Assessing two competing approaches to the psychology of moral judgments

Abstract

This paper brings together the social intuitionist view of the psychology of moral judgments developed by Jonathan Haidt, and the recent morphological rationalist position of Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons. I will end up suggesting that Horgan and Timmons have offered us a more plausible account of the psychology of moral judgment formation. But the view is not without its own difficulties. Indeed, one of them might prove to be quite serious, as it could support a form of skepticism about understanding our own motivating reasons.

Keywords:

• Haidt
• Timmons
• Horgan
• morphological rationalism
• social intuitionism
• moral psychology
• confabulation
• reasons
• deliberation
• skepticism

Acknowledgements

This paper was first written for the Illuminating Reasons Conference at the University of Arizona. Thanks to Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons for inviting me to present, and for their helpful feedback. Thanks as well to several anonymous reviewers for extensive comments. Work on this paper was supported by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Christian Miller, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and the Director of the Character Project (www.thecharacterproject.com), which was funded by $5.6 million in grant funding from the John Templeton and Templeton World Charity Foundations. His main areas of research are meta-ethics, moral psychology, action theory, and philosophy of religion, and he is the author of over 65 papers. He is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (Oxford University Press), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Happiness (MIT Press), and The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum Press), and is the book review editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy. He was awarded the 2014 Kulynych Family Omicron Delta Kappa Award for Student Engagement, the 2009 Wake Forest University Reid-Doyle Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and the 2009 Wake Forest University Award for Excellence in Research. He has two new books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013) and Character and Moral Psychology (2014), which together articulate a novel framework for thinking about character that is empirically supported by research in psychology.

Notes

1. In their book, Horgan and Timmons now call the view ‘chromatic rationalism'.

2. Haidt tends to prefer examples of moral judgments involving axiological categories such as good and bad, rather than deontic categories (see, e.g. Haidt 2001, 817; Haidt and Bjorklund 2008a, 186). Nothing will hang on this in what follows.

3. They also write that intuition is a “kind of thinking that is not reasoning, and in which emotion often plays a role” (2008b, 251). Elsewhere, Joshua Greene and Haidt note that,

These feelings are best thought of as affect-laden intuitions, as they appear suddenly and effortlessly in consciousness, with an affective valence (good or bad), but without any feeling of having gone through steps of searching, weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion. (2002, 517)

See also Haidt 2001, 818.

4. They clarify that a conscious process is a process which is “intentional effortful, and controllable and that the reasoner is aware that it is going on” (189; see also Haidt 2001, 818).

5. A quick note on the terminology of ‘principles’ and ‘reasons.’ Haidt often uses the language of reasons (see, e.g. Haidt and Bjorklund 2008a, 190; see also Sauer 2011, 709–711), whereas Horgan and Timmons prefer talk of principles (and reasons too) when formulating SI (Horgan and Timmons 2007, 280–284; Horgan and Timmons forthcoming, Chapter 1). There are conceptual differences between principles and reasons (see Horgan and Timmons 2007, 283 for some relevant discussion), but here these differences will not matter and so I will refer to both moral principles and reasons fairly interchangeably in what follows.

6. For recent interesting work, see Uhlmann et al. 2009. For early support, see Nisbett and Wilson 1977.

7. For additional details, see Horgan and Timmons 2007, 285–287. For more general discussion of morphological content, see Henderson and Horgan 2011, Chapter 7.

8. Haidt and Bjorklund (2008a, 212) seem to anticipate a view very much like morphological rationalism, but quickly dismiss it.

9. Here, I have in mind subjective rationality, or roughly the rationality of the process which leads to the formation of a token mental state. A mental state will be subjectively rational in virtue of being appropriately responsive to what reasons there are by the agent's own lights (whether consciously or non-consciously). This is to be distinguished from objective rationality, or roughly whether the mental state is appropriately responsive to the actual justifying reasons there are. Note that social intuitionism need not threaten the objective rationality of moral judgments. Even if they are not typically formed on the basis of subjective reasons, it is a further question whether they do or do not align with the agent's relevant justifying reasons. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing me to clarify this.

10. Following the previous note, it is important to reiterate that the focus is on subjective rational assessment, and on whether moral judgments would be subjectively rational. Haidt's view can allow for objective rational assessments and objectively rational moral judgments.

11. Building on the previous two notes, even though we are only focusing on subjective as opposed to objective rationality, these would still be welcome results if MR can secure them. To claim that we do not typically form moral judgments on the basis of what we consider (consciously or unconsciously) to be reasons, and to claim that much of the time the justification of our moral judgments is really just post-hoc confabulation, are highly revisionary claims. Thanks to an anonymous referee for comments here.

12. Of course, more needs to be said to motivate this maxim in the first place. And note that it is a ceteris paribus principle, and so Haidt could argue that there are other grounds for preferring SI over MR. Thanks to an anonymous referee for these observations.

13. For relevant empirical discussion, see Pizarro and Bloom 2003, 195. For a response, see Haidt 2003. For a review of research on conscious thoughts and behavior, see Baumeister, Masicampo, and Vohs 2011 and, more recently, Newell and Shanks 2014.

14. One response is to suggest that such principles can be called to mind because at some point in the past, they had to be learned and habituated so that they could function procedurally. See Sauer 2011, 717–718; 2012 for a suggestion along these lines.

15. See also Horgan and Timmons forthcoming, Chapter 6. For additional criticism of Haidt's evidence for confabulation, especially his incest case, see Railton 2014, 847–851.

16. For still other work that will not be considered here but which could provide similar challenges to Horgan and Timmons's approach, see the classic paper by Nisbett and Wilson (1977) as well as recent studies by Uhlmann et al. 2009 who draw on the motivated reasoning literature.

17. Even in the two friends case, Latané and Darley note that, “While superficially this appears as high as the Alone condition, again there must be a correction for the fact that two people are free to act. When compared to the 91% base rate of hypothetical two-person groups, friends do inhibit each other from intervening” (1970, 63).

18. For reviews, see Latané and Nida (1981) and Latané et al. (1981). In examining 48 studies, Latané et al. found that in group effect studies using confederates, 75% of alone participants helped, whereas less than 53% of participants in groups did. For group effect studies using groups of participants with no confederates, 50% of alone participants helped, whereas 22% of participants in groups did (1981, 291).

Garcia et al. (2002) even found that actually being in a group context is not necessary for a group effect to result; rather merely priming participants with the idea of being in the presence of others had a significant effect on dollars pledged using a charity-giving measure.

19. For additional studies, see Ross and Braband 1973; Latané and Nida (1981), 311.

20. For additional studies, see Gottlieb and Carver 1980; Schwartz and Gottlieb 1980; Latané and Nida 1981, 311; Tice and Baumeister 1985.

21. For additional studies, see Schwartz and Gottlieb 1980; Latané and Nida 1981, 311; Chekroun and Brauer 2002; Fischer et al. 2006, 268.

22. For additional studies, see Petty et al. 1977a; Latané et al. 1979; Latané and Nida 1981, 311, 313; Wiesenthal, Austrom, and Silverman1983; Chekroun and Brauer 2002, 855.

23. Petty et al. 1977a, for instance, found a decrease in willingness to take coupons for a free burger in group rather than alone contexts.

Matters are more complex than the above makes it seem, as there are group effect studies in which helping is not inhibited, or if it is, it is not inhibited to nearly the same extent as the studies above found. For more extensive discussion, see Miller 2013, Chapter 6.

24. As Milgram wrote in an earlier paper, “The person brings to the laboratory enduring dispositions toward authority and aggression  …  ” (1965, 73).

25. See also Nisbett and Wilson 1977, 241, who cite the group effect research in the context of making similar points to what follows.

26. For related discussion, see Sauer 2012. And it is worth noting that these dispositions can involve some morally appropriate sensitivities. For instance, a disposition to help in order to preserve a good mood, could be bound up both with an appreciation of the importance of a good mood, as well as with the importance of helping rather than ridiculing another person. Still, though, helping which is motivated only by such a disposition would not be considered virtuous or morally admirable on most approaches in moral theory. Thanks to Peter Railton for pointing this out to me.

27. For a similar concern, see Doris 2002, 139. For related discussion, see Brink 2013, 142 and, in psychology, the very interesting studies and relevant discussion in Uhlmann et al. 2009, especially 489.

28. For a similar idea in the psychological literature, see Nisbett and Wilson 1977, 233.