Abstract
According to rationalism regarding the psychology of moral judgment, people’s moral judgments are generally the result of a process of reasoning that relies on moral principles or rules. By contrast, intuitionist models of moral judgment hold that people generally come to have moral judgments about particular cases on the basis of gut-level, emotion-driven intuition, and do so without reliance on reasoning and hence without reliance on moral principles. In recent years the intuitionist model has been forcefully defended by Jonathan Haidt. One important implication of Haidt’s model is that in giving reasons for their moral judgments people tend to confabulate – the reasons they give in attempting to explain their moral judgments are not really operative in producing those judgments. Moral reason-giving on Haidt’s view is generally a matter of post hoc confabulation. Against Haidt, we argue for a version of rationalism that we call ‘morphological rationalism.’ We label our version ‘morphological’ because according to it, the information contained in moral principles is embodied in the standing structure of a typical individual’s cognitive system, and this morphologically embodied information plays a causal role in the generation of particular moral judgments. The manner in which the principles play this role is via ‘proceduralization’ – such principles operate automatically. In contrast to Haidt’s intuitionism, then, our view does not imply that people’s moral reason-giving practices are matters of confabulation. In defense of our view, we appeal to what we call the ‘nonjarring’ character of the phenomenology of making moral judgments and of giving reasons for those judgments.
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Notes
The other main question in moral psychology (according to Haidt and Bjorklund 2007) is ‘Where do moral beliefs and motivations come from?’ – a question about how humans come to acquire a moral outlook. In response to this question, they discuss empiricist, rationalist, and moral sense theories, and favor a Humean moral sense view. See also Haidt and Joseph (2004).
It is important to note that both rationalist and intuitionist views do (or may) countenance the same sorts of psychological elements that figure into people’s moral psychology. These elements include: various emotions (e.g., disgust, anger), intuitions, moral judgments, and moral reasoning. The difference between these views is how these elements are typically involved in producing moral judgments. According to the rationalist, moral reasoning is at the center of the process, and so it is the proper focus of research in moral psychology. Intuitionism, by contrast, puts primary emphasis on moral intuitions and less emphasis on moral reasoning as a primary focus of research on the production of people’s moral judgments. According to Haidt and Bjorklund, then, the difference between these views is one of emphasis: “Rationalists say the real action is in reasoning; intuitionists say it’s in quick intuitions, gut feelings and moral emotions” (2007).
Haidt does allow an important role in his SIM for moral reasoning (see especially Haidt 2003), but it typically takes place in inter-personal social contexts (hence, the ‘social’ aspect of the model). Haidt again:
The core of the [social intuitionist] model gives moral reasoning a causal role in moral judgment but only when reasoning runs through other people. It is hypothesized that people rarely override their initial intuitive judgments just by reasoning privately to themselves because reasoning is rarely used to question one’s own attitudes or beliefs. (Haidt 2001, p. 819).
So, it is important to notice that the present issue regarding the roles of principles in moral psychology is distinct from (and largely orthogonal to) philosophical issues concerning the metaphysics and epistemology regarding moral principles. Thus, even if one is a metaphysical holist about moral reasons and so, along with Jonathan Dancy (2004) and David McNaughton (1988), denies that there are any considerations that are invariant in their moral relevance, and even if one is an epistemological particularist (Garfield 2000) and denies that moral principles are first in the order of moral justification and knowledge, one can still allow that moral principles (understood as generalizations) might still play the sort of guiding role via proceduralization that we explain in the next section.
It is worth noting that it is possible (and we think plausible) to accept the idea that moral principles do contain a ‘certeris paribus’ clause, even though the morally relevant features mentioned in such principles can be silenced and reversed, and hence need not be invariant in their relevance or valence.
At any rate, it is obviously ready for use if it is occurrently tokened in a suitable way. Insofar as one construes human cognition on the model of a computer (a Von Neumann machine), one might think of such suitable tokening as occurring within the central processing unit, and not just in the cognitive system’s memory banks.
As we explain in the next section, there are other dispositions characteristic of possessing a moral principle morphologically.
Are such explanations of moral judgments in terms of morphologically possessed moral principles in danger of being trivial? One way in which this triviality worry might be pressed is by noting that in every case in which someone comes to have or make a moral judgment, it is trivially true that there is a moral principle that can be invoked to help explain the particular judgment. After all, in coming to hold a moral judgment about a particular case in which the judger is responding to some particular set of perhaps very complex circumstances, it will be possible in principle to formulate a very specific moral ‘generalization’ that specifies in its antecedent as much information as you please about the factual details of the case (the circumstances and action) and specifies in its consequent the moral feature or property being attributed by the judger to the specific act token described in the antecedent. So, according to this conception of a moral principle, it is completely trivial that moral principles are part of the explanation of a person’s particular moral judgments. And so it would be if one conceives of moral principles in this way. We don’t. Rather, we have in mind explanatorily interesting moral generalizations that are suitable for helping to explain a robust range of actual and counterfactual judgments a person is disposed to make. For instance, there is considerable empirical evidence that people attribute moral responsibility to agents whose actions produce harm to someone based on a principle that takes into consideration such factors as intention, negligence, recklessness, and foresight. A person is not held morally responsible if the harm caused was accidental (without intention, negligence, recklessness) or done involuntarily (e.g., under duress) or without foresight of the resulting harm. (On this matter, see Darley and Schultz 1990.) And it is a genuine non-trivial matter, according to this conception of moral principles, to appeal to such generalizations, whether consciously or unconsciously operative, in explaining people’s moral judgments.
Admittedly, one possibility is that the rules of grammar are explicitly represented unconsciously during language processing, and that the exercise of grammatical competence during speech production and speech recognition is a matter of unconscious, extremely rapid, application of these explicitly represented rules. But surely a more efficient and more effective way for language processing to work would be via the automatic guidance of proceduralized grammatical rules – say, via innate proceduralized rules of universal grammar together with learned proceduralized rules of one’s specific language. For a book-length defense of the claim that much of human cognition needs to operate procedurally (on pain of encountering computational intractability otherwise), see Horgan and Tienson (1996). This book includes a proposal for understanding procedurally-operative morphological content by appeal to the mathematics that goes naturally with connectionist models, viz., dynamical-systems theory.
Certain specific kinds of error or error-tendency might be an inherent product of a cognitive system’s competence, rather than resulting from breakdowns in that competence. (For example, perhaps an ideally competent human visual-perception system will be subject to the Muller-Lyer illusion, by virtue of the system’s innate cognitive architecture.) Clause 2 makes explicit that theoretical hypotheses about cognitive architecture are themselves subject to the DCBE maxim – i.e., all else equal, a hypothesis about cognitive architecture is better insofar as it does not attribute some systematic and pervasive form of error-tendency to the architecture itself.
On the phenomenon of thought insertion, see Stephens and Graham 2000.
This example is inspired by a scene from Ian McEwan’s novel Amsterdam (1999, ch. iii) in which composer Clive Linley is confronted with the sort of choice we go on to describe. In our story, Ian does the right thing; the incident in McEwan’s story might be called ‘Clive’s callousness.’
An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 2006 British Society for Ethical Theory meeting in Southhampton, England. We thank the audience at this meeting for very helpful comments. We also thank our colleagues Michael Gill and Shaun Nichols for their valuable advice and comments on this project.
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Horgan, T., Timmons, M. Morphological Rationalism and the Psychology of Moral Judgment. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 10, 279–295 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9068-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9068-4