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What good is moral reasoning?

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Abstract

The role of reasoning in our moral lives has been increasingly called into question by moral psychology. Not only are intuitions guiding many of our moral judgments and decisions, with reasoning only finding post-hoc rationalizations, but reasoning can sometimes play a negative role, by finding excuses for our moral violations. The observations fit well with the argumentative theory of reasoning (Mercier H, Sperber D, Behav Brain Sci, in press-b), which claims that reasoning evolved to find and evaluate arguments in dialogic contexts. This theory explains the strong confirmation bias that reasoning displays when it produces arguments, which in turn explains its tendency to rationalize our decisions. But this theory also predicts that people should be able to evaluate arguments felicitously and that, as a result, people should reason better in groups, when they are confronted with other people’s arguments. Groups are able to converge on better moral judgments. It is argued that reasoning and argumentation play an important role in our everyday moral lives, and a defense of the value of reasoning for moral change is offered.

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Notes

  1. Another possibility is that reasoning is supposed to be used when our intuitions are weak or non-existent. It is probably true that we use reasoning more when we have little by way of intuitive judgment, but even then, it is not clear that reasoning drives us towards better outcomes (Mercier and Sperber in press-b). In any case, such situations have received less attention in the moral domain and so I will not elaborate on this point further.

  2. One could say that both satisficing and the confirmation bias can be detrimental in formal contexts, from medieval disputationes to televised debates or some scientific meetings. There, one has an incentive to anticipate rebuttals and develop very strong arguments. But that is only because the emphasis is more on appearance, on never being shown to have made a poor argument (see Mercier in press-c). This type of context is presumably cultural, evolutionarily novel, and reasoning is not tailored for them—as shown by the fact that it takes special skills and a great deal of training to be able to perform even passably in them.

  3. Greene (2008) uses ‘confabulation’ to refer to stories people invent when they are unable to provide a genuine explanation for an event. A typical example is that of split-brain patients whose left hemisphere creates entirely fictional stories to account for behavior directed by the right hemisphere (Gazzaniga and LeDoux 1978). Confabulation differs from lying in that the confabulator believes her own story.

  4. People facing collective action problems also benefit hugely from group discussion (Balliet 2010, Janssen et al. 2010). While reasoning and argumentation are likely to play some role in this process, it is likely that the benefits of group discussion in solving collective action problems mostly result from the ability to make promises rather than from argumentation (Orbell et al. 1988).

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Acknowledgments

For their very useful feedback, I wish to thank Jon Baron, Nicolas Baumard, Roberto Casati, Vittorio Girotto, Jon Haidt and Dan Sperber.

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  1. Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program, University of Pennsylvania, 313 Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Hugo Mercier

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Mercier, H. What good is moral reasoning?. Mind Soc 10, 131–148 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-011-0085-6

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