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Confabulating the Truth: In Defense of “Defensive” Moral Reasoning

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Abstract

Empirically minded philosophers have raised questions about judgments and theories based on moral intuitions such as Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium. But they work from the notion of intuitions assumed in empirical work, according to which intuitions are immediate assessments, as in psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s definition. Haidt himself regards such intuitions as an appropriate basis for moral judgment, arguing that normal agents (nonphilosophers) do not reason prior to forming a judgment and afterwards just “confabulate” reasons in its defense. I argue, first, that the notion of “considered intuitive judgment” that Rawls spells out when he first presents his method is pre-theoretical, but not at all pre-reflective, in the way Haidt’s definition supposes; it may rest on various forms of reasoning short of systematic derivation from theoretical principles. I go on to take issue with Haidt’s dismissal of ex post facto moral reasoning, arguing that it can play both a causal role in an individual’s later intuitions or judgments and a legitimate normative role, as required by moral competence in judging non-taboo cases. I suggest that the move from intuition to judgment and thence to ex post facto reasoning makes sense as a justificatory version of Peircean abduction, or what is now mainly called “inference to the best explanation.”

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Notes

  1. Haidt (Haidt2001: 829, cf. 819) briefly recognizes a “private reflection loop,” and the term would accommodate what I suggest here, but on his account it depends on generating new intuitions—via role-taking, for instance—that contradict our initial intuitive judgments. In the loop I have sketched there is no opposing intuition, but just the realization that my intuition may not be an adequate basis for judgment. Haidt’s loop essentially would involve setting up a counterweight to the confirmation bias of post hoc reasoning: to confirm a judgment based on an opposing intuition would be to disconfirm the initial judgment. My own loop retains the confirmation bias but allows for later effects on judgment if an attempt at confirmation fails. In the painting case what seems to prompt my willingness to discount my immediate intuitions as merely personal is my awareness of a competing explanation of them, not competing intuitions.

    Haidt might also seem to have another way of accommodating my loop. He allows for private reasoning, even prior to judgment, in response to a weak intuition (Haidt 2001: 819), whether or not it faces opposition. So he might suggest that we should count an intuitive evaluation as weak wherever the subject recognizes a need to confirm it before definitely endorsing the corresponding judgment, even if the feeling that gives rise to it is and remains strong. He could then argue that my awareness that my aesthetic intuition may not actually track aesthetic value makes it weak. But limiting the point of private reasoning to weak intuitions would seem to be empty, if any intuition that we see a need to confirm by reasoning is ipso facto weak.

  2. See Paavola (2005) for helpful discussion of the evolution of Peirce’s views on abduction. Paavola argues for a distinction between abductive “instinct”and abductive inference, while acknowledging that Peirce never kept them distinct himself. In any case, I think one could still say that the product of the instinct—the hypothesis—becomes part of an inference or reasoning process once it is tested.

  3. For an extended account of this “best of a bad lot” objection, see Douven (2011).

  4. Rawls’s “practice” conception of rules is of course proposed for promising and punishment, not taboos. Perhaps what distinguishes taboos, on a rule-based view of this sort, would just be degree of stringency: how extreme cases have to be to warrant an exception. Note, too, that on a rule-based view it is possible that Haidt’s subjects’ disgust at the thought of incest was something they interpreted as a moral reaction only insofar as the reasons for the general ban on incest do make reference to harm (cf. Jacobson 2012).

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Acknowledgments

An initial draft of this paper was written while I was on sabbatical from the University of Maryland, College Park, in Fall Term 2011. It benefitted greatly from interaction then and later with members of an informal reading group on moral psychology, especially David Wasserman and Ryan Fanselow. I also owe thanks to Jerrold Levinson for discussion of the content of judgments of aesthetic worth and to Andrew Fyfe for sharing his expertise on Peirce. Further work on the paper was aided by presentation to audiences at the University of South Carolina and the Cogito Research Center of the University of Bologna, along with discussion of related issues in my graduate seminar on moral Intuitions at Maryland.

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Greenspan, P. Confabulating the Truth: In Defense of “Defensive” Moral Reasoning. J Ethics 19, 105–123 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-015-9193-6

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