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Deontology defended

  • S.I.: Neuroscience and Its Philosophy
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Abstract

Empirical research into moral decision-making is often taken to have normative implications. For instance, in his recent book, Greene (2013) relies on empirical findings to establish utilitarianism as a superior normative ethical theory. Kantian ethics, and deontological ethics more generally, is a rival view that Greene attacks. At the heart of Greene’s argument against deontology is the claim that deontological moral judgments are the product of certain emotions and not of reason. Deontological ethics is a mere rationalization of these emotions. Accordingly Greene maintains that deontology should be abandoned. This paper is a defense of deontological ethical theory. It argues that Greene’s argument against deontology needs further support. Greene’s empirical evidence is open to alternative interpretations. In particular, it is not clear that Greene’s characterization of alarm-like emotions that are relative to culture and personal experience is empirically tenable. Moreover, it is implausible that such emotions produce specifically deontological judgments. A rival sentimentalist view, according to which all moral judgments are determined by emotion, is at least as plausible given the empirical evidence and independently supported by philosophical theory. I therefore call for an improvement of Greene’s argument.

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Notes

  1. The switch case was first introduced by Foot (1978), the footbridge case by Thomson (1985).

  2. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a species of scientific neuroimaging. It implicitly assumes that active brain regions consume a comparatively high amount of oxygen, causing a change in blood flow, which in turn can be visualised through magnetic fields.

  3. Greene's initial hypothesis was that the two classes of dilemmas could be distinguished by whether they were ‘personal’ or ‘impersonal’. A personal dilemma leads to serious bodily harm of a particular person in such a way that it is not a result of deflecting a threat onto a third party (Greene and Haidt 2002, p. 519). An impersonal dilemma does not involve such a harm. However, the personal-impersonal distinction has been criticized by various authors (e.g., Nichols and Mallon 2006; Mikhail 2007) and finally been questioned by Greene himself (Greene 2007b, p. 108).

  4. Ironically, the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham seems to have been one of the first philosophers to use ‘deontology’ (Louden 1996, pp. 573–579). He applied it far more broadly than we do nowadays, sometimes as a synonym for ‘ethics’, sometimes as a synonym for ‘utilitarianism’.

  5. Greene would claim that, by targeting the former, he also refutes the latter. Whether this claim is correct is a question that has been addressed elsewhere.

  6. This argument is most developed in Greene (2007a), an earlier paper to which Greene refers in his book (Greene 2013, p. 381) for further detail.

  7. I thank an anonymous reviewer for clarificatory advice.

  8. I thank an anonymous reviewer for Synthese for helping me see this implication.

  9. A view on which the strength to which emotions influence a moral judgment determines its normative status would also have to explain how relativity to culture or personal experience should determine this influence on moral judgment. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point.

  10. There are others but I do not have the space to discuss them here. For instance, Nichols and Mallon (2006) take the view that moral decision-making is determined by rule-based assessments, regardless of whether these rules concern consequentialist or deontological considerations. Rules are supplemented by emotion and cost–benefit analysis.

  11. I thank an anonymous reviewer for Synthese for bringing the relevance of this literature to my attention.

  12. Strawson laments that “it is a pity that talk of the moral sentiments has fallen out of favour” (2008 [1960], p. 26), as he regards it as quite apt to describe reactive attitudes.

  13. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this objection and reply.

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Acknowledgements

This paper has greatly benefitted from discussions with Gunnar Björnsson, Josh Greene, Richard Holton, Gina Rini, and audiences in Riga, Granada, and Mainz, as well as from a debate between Rae Langton and Joshua Greene in Cambridge. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful feedback, which has to a great degree shaped and improved this paper.

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    Nora Heinzelmann

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Heinzelmann, N. Deontology defended. Synthese 195, 5197–5216 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1762-3

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