A Social Model of Moral Dumbfounding: Implications for Studying Moral Reasoning and Moral Judgment

Abstract

Moral psychologists have recently turned their attention to a phenomenon they call ‘moral dumbfounding’. Moral dumbfounding occurs when someone confidently pronounces a moral judgment, then finds that he or she has little or nothing to say in defense of it. This paper addresses recent attempts by Jonathan Haidt and Marc Hauser to make sense of moral dumbfounding in terms of their respective theories of moral judgment; Haidt in terms of a ‘social intuitionist’ model of moral judgment, and Hauser in terms of his ‘Rawlsian creature’ model of moral judgment. I show that Haidt and Hauser assume that moral dumbfounding is to be explained in terms of features of a.) moral judgment that are b.) construed in terms of the intrinsic features of individuals. By contrast, I hypothesize that moral dumbfounding is to be explained in terms of moral reasoning, more specifically in terms of the social dynamics of such reasoning. Finally, I argue that this hypothesis points towards an externalistic account of both moral reasoning and moral judgment.

Keywords:

• Externalism
• Frank Keil
• Individualism
• Jonathan Haidt
• Marc Hauser
• Moral Dumbfounding
• Moral Judgment
• Moral Reasoning
• Solomon Asch

Acknowledgments

Thanks to members of an audience at the 2007 meetings of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP), at York University, Toronto, especially Fiery Cushman, for helpful discussion. Thanks also to at least one anonymous referee for useful comments.

Notes

Notes

[1]  In a recent study (2007), Hauser and colleagues directly assessed whether moral judgments exhibit features that are not found in conscious moral reasoning. Specifically, they found that moral judgments about hypothetical cases were sensitive to the principle of double effect, but that subjects’ explicit justifications of their judgments were insufficient to account for such sensitivity.

[2]  For discussion of psychological externalism see Wilson (2004) and Sneddon (In press).

[3]  Harman (1977, ch. 1) and Sturgeon (1984) are important treatments. See Miller (2003) for a useful discussion.

[4]  Neil Levy (2006) makes a similar point in a defense of Haidt's position against criticisms made by C. Fine (2006).

[5]  There is lots of work on moral judgment, and it is, mostly, reasonably construed as individualistic. Most significant are studies about the moral/conventional distinction. See Nichols (2004) for references and philosophical discussion and use of this tradition. Kelly et al. (2007) casts some doubt on this tradition.

[6]  The concrete/abstract distinction has been used in recent studies of attributions of moral responsibility: Nichols & Knobe (In press).

[7]  The person-situation debate was sparked by Walter Mischel's 1968 review of the literature on personality and action production in Personality and Assessment. John Doris (2002) presents and develops the implications of this debate for philosophical thinking about the virtues. A view of the debate from the perspective of personality psychology can be found in Funder (1999). Ross and Nisbett (1991) is a well-known view of the debate from the situationist side. Famous experiments in this debate are Milgram's (1963) studies of obedience, the Stanford prison study (Darley & Batson, 1973; Haney et al., 1973).

[8]  Pluralist accounts of moral judgment are currently emerging: e.g., Cushman et al. (2006), Greene et al. (2004).

[9]  Blair et al. (2005, pp. 57–59) offers a useful characterization of these tests. See also Smetana (2006, pp. 122–125).

[10]  Andy Clark's work is perhaps the most obvious and well-known example (e.g., Clark, 1997, 2006; Clark & Chalmers, 1998).