Moral Judgement and Moral Progress: The Problem of Cognitive Control

ABSTRACT

We propose a fundamental challenge to the feasibility of moral progress: most extant theories of progress, we will argue, assume an unrealistic level of cognitive control people must have over their moral judgments for moral progress to occur. Moral progress depends at least in part on the possibility of individual people improving their moral cognition to eliminate the pernicious influence of various epistemically defective biases and other distorting factors. Since the degree of control people can exert over their moral cognition tends to be significantly overestimated, the prospects of moral progress face a formidable problem, the force of which has thus far been underappreciated. In the paper, we will provide both conceptual and empirical arguments for this thesis, and explain its most important implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral progress
• moral psychology
• situational factors
• moral development

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers of this journal for constructive feedback on this paper. We also thank the audience at the 2020 Descartes Lecture at Tilburg University, and Clemens Stachl, for helpful discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Anderson (2014); E.g., Appiah (2009).

2. The claim is that making better moral judgments at least means to achieve what Moody-Adams has dubbed ‘local moral progress.’ Whether it also constitutes global moral progress, which indicates progress across (virtually) all subdomains of moral concerns and aspects of moral functioning, would require a more comprehensive treatment of the notion of moral progress that cannot be delivered in this paper (Moody-Adams, 1999, p. 169).

3. Recent forms of populism in public discourse seem aptly characterized by the view of moral progress at issue in this paper. The quality of public discourse starts to erode when people increasingly respond to illegitimate influences that sway their judgments instead of forming their beliefs based on processes that track the truth. For example, when politicians tout punitive tariffs, voters’ positive evaluation of the proposal is often guided by nationalist sentiments rather than proper economic analysis Caplan (2008). Similarly, when people consider immigration policies, their judgment is easily clouded by fear or group affiliation Achen and Bartels (2016). The problem here is not emotional influence per se; indeed emotions are required for sound judgment in very many cases cf. Roeser (2014), but that factors that have nothing to do with the truth cloud people’s judgments.

4. Do we see things differently, i.e., do we not see the irrelevant factors anymore, or are we just able to control for situational factors better? Both views are possible, and both are compatible with the view insofar as the moral judgment is ultimately correct. As will become clear in section 2, the empirical evidence suggests that people will have to control for situational factors, hence I will be talking of the control requirement.

5. Looking at the process-related conception of moral progress, we can distinguish two broad families of views: endpoint views and functionalist views. There are perspective-dependent criteria, too, of course, but here we will assume that they cannot deliver a viable criterion of moral progress. This is a controversial assumption, but one that seems warranted in the present context. To see why, consider a prototypical perspective-dependent criterion of moral progress: state A represents progress over state B insofar as A is preferred by some individual, or group, over B. The problem with such views is not (only) that they introduce a raging subjectivism into the notion of moral progress. The decisive problem is that they align progress with preference and the latter need not be fixed. Hence, state A does and does not constitute progress over state B, depending on the judging individual or group, which is not very illuminating. Apart from perspective-dependent views, there are then two main families of views about moral progress: end-point views and functionalist views.

6. Some authors have also mentioned quantitative criteria as a separate type of account of moral progress; e.g., Musschenga and Meynen (2017) Examples of quantitative criteria are the number of right actions or the increase of the correlation between moral judgments and moral actions. However, these criteria are only derivatively quantitative: they rely on a substantive criterion about the unit of measurement. We need to know, in other words, what right actions are to use quantitative criteria, hence they can be subsumed under substantive criteria.

7. The end-point view of course raises metaethical questions and appears to reduce to a questions about the plausibility of moral realism: are these moral facts compatible with an acceptable metaphysics and epistemology? The problems of end-point views are not, however, a concern of this paper.

8. Our conception of endpoint views is undemanding, for the purposes of this paper, as a concession to proponents of the possibility of moral progress. If only one individual’s correct moral judgments would already constitute moral progress, proponents of the possibility of moral progress have an easier case to prove compared to the (more plausible, but more demanding) requirement that a sufficient number of individuals must repeatedly and reliably make correct moral judgments across time. We return to this point in section 4 below.

9. To forestall the objection that agent-neutral reasons do not ultimately depend on a specific normative theory, consider that agent-neutral reasons exist only if you believe that the choice between saving your daughter or saving a bishop from a burning house just depends on the consequences of either act and that your personal relation with your daughter plays no role on this conception. Hence, Nagel is committed to a substantive normative theory, too.

10. There is a special problem for substantive views, of course, that has to do with incommensurability. The objective list views of moral progress that are exemplary of these kinds of views might indeed include values or aims that are positively evaluated by all moral theories; the question, of course, is whether all values can be realized to the fullest at the same time and what to do if value conflicts arise. Given the ongoing discussion of ethical dilemmas, it may be that proponents of substantive views have to settle for local views of moral progress since there will be incommensurability and dilemmatic trade-offs at the global level.

11. Thanks to an anonymous referee for prompting us to clarify these points.

12. The dilemma can be found in the supplementary material of Greene et al. (2001), available at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2001/09/13/293.5537.2105.DC1.

13. Greene emphasizes that these judgments are merely characteristically utilitarian; Greene (2014).

14. Of course, there could be a theory that explains why you should act in the switch case but not in the push case, but there is not.

Additional information

Funding

Michael Klenk’s work on this paper has been part of the project ‘Design for Changing Values’ that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No 788321. Hanno Sauer’s work has been part of the project ‘The Enemy of the Good’ that has received funding from the the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No 851043.