The disunity of moral judgment: Evidence and implications

ABSTRACT

We argue that there is significant evidence for reconsidering the possibility that moral judgment constitutes a distinctive category of judgment. We begin by reviewing evidence and arguments from neuroscience and philosophy that seem to indicate that a diversity of brain processes result in verdicts that we ordinarily consider “moral judgments”. We argue that if these findings are correct, this is plausible reason for doubting that all moral judgments necessarily share common features: if diverse brain processes give rise to what we refer to as “moral judgments”, then we have reason to suspect that these judgments may have different features. After advancing this argument, we show that giving up the unity of moral judgment seems to effectively dissolve the internalism/externalism debate concerning motivation within the field of metaethics.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral judgment
• moral cognition
• internalism
• externalism
• metaethics

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. In support of this interpretation, see, Sinnott-Armstrong et al. (2012); Sinnott-Armstrong & Wheatley (2014)).

2. We owe this observation to Steven Stich. See his 2006.

3. For example, G.E. Moore (1903) held that moral judgments are true or false, but recognizing a moral truth was not like the recognition of other facts. He held that the moral goodness of something depended on “non-natural” facts. Mackie (1977) famously denied that there were any moral facts at all.

4. A large number of contemporary and near contemporary authors could be listed here as participants to these debates. For a start, see, Sayre-mccord (2014); Smith does a nice job of briefly covering the central debates within metaethics in section 1.2 of his (Smith, 1994).

5. Psychopaths are often used as a kind of counterexample to moral internalism because it is believed they can make moral judgments without being motivated. The following authors consider the possibility that psychopaths constitute real-life counterexamples to internalism: (Brink, 1986; Prinz, 2007); Kennett 2006, Matthews 2014, Maibom 2018, (Nichols, 2002, Sinnott-Armstrong & Wheatley, 2014; Smith, 1994).

6. For evidence and arguments that psychopaths are not in fact morally impaired, see, Aharoni et al. (2012), Borg and Sinnott-Armstrong (2013), Larsen et al. (2020), and Marshall et al. (2018).

7. Stich (2006) calls this the “elegant machine” view of morality. Kohlberg seemed to hold this view. As one example, in his (Kohlberg & Hersh, 1977) he says that studying moral development is “the analysis of developing structures of moral judgment, which are found to be universal in a developmental sequence across cultures” (p. 54, our emphasis). The study of the moral/conventional distinction also seems to presuppose that there is a significant distinction between the two judgment types to be studied. See for example, Nucci and Turiel (1978).

8. See C. Daryl (Cameron et al., 2015; Decety & Cowell, 2014; Greene, 2015a, 2015b; Cushman & Young, 2011; Schaich Borg et al., 2011; Young & Dungan, 2012)

9. Sinnott-Armstrong et al. (2012); Sinnott-Armstrong & Wheatley (2014)) review a variety of potential unifying features for moral judgment and systematically reject them. They also consider possible implications of the rejecting the idea position that moral judgments form a natural kind of distinct class of judgments. Our argument here owes much to their work.

10. Moral internalism may be interpreted as both a conceptual truth and an empirical one. For example, Smith (1994) defends a conceptual connection between moral judgment and motivation, while Brink (1986) argues that if it is even conceptually possible to unhook moral judgment and motivation, then the internalist thesis is defeated. Prinz (2007) Björnsson (2002) offer empirical arguments for internalism. Internalism has been defined in various ways; for an overview see, Smith (1994, chapter 3) and C.M. Korsgaard (1986).

11. It is entirely possible to reject a position on which cognitive processes must be rooted in physical properties in some fashion. Although many in the field have taken such a position, for the sake of space we will not engage with such views here.

12. See for example, Stangor and Walinga (2014, pp. 441–442); Prinz (2007, pp. 17–18).

13. For an example, see, Shafer-Landau (2000, p. 271). Assuming that the externalist believes that beliefs must have some kind of material component.

14. For a discussion of this point about the externalist’s commitment to an essential nature of moral judgment, see, Sackris (2021).

15. For example, C. M. Korsgaard (1998) and Cholbi (2009) argue that Kant misapplies his own theory to the case of the murderer at the door; Shue (1978) argues that there are no morally permissible grounds for allowing torture, but then ultimately concedes that in a ticking time bomb scenario torture might be permissible due to the sheer number of lives to be saved.

16. We might interpret Mill himself as defending a deontological position in On Liberty, although of course he claims his position is based on utilitarianism construed in the broadest possible way.

17. Or coordinated set of processes/faculties. For the sake of conciseness, we will use the phrase “process” or “faculty” with the intention of including the possibility that moral judgments are not made via a single brain process or faculty, but instead via some specific, coordinated set of processes or faculties.

18. Greene relied on the Trolley problem and Footbridge problem as first discussed by Thomson (1976) and Foot (1967) as the basis of his impersonal and personal moral dilemmas.

19. Barrett, Mesquita and Smith (2010) attribute a position like the one on which moral judgment is a monolithic entity with certain necessary features to what they call “essentialist” thinking. They identify two key problems with essentialist thinking: it creates the tendency to ignore context and it leads to naming phenomena with nouns instead of identifying them with processes. A greater attention to context and processes are exactly what we are calling for here.

20. Kumar argues for the unity of moral judgment despite his recognition of the fact that moral judgments appear to result from disparate brain processes. To his credit, he admits that “One general challenge that proponents of theories [such as his own] is to show that while the constituents of moral judgment are multiple, moral judgment is nonetheless unified” (Kumar, 2016b, p. 793). Kumar’s attempt to unify moral judgment despite these challenges is quite similar to Hare’s (1981), which Kumar readily acknowledges. For a critique of Hare’s position, see, Sinnott-Armstrong and Wheatley (2014, pp. 464–465).

21. Peter Railton (2017) also argues that moral learning and moral judgment are merely instances of more general cognitive faculties and that moral judgment is not the result of distinct cognitive processes. Although Railton characterizes Greene as giving a dual processes account of moral judgment, he seems to (by our lights) misinterpret Greene as merely aiming to account for moral judgment. On our understanding, Greene is giving a dual-process account of general reasoning faculties. Whether dual process accounts are generally good accounts of our reasoning practices is not our main concern here. If our reading of Greene is correct (which later remarks from Green, such as his [Greene, 2015b] seem to confirm), Greene and Railton are actually in agreement that what we call “moral judgment” is the output of a generalized reasoning faculty and not a distinct cognitive system. See, also McHugh et al. (2021) where the authors theorize that moral judgment is merely an instance of the general (learned) human ability to categorize things.

22. See especially Chapters 6, 7 of his (2012).

23. And, of course, there could be more. We don’t suppose that there are only two bases for what we refer to as “moral” judgments. We imagine that the bases are multiple.

24. See, Hare (1981); Kumar (2015)

25. For example, Stangor and Walinga define emotion as “a mental and physiological feeling state that directs our attention and guides our behavior” (Stangor & Walinga, 2014, p. 442) in their Introduction to Psychology. The modern sentimentalist tradition within philosophy can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century British Empiricists such as Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, David Hume, etc (Driver, 2013). For contemporary advocates, see, (Blackburn, 1998; Greene, 2013; Haidt, 2012; Prinz, 2007; Slote, 2010).

26. Prinz, for example, states: “If moral judgments contain moral concepts, and moral judgments have an emotional composition, then moral judgments motivate action, because emotions are motivational states. [Sentimentalism] entails internalism … ” (Prinz, 2007, p. 102). It’s not that simple of course – not all sentimentalist positions commit themselves to internalism. For example, Nichols (2004) view is slightly different from Prinz’s in that he sees morality as founded in rules, and those rules are rooted in human emotion. Slote’s (2010) sentimentalist account seemingly commits him to internalism in a similar fashion to the way that Prinz’s account does.

27. King (2018, p. 635) also makes the latter observation about her students and their reading of “Famine Affluence and Morality”. Greene discusses student responses to “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, however he reaches a different conclusion. He believes his theory explains why readers typically don’t judge that they ought to help the children of East Bengal (Greene, 2008, pp. 47–48). In my experience, however, and the experience of King (2018), after some discussion students do typically say that such individuals ought to be helped. Regardless of this difference in perception, what is significant here is that even when students do agree that it would be morally right to help such individuals, they almost never act on such judgments. For a discussion of internalism/externalism as it directly relates to Singer’s work, see, Sackris (2021).

28. Kumar (2015, 2016a, 2016b) is a notable exception.

29. Flanagan highlights the difficulty of defining morality and states “ethical relevance may turn up in unexpected places, and no beliefs or domains of life can be deemed ethically irrelevant a priori” (Flanagan, 1993, p. 17). Shafer-Landau (201500) does not believe “morality” can be defined, which would seem to imply that “moral judgment” is similarly undefinable. See his “Introduction”. Richardson (2018), in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on moral reasoning states “[W]e will need to have a capacious understanding of what counts as a moral question. For instance, since a prominent position about moral reasoning is that the relevant considerations are not codifiable, we would beg a central question if we here defined ‘morality’ as involving codifiable principles or rules”. Svavarsdottir admits that “it is of course notoriously difficult to say what distinguishes moral judgments from other evaluative or normative judgments” (Rozin et al., 1999, footnote 6). Dreier states “we should just admit that it may be vague whether a given judgment is moral or not” (Dreier, 1996, p. 411, n. 419).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Sackris

David Sackris is the chair of the philosophy program at Arapahoe Community College. He is also the book reviews editor for the journal Teaching Philosophy.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto-Mississauga with appointments in the forensic science and philosophy departments.