-judgments are not morally relevant, and what parts of the brain light up when other people make a judgment that such-and-such-factors-ignored-by-consequentialist-judgments are in fact morally relevant? What would that possibly tell us? (Shall we then perform yet more experiments to see what parts of the brain light up when people make a judgment about the relevance of the factors to which those second-order judgments are responding, and so on, ad infinitum?)” (Berker 2009, 327).

  15. To be precise, the issue here isn’t directly about the size of set M. Rather, the real issue is the relationship between the judgments that are elements of M and the judgments that are elements of the φ-basis set. Are these similar types of moral judgments? Similar to what degree? But it’s not an easy matter to provide a taxonomy of moral judgment types or a metric of similarity space. Since these are messy questions, I use set size as a proxy for similarity, on the purely mathematical assumption that a large set M is more likely to have elements similar to those of the φ-basis set than a small set M.

  16. Though see Wiegmann et al. (2012) for suggestive evidence that order effects may affect moral judgments only under certain circumstances.

  17. In fact, if there is such a self-approving psychological process, then it might be understood as the naturalistic foundation of morality itself. Christine Korsgaard (describing a view she attributes to Hume) argues that morality must meet the reflectivity test. “Call a purportedly normative judgment a ‘verdict’ and the mental operation that gives rise to it a ‘faculty’…. [A] faculty’s verdicts are normative if the faculty meets the following test: when the faculty takes itself and its own operations for its object, it gives a positive verdict” (Korsgaard 1996, 62; italics in original).

  18. See also Harman (1977), on which Joyce relies, and also Street (2006) for a somewhat similar argument (though Street does not intend the conclusion to be debunking in quite the same way as Joyce). Though Joyce’s book deals centrally with evolution, the logic of his debunking argument does not require any particularly Darwinian premise. Indeed, in another publication (Joyce 2006a) he employs the same argument starting from points that are wholly general to the empirical sciences.

  19. There is a sense in which Joyce’s debunking is selective: he wishes only to debunk moral judgments, not judgments in other normative domains. This is important, because if his argument were truly global—that is, applied to all normative domains—then it would risk self-defeat. The epistemic norms underwriting his empirical claims, and even the inferential threads of the argument itself, might be evolutionarily debunked. (See Joyce 2006b, 183–184, for a brief discussion of the point.) I leave this issue to the side for now, since my interest is only in moral debunking; for my purposes, ‘global’ and ‘selective’ are relative to the moral domain.

  20. For instance, see Finlay (2008), Stich (2008), or Tresan (2010).

  21. If this just sounds insane, rather than merely ridiculous, then keep in mind that in Yates versus United States, the American Supreme Court decided that some fish are not tangible objects. See ‘In Overturning Conviction, Supreme Court Says Fish Are Not Always Tangible’ (New York Times, February 25, 2015; http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/us/justices-overturn-a-fishermans-conviction-for-tossing-undersize-catch.html). Justice Kagan disagreed with the majority: “A fish is, of course, a discrete thing that possesses physical form,” she said, and cited Dr. Seuss.

  22. Perhaps this should not be surprising, since the Street (2006) evolutionary argument on which they rely is explicitly targeted at all evaluative attitudes.

  23. I owe this example to an anonymous referee.

  24. These are reverse Sobel sequences. Consider the following two counterfactuals, first in this order, and then in reverse order: (C1) If Sophie had gone to the parade, she would have seen Pedro. (C2) But if Sophie had gone to the parade and been stuck behind a tall person, she would not have seen Pedro. There is an active dispute over whether the problem exposed by this reversal reflects something deep in the semantics of counterfactuals or is a pragmatic effect. See von Fintel (2001) and Moss (2012).

  25. Representatives of this movement appear in Doris and Stich (2007), Appiah (2008), Levy (2009), Christen et al. (2014).

  26. See, for instance: Korsgaard (2009), Velleman (2009), Oshana (2010).

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Acknowledgments

The development of this paper has benefited immensely from detailed comments by Guy Kahane, Joanna Demaree-Cotton, and an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies. I am also indebted to discussion with Hilary Greaves, Hossein Dabbagh, Nora Heinzelmann, Ned Block, Michael Strevens, Joshua Knobe, Thomas Nagel, Daniela Dover, Knut Olav Skarsaune, and Sharon Street. The ideas have been sharpened by engagement with audiences at NYU, Oxford, VU University Amsterdam, the University of Sydney, the University of Tokyo, Kansas State University, and UC Davis. This research was supported by the VolkswagenStiftung’s European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences, and the Humanities (Grant II/86 063).

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    Regina A. Rini

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Rini, R.A. Debunking debunking: a regress challenge for psychological threats to moral judgment. Philos Stud 173, 675–697 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0513-2

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