Abstract
Many philosophers assume that philosophical theories about the psychological nature of moral judgment can be confirmed or disconfirmed by the kind of evidence gathered by natural and social scientists (especially experimental psychologists and neuroscientists). I argue that this assumption is mistaken. For the most part, empirical evidence can do no work in these philosophical debates, as the metaphorical heavy-lifting is done by the pre-experimental assumptions that make it possible to apply empirical data to these philosophical debates. For the purpose of this paper, I emphasize two putatively empirically-supported theories about the psychological nature of moral judgment. The first is the Sentimental Rules Account, which is defended by Shaun Nichols. The second is defended by Jesse Prinz, and is a form of sentimentalist moral relativism. I show that both of the arguments in favour of these theories rely on assumptions which would be rejected by their philosophical opponents. Further, these assumptions carry substantive moral commitments and thus cannot be confirmed by further empirical investigation. Because of this shared methodological assumption, I argue that a certain form of empirical moral psychology rests on a mistake.
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Notes
I am not the first person to claim that neuroscientific evidence contributes little to philosophical debates because of the weighted assumptions that must be taken on by any individual who hopes to engage in empirically-informed philosophy. Selim Berker, for example, has argued, contra claims made by Peter Singer and Joshua Greene, that neuroscientific evidence makes little contribution to debates over normative ethical theories. As Berker puts it, “once we separate the bad arguments for why Greene et al.’s empirical research has normative implications from the better arguments for that conclusion, we can see that the neuroscientific results are actually doing no work in those better arguments” (Berker 2009, p. 294). While I agree with many of Berker’s claims on this point, my arguments have a very different target. I am not primarily arguing against empirically-informed attempts to refute normative theories like utilitarianism or deontology, but rather attempts to empirically confirm putatively metaethical theories about the psychological nature of moral judgments.
While neither Prinz nor Nichols provide us with a rigorous definition of what they mean by the term ‘empirical,’ it is, I believe, fair to attribute to them both a ‘disciplinarian’ view, according to which empirically-confirmable hypotheses are the class of hypotheses that are confirmed or disconfirmed by the performance of controlled experiments of the sort performed by psychologists and other natural and social scientists. The comments cited in the following paragraphs are all consistent with this attribution, and many of them seem to support it. I therefore attribute the following assumption to both of these philosophers: empirical evidence is the sort of evidence that is discovered by academics and other researchers who work in the natural and social sciences.
Nicholas Southwood has described three different possible characterizations of conventional normative judgments. Turiel seems to be an adherent of several of these versions of the moral/conventional distinction. He seems to be a proponent of the “form view” insofar as he sometimes explicates the distinction in terms of “formal properties of the principles that figure in the judgments” (Southwood 2011, p. 5), such as scope. Turiel also seems to be committed to the “content view,” which explicates the distinction in terms of “the content or substantive character of the principles, that is, the kinds of actions they require: whether they require us to aid the destitute, refrain from killing, or pass the port to the left” (ibid., p. 10). Finally, Southwood characterizes the “grounds view” as the thesis that conventional normative judgments are those normative judgments for which “social practices are part of what is grounding the judgments” (ibid., p. 14). Some of Turiel’s comments also seem to be in line with this understanding of the distinction.
I should note that this conclusion is not meant to imply either the truth of neosentimentalism or the falsity of the moral/conventional distinction. Southwood, for example, has offered compelling arguments in favour of a particular understanding of the distinction, and nothing I say here is meant to refute his claims. His arguments, however, do not aim to vindicate the distinction by appealing to empirical evidence, but rather aim to “provide a philosophical account of the commonsensical distinction between moral judgments and conventional normative judgments” (Southwood 2011, p. 39). In doing so, he appeals to many moral intuitions about, for example, what kinds of considerations serve to justify moral judgments (ibid., p. 38). My claim here is that empirical evidence is not sufficient to confirm or disconfirm any characterization of the distinction between the moral and the conventional, as empirically-informed arguments of this sort beg the question against alternative theories.
Note that Prinz does not reject traditional philosophical methods, but rather claims that they gain epistemic merit only insofar as they approximate rigorous empirical investigation: “I do not reject traditional philosophical methods, such as conceptual analysis. Indeed, I think that conceptual analysis is an empirical method in some sense: a kind of lexical semantics achieved by means of careful introspection. I think that method often bears fruit, but sometimes introspections clash or fail to reveal the structure of our concepts. So it is helpful to find other methods to help adjudicate between competing philosophical theories” (Prinz 2007a, p. 9). Regardless of the fact that Prinz wants to make room for traditional philosophical methods, it is still fair to attribute him the view that all legitimate modes of inquiry are empirical, and the view that the methods used by natural and social scientists are epistemically superior to conceptual analysis.
Richard Joyce, for example, writes that the open question argument is “based on the confused views of necessity, a prioricity, and analyticity that dogged early-twentieth-century philosophy and weren’t straightened out until the middle of the century” (Joyce 2006, p. 152). A similar argument has been put forward by Harman (1977, p. 19). The decisiveness of counter-arguments of this style has been challenged by Ball (1988).
The fact that “ethics is a branch of philosophy” leads Shafer-Landau to the conclusion that “the conditions under which actions are right, and motives and characters good, aren’t confirmed by the folks with lab coats. They are confirmed, if at all, by those who think philosophically” (Shafer-Landau 2006, p. 217).
Darwall et al. (1992) for example, explain the ‘open feel’ of moral definitions by appealing to a “conceptual link with the guidance of action, a link exploited whenever we gloss the open question ‘Is P really good?’ as ‘Is it clear that, other things equal, we really ought to, or must, devote ourselves to bringing about P?’” (Darwall et al. 1992, p. 117). This view explains the ‘open feel’ of moral questions by claiming that moral propositions (e.g., ‘only pleasure is good’) are best understood as being about what one ought to do (promote pleasure). This analysis relies on a thesis commonly referred to as either internalism about reasons, or moral rationalism. The most perspicuous version of this thesis was articulated by Sergio Tenenbaum, who understands it as a disjunction of the following two theses: “(1), Reason-Giving (Judgment) Assumption: If one accepts that X is morally right, one thereby accepts that there is a reason to do X, and (2) Reason-Giving (Existence) Assumption: If X is morally right, then there is a reason to do X” (Tenenbaum 2000, p. 109).
While I find Shafer-Landau’s arguments persuasive, I do not wish to rely too heavily on it for my purposes. This is because it is not obvious how we ought to understand the nature of philosophy and the relationship between philosophical work and the natural sciences. Prinz would likely reject some aspects of Shafer-Landau’s assumptions about the a priori status of philosophy, so beginning with the assumption that Shafer-Landau is correct may lead me to beg the question against naturalists like Prinz. Similarly, some reductive naturalists reject the argument from internalism about reasons (Railton 1986, pp. 166–167). Since at least some advocates of the reduction of the moral to the natural reject the reason-giving assumption, it would be preferable if we could avoid using this assumption as a premise.
I include this last element, the norms of belief-formation, because some critics have suggested that a failure to include this element is a weakness of other versions of this argument (specifically Railton 1986). Railton’s statement of the argument is as follows: “two individuals who differ in ultimate values could, without manifesting any rational defect, hold fast to their conflicting values in the face of any amount of argumentation or evidence” (Railton 1986, p. 166). Railton’s counterargument turns on the claim that belief-formation is a practice that also requires some basic agreement about the values and norms that govern scientific inquiry. Two individuals could therefore disagree over the norms of belief-formation without manifesting any rational defect. A consequence Railton draws from this is that there is nothing distinctive about morality in this respect. However, my argument in this section does not preclude the possibility that belief-formation is normative and practical in the ways Railton suggests. The point I wish to emphasize is that any two individuals can agree on all definitions, empirical evidence and the norms that govern scientific and ethical belief-formation and yet still meaningfully disagree about a moral matter of fact, whereas the same is not true for disagreements about naturalistic facts. I will argue for this last claim in the paragraphs that follow.
I will discuss how Gibbard uses this term, and how I understand it, below.
For a succinct summary of the debate regarding species in the philosophical literature, see Pigliucci and Kaplan (2006, pp. 214–217).
The former defines ‘right’ in the relevant sense in the following way: “That which is consonant with justice, goodness, or reason; something morally or socially correct, just, or honourable.” The latter defines the same term in the following way: “Being in accordance with what is just, good, or proper.”
In addition to Moore and Gibbard, Toulmin (1950), for example, writes, that “even if there is neither deception nor defect on either side, even if both parties are fully informed about the case and both mean the same by ‘good’ and ‘right’, it still makes sense to inquire whether their moral judgments are in fact the same” (Toulmin 1950, p. 20).
One potential objection to this claim and the ‘What’s at issue?’ argument runs as follows: It may be true that, given the definitions and empirical observations provided above, distinctively moral disagreements like those described do not cause bafflement in most conversational contexts. However, this may not be the case for all possible definitions. For example, if the two interlocutors in the example above accepted a utilitarian definition and thus defined the word ‘right’ as meaning “produces the most happiness,” these individuals arguably could not continue to disagree about the rightness of having an abortion without the resulting disagreement being baffling. The conclusion of this argument would be that I have cherry-picked definitions in order to make the disagreements in question seem particularly intuitive. Fortunately, this argument does not pose a significant challenge to the WA. This is because the WA is attempting to make a general claim about very common moral experiences, concepts, and terms that nearly all people could accept. Proponents of the WA are not interested in determining what the intuitive consequences of endorsing different definitions would be, as the argument is making claims only about the concepts, definitions, and disagreements that many people do, in fact, have. Consider the following analogy: If some people endorsed the following definition of horse: “the best creature on Earth,” then it would no longer be baffling that people could agree on definitions, empirical observations, and norms of belief formation while still disagreeing about whether or not a given entity is a horse. Nonetheless, since this is not a viable definition of ‘horse,’ we still have good reason to conclude that disagreements like that in the controversial horse case I describe above are, in fact, baffling. Similarly, the fact that endorsing different definitions and concepts would result in a different intuitive response to disagreements about rightness does not show that actual moral disagreements (where the disagreement cannot be explained as being about some non-moral matter) are baffling.
This way of putting the conclusion may suggest the following criticism: it seems that there are at least some instances where empirical evidence plays some role in determining the status of a moral proposition and can at least partially disconfirm a moral proposition. For example, the proposition ‘Bill is a morally repugnant individual’ could be disconfirmed if we learn, purely empirically, that Bill does not have any of the character traits that we identify as necessary for someone to be considered a morally repugnant individual. Have we not just disconfirmed a moral proposition with empirical evidence? My response to this falls into two parts. First, we did not disconfirm this proposition by only appealing to empirical evidence. Without an account of what traits are morally repugnant, we would not be able to disconfirm this proposition. Similarly, we cannot disconfirm any moral proposition without the addition of similar moral content. So my conclusion that the theses supported by Prinz and Nichols cannot be reduced to, identified with, or considered equivalent to moral propositions still stands. Furthermore, my argument in this paper is that the philosophical debates Nichols and Prinz are engaged in do not benefit from the inclusion of the empirical evidence they cite. The analogy to the Bill case would be that the philosophers are not disagreeing over any empirical observations of what Bill has done, but rather are disagreeing about the nature of moral repugnance. Further empirical inquiries into Bill’s character and behaviour will not help the interlocutors resolve their disagreement over whether or not Bill is repugnant. This, I argue, is similar to the state of the philosophical debates Prinz and Nichols are involved in.
Second, it may be true that some moral propositions rely for their confirmation or disconfirmation on both moral and empirical premises, but this is not true for all moral propositions. There are particular moral facts that depend on both empirical and moral propositions for their confirmation (like ‘Bill is a morally repugnant individual’), and there are also generalizable moral principles that do not (like ‘All and only actions that maximize utility are morally right’). I cannot see any way that this latter type of proposition (moral principles) could be even partially disconfirmed by empirical evidence. Since Prinz and Nichols’s theories about the nature and content of moral judgment (Nichols’s characterization of the distinction between convention and morality, and Prinz’s relativism) are far more like the former than the latter, my objections to their projects survive this response.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Anthony Skelton, Carolyn McLeod, Andrew Botterell, Sergio Tenenbaum, Charles Jones, Allan Gibbard, Katy Fulfer, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
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Clipsham, P. Does empirical moral psychology rest on a mistake?. Philos Stud 170, 215–233 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0208-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0208-5