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Psychology and the Aims of Normative Ethics

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Handbook of Neuroethics

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the philosophical relevance of empirical research on moral cognition. It distinguishes three central aims of normative ethical theory: understanding the nature of moral agency, identifying morally right actions, and determining the justification of moral beliefs. For each of these aims, the chapter considers and rejects arguments against employing cognitive scientific research in normative inquiry. It concludes by suggesting that, whichever of the central aims one begins from, normative ethics is improved by engaging with the science of moral cognition.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There is one sense in which no one doubts the relevance of empirical findings to normative ethics. That is in applying settled normative views to actual circumstances. Obviously psychology – and ordinary daily experience – can aid us in learning how to bring about the moral goals we have set, once those goals are already determined. What is at issue in this chapter is something different: Can empirical moral psychology play a role in helping to determine what the moral goals themselves ought to be?

  2. 2.

    Some clarification about terms: The use of “empirical moral psychology” is meant to be ecumenical, encompassing research by psychologists, neuroscientists, biologists, behavioral economists, sociologists, and experimental philosophers. “Normative ethics” refers to the branch of moral philosophy concerned with how we ought to live our lives, what things we ought to value, and what practical decisions we ought to make. This chapter does not discuss certain related topics, such as free will and moral responsibility, or naturalistic moral ontology.

  3. 3.

    The clearest statement of Kant’s view on this point comes in Book 3 of his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant 1785). Interpreting Kant is always a delicate matter, and there is not space here to fully explicate the interpretation given in the text, which mostly follows Korsgaard (1996a).

  4. 4.

    Kant (1785), Ak 4:389. Kant is quite strident on this point; he goes on to insist that an empirical approach to fundamental moral principles gives only a “base way of thinking,” “disadvantageous to the purity of moral themselves… a bastard patched together from limbs of quite diverse ancestry” (4:425–426).

  5. 5.

    Kant often certainly sounds as if he is making a metaphysical claim, where adopting the practical perspective entails denying that the world really contains deterministic natural laws. But this is not the only interpretation available. See Korsgaard (1996a).

  6. 6.

    (Korsgaard 1996b, p. 17). For a related discussion specifically regarding psychological findings, see Kamm (2009, p. 469).

  7. 7.

    Although objections to step (1) are possible, one might challenge the idea of agency itself, or at least the idea that reflective endorsement is a necessity for it. Doris (2009) makes an argument of this sort. Alternately, one might suggest that the connection between steps (1) and (2) is less clear. See van Roojen (1999) for an argument that the kinds of reasons relevant to moral agency do not map onto the kinds of motives discussed in psychological theory.

  8. 8.

    Similar comments apply to the phenomenon of moral disagreement. Knowing how and why people come to hold diverging moral views – between various communities (Moody-Adams 2002; Haidt 2012) or even within individual minds (Cushman and Young 2009) – might provide clues as to how to deal with them.

  9. 9.

    Piaget, in fact, aims his work squarely at addressing Kant’s challenge to empirical psychology. Piaget’s developmental account is explicitly intended to reveal the nature of moral agency (or autonomy). For a development of Piaget’s views on normative ethics, see Rini (unpublished manuscript).

  10. 10.

    (Kohlberg 1971, p. 224). For a critical appraisal of Kohlberg’s normative claims, see Goodpaster (1982). Kohlberg’s findings have also been criticized on empirical grounds, especially by his former collaborators (Gilligan 1982) and (Turiel 1983). For more recent work in the developmental tradition, see Rest et al. (1999) and Narvaez and Lapsley (2009).

  11. 11.

    The linguistic analogy has been criticized both for its normative claims (Daniels 1980) and its empirical grounding (Dupoux and Jacob 2007; Prinz 2008). For general discussions of descriptive interpretations of reflective equilibrium, see Scanlon (2002) opposed, and Rini (2011, Chap. 3), in favor. A closely related research program, focused on describing the causal role of intention-ascription in moral judgment, provides a detailed example of what careful empirical work can uncover (Knobe 2003; Young and Saxe 2008; Cushman 2008).

  12. 12.

    For examples of the linguistic formulation of the is-ought gap, see Stevenson (1944, pp. 271–276) and Hare (1952, pp. 17–55). Williams (1985, pp. 121–131) argues that the linguistic formulation does not clarify matters.

  13. 13.

    Flanagan 1993, p. 32. See also a related argument in Appiah (2008, pp. 22–23).

  14. 14.

    See also Gigerenzer (2008, p. 6) and Moody-Adams (2002, p. 140) for other applications of “ought”/“can” to limitations on cognitive or imaginative human capacities.

  15. 15.

    (Rawls 1971, p. 138). Rawls continued to draw attention to this role for psychological findings in his later work (Rawls 1974, p. 294, Rawls 1987, p. 24). Rawls’ attention to psychological realism has brought his method criticism as overly conservative, but an ought-implies-can argument like the one sketched in this section may actually show this sort of conservatism to be a theoretical virtue. See Rini (2011, Chap. 3).

  16. 16.

    Even Peter Singer, usually quite uncompromising about the demandingness of morality, allows moral theory to bend for certain psychological limitations. For instance, Singer notes that partiality toward family runs contrary to impersonal consequentialist theory. However, he says, familial partiality is so biologically entrenched that it is better to harness it – and so secure reliable concern for local welfare – than to attempt to fight it. See Singer (1981, pp. 33–36).

  17. 17.

    (Churchland 2000, p. 294). This negative argument is related, but not identical, to Horgan and Timmons’ (2009) frame problem, discussed above. For further related arguments, see Stich (1993) and Johnson (1996).

  18. 18.

    Rawls stresses that his method of reflective equilibrium is meant to operate only upon “considered moral judgments,” which are a class of intuitions rendered according to constraints like these. See Rawls (1951, p. 179) and Rawls (1971, pp. 47–48).

  19. 19.

    There is a difficult issue here about what type of norm plays this role: Intoxicated intuitions might be excluded on epistemic grounds (intoxication being though not conducive to truth in any domain), while the self-interest exclusion may represent a distinctively moral norm. But such issues can be set aside here.

  20. 20.

    It should be noted that in Haidt’s later work (Haidt 2012), he downplays the centrality of emotion and instead focuses on automated cognition. For critical discussion of Haidt’s view, see Pizarro and Bloom (2003); Kennett and Fine (2009); Liao (2011); Huebner (2011), among others.

  21. 21.

    See Greene (Greene et al. 2001, 2004) for the psychological background. For further discussion, see the references given in parenthesis (Singer 2005; Nichols and Mallon 2006; Allman and Woodward 2008; Kamm 2009; Kahane and Shackel 2010; Kumar and Campbell 2012). Berker (2009) offers a particularly comprehensive criticism of the empirical and normative aspects of Greene’s argument.

  22. 22.

    For more on moral heuristics, see the references given in parenthesis (Baron 1994; Horowitz 1998; van Roojen 1999; Kamm 1998; Sunstein 2005; Gigerenzer 2008; Appiah 2008). Sinnott-Armstrong (2008) makes a related, and still more ambitious, argument, claiming that the influence of morally irrelevant factors like framing effects or presentational order is so pervasive as to cast an epistemic shadow over all moral intuitions. This sort of argument is not unique to the moral domain – see Weinberg (2007); Alexander (2012, Chap. 4) for related criticism of the role of intuition in all areas of philosophy.

  23. 23.

    Many responses to the moral heuristics argument and Greene’s argument, including most of those mentioned in footnotes above, involve challenging their particular empirical or normative premises. Another response, suggested by Levy (2006), claims that a constructivist meta-ethic can immunize us to many of these challenges. If one holds that morality simply is whatever our intuitions (or some suitably restricted class of them) correspond to, then there is little danger of our intuitions turning out driven by “morally irrelevant” factors – the psychological findings will simply tell us what our moral beliefs have been committed to all along.

  24. 24.

    See Rini (2013) for discussion of a broader theoretical framework for arguments of this sort. Similar moderate approaches – sympathetic to empirical investigation, but issuing cautionary qualifications – can be found in the references given in parenthesis (Stevenson 1944, p. 123; Baier 1985, p. 224; Noble 1989, p. 53; Held 1996, p. 83; Appiah 2008; Tiberius 2010; Kahane 2013). But see Machery (2010) for a skeptical argument, accusing the moderate approach of circularity.

  25. 25.

    The contents of this chapter benefited significantly from discussions with Tommaso Bruni, Nora Heinzelmann, Guy Kahane, and Felix Schirmann, and from written comments by Stephan Schleim and an anonymous referee. This research was part of the project “Intuition and Emotion in Moral Decision Making,” funded by the VolkswagenStiftung’s European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences, and the Humanities (grant II/85 063).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Regina A. Rini

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  1. Regina A. Rini
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Correspondence to Regina A. Rini .

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  1. Institute for Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Jens Clausen

  2. The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

    Neil Levy

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Rini, R.A. (2015). Psychology and the Aims of Normative Ethics. In: Clausen, J., Levy, N. (eds) Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4707-4_162

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