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Do Emotions Play a Constitutive Role in Moral Cognition?

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Abstract

Recent behavioral experiments, along with imaging experiments and neuropsychological studies appear to support the hypothesis that emotions play a causal or constitutive role in moral judgment. Those who resist this hypothesis tend to suggest that affective mechanisms are better suited to play a modulatory role in moral cognition. But I argue that claims about the role of emotion in moral cognition frame the debate in ways that divert attention away from other plausible hypotheses. I suggest that the available data may be more plausibly explained by appeal to predictive and evaluative mechanisms, which are neither wholly affective nor straightforwardly cognitive. By recognizing this fact, we can begin to see why questions about the role of emotion in moral psychology are likely to be empirically misguided.

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Notes

  1. Alternatively, the desire to avoid or reject disgusting stimuli may fade after distraction, and Schnall et al. (2008b) don't control for the time it takes people to wash their hands. Alternatively, as an anonymous referee notes, an embodied cognition approach may better accommodate these data. But as Rupert (forthcoming) argues, the most plausible approach to embodied cognition is likely to rely on multiple parallel processes, yielding a view that is roughly in accord with the view that I articulate in the main text.

  2. Strohminger et al. (2011) also found that people who listened to selections from Chicken soup for the soul were less likely to think it permissible to pursue aggregate welfare in moral dilemmas. I am unsure what goal listening to these clips would trigger, but it is conceivable that it would increase the salience of some values, which may lead to privileging norms against battery. The effects of mood induction are situationally variable, and Hunsinger et al. (2012) propose that positive affect is more likely to facilitate situationally dominant attitudes. However, the fact that the number of lives saved is presented as a situationally relevant should lead people to be (slightly) more accepting of an option that takes this into account, which is consistent with the suggestion I develop in the main text.

  3. This fact was driven home to me during a failed attempt to replicate the 'fart spray' study. I was working in a public space, and could not control for idiosyncrasies of personal history, or for stray assumptions about the experimental situation. But one of my participants asked me, in a thick Dorchester accent, “You know why it smells funny around here? It's usually nice, but it kinda smells like garbage”. The experiment was originally run on the campus of Stanford University, and I was running it on the Boston Common, in an urban area where noxious odors are common. My participants may have reflexively downgraded the salience of the desire to avoid and reject offensive stimuli, which would moderate the effect of the induction. Of course, it's hard to know whether my failure derived from differences in the experimental context, difference in participants, or whether it was an artifact of the complex nature of moral judgment. But this is precisely the problem I want to call attention to.

  4. A distraction task that requires participants to rate the pleasantness of a house decreases the likelihood of endorsing actions that use personal force or cause intentional harm, while counting the number of windows in that house has no noticeable effect on these judgments. Cummins and Cummins (2012) see this as evidence that emotion plays a role in moral cognition, but this difference is more plausibly explained by appeal to the enhanced goal of reporting reflexive evaluations after being told to make a reflexive judgment about a house. Since they did not use a manipulation check to confirm the presence of affect, these data cannot support the hypothesis that emotions are causally or constitutively implicated in the production of moral judgments. (Thanks to Nina Strohminger for helpful discussion of this experiment).

  5. In a second experiment they found no statistically significant effects for the 6 scenarios, and an effect for the pooled mean. I confine my discussion to the first experiment, though the extension to the second should be clear enough.

  6. The probability of finding a statistically significant effect as a matter of chance for a single test at α = .05 is approximately 1/20 in this case. Without adjusting for the number of levels in a factor, the probability of finding a statistically significant effect merely as a matter of chance for seven tests at α = .05 is (1 − (0.95)7), or approximately a 30 % chance of a false discovery. That said, the Bonferroni method is a highly conservative correction, and it can obscure real effects. I offer this correction as nothing more than a reminder that the data as analyzed cannot provide unambiguous support for the claim that emotion plays a causal role in the production of moral judgments.

  7. Some moral judgment tasks also reveal activity in other parts of the orbitofrontal cortex [OFC}, but fMRI introduces distortions near the sinuses, making it difficult to get clear data for this area; that said, it would not be surprising if OFC were active in the production of moral judgments (Cf. Landreth 2008).

  8. Impersonal up to 25.2 s, M = 4.7, SD = 2.98; personal up to 22.8 s, M = 5.2, SD = 3.27.

  9. Another recent study using Lateralized Readiness Potentials and a Go/No–Go task suggests that moral information is processed prior to, and independently of, disgust information. (Yang et al. 2013).

  10. In the ultimatum game, one player proposes a way to divide some money, while a second player decides whether to accept this proposal. If the second player rejects the offer, neither gets anything. People routinely offer fair splits (50/50), and routinely reject offers that they are too unfair (typically around 20–30 %). Cathodal tDCS over right dlPFC also reduces the likelihood of punishing someone who makes an unfair offer (Knoch et al. 2008) by inhibiting neural excitability, and decreasing the likelihood that this population of neurons will fire in response to the relevant stimulus.

  11. I cannot do justice to this interesting literature here. However, the depletion of serotonin triggers both increased impulsivity and an increase in the rate at which unfair offers are rejected. Serotonin innervates a network that includes the vmPFC, insula, and amygdala (Crockett et al. 2012), and both experimental data and computational models suggest that this network plays a critical role in comparisons between anticipated reward-values over various time delays (Daw et al. 2002; Rogers 2011); more importantly, it appears to play a role in pruning decision trees by eliminating options expected to lead to aversive outcomes (Crockett 2013). Serotonin does not so much promote self-control, as modulate the effect of predictions about aversive stimuli (Crockett et al. 2009; Dayan 2008). This is important because depleting serotonin modulates the impact of punishment-related and aversive signals, and yields an exaggerated aversion to stressful or threatening stimuli (Cools et al. 2008), and increasing serotonin triggers an increase in subjective disapproval for actions that bring about aggregate welfare in high-conflict dilemmas (Crockett et al. 2010b). In this case, serotonin seems to increase the salience of battery avoidance by up-regulating this task-relevant evaluative representation.

  12. It is often noted that frontotemporal dementia [FTD] yields motivational deficits, flattened affect, and an increase in the proportion of judgments based of aggregate welfare (Mendez et al. 2005). But FTD yields numerous processing deficits and widespread damage to both the frontal and parietal cortex, and this makes it unclear whether the flattening of affect is causally implicated in this pattern of judgments, or whether it is just highly correlated with it. Furthermore, the fact that disrupting the right dlPCF yields a similar pattern of judgments makes it incredibly difficult to interpret these data.

  13. There are obvious similarities between this computational approach and dual-process theories of judgment and decision-making. But whether the relationship is one of implementation will depend on the precise commitments of the dual process theory under consideration. Many dual-process models assume that the slow-processes operate consciously, while the fast-processes operate subconsciously and associatively. By contrast, model-based, model-free, and Pavlovian systems can all operate reflexively, and their outputs are often integrated in guiding behavior. Of course, there are dual-process accounts that allow for reflexive rule-based processing. I have a preference for the neuro-computational approach as it is more rigorously and formally articulated.

  14. For a very different argument for a similar conclusion, see Sinnot-Armstrong (2011).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 20057, USA

    Bryce Huebner

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  1. Bryce Huebner
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Correspondence to Bryce Huebner.

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Huebner, B. Do Emotions Play a Constitutive Role in Moral Cognition?. Topoi 34, 427–440 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9223-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9223-6

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