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Experimental ethics, intuitions, and morally irrelevant factors

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Notes

  1. Greene et al. (2009). The study offers a solution to the descriptive part of the trolley problem (which principles govern our responses to trolley scenarios?), not to its moral part (which responses are correct?).

  2. Greene et al. (2009, p. 365).

  3. Musen and Greene, MS; see Singer (1972).

  4. Uhlmann et al. (2009).

  5. For another study of this sort, see Gino et al. (2010).

  6. The moral (ir)relevance of intention, the second of the two factors identified by Greene and colleagues, is less clear (see Greene 2014, pp. 720–721). Note also that Greene and Musen’s study was challenged by Nagel and Waldmann (2013). They found that the apparent distance effect is really due to various confounding variables, such as informational directness, group membership and the relative efficaciousness of one’s helping efforts. But as Greene rightly points out, at least some of these factors are morally irrelevant, too (Greene 2013, p. 378).

  7. Greene (2016a, p. 176).

  8. See Berker (2009), Greene (2010, 2014), Kahane (2013), Kumar and Campbell (2012), Rini (2013) and Sauer (2012). I am not in this article concerned with the normative significance of experimental neuroscientific findings for moral theory (on this see Berker 2009; Kamm 2009; Königs 2018a).

  9. Note that Uhlmann and colleagues confirmed in a pre-test that ethnicity and nationality are typically not considered morally relevant.

  10. The distinction between these two types of intuitions is common in the literature, see e.g. Greene (2014, p. 724), Kagan (1998, pp. 13–14), Kamm (1993, pp. 5–7), McMahan (2013) and Sandberg and Juth (2011, p. 213).

  11. I am here expanding and, I hope, improving on previous characterizations of this type of argument (Berker 2009, p. 321; Kumar and Campbell 2012; Sauer 2018, p. 43).

  12. As previously observed by Kumar and Campbell (2012, pp. 317–318).

  13. At one point, Greene seems reluctant to explicitly endorse this assumption (Greene 2014, p. 713), but he has to if the argument is to be a precise argument from irrelevance against deontology. Due to the mentioned symmetry, he cannot attack the deontological intuition directly by claiming that it, but not the consequentialist response, is triggered by the irrelevant factor. For whenever our case-specific responses vary in response to an irrelevant factor, both responses are sensitive to this irrelevant factor. The deontological intuition is triggered by the irrelevant fact that the victim is pushed rather than killed by hitting a switch (or black rather than white). But the consequentialist intuition is likewise triggered by the irrelevant fact that the victim is killed by hitting a switch rather than pushed (or white rather than black).

  14. Greene (2010, p. 21), my emphasis.

  15. Greene (2008, p. 39). Elsewhere, he defines deontological judgments “as ones that are naturally justified in deontological terms (in terms of rights, duties, etc.) and that are more difficult to justify in consequentialist terms”, and consequentialist judgments “as ones that are naturally justified in consequentialist terms (by impartial cost–benefit reasoning) and that are more difficult to justify in deontological terms” (Greene 2014, p. 699). In this paper, I go along with Greene’s definition.

  16. Kumar and Campbell (2012, p. 318).

  17. Kumar and Campbell (2012, p. 322).

  18. Singer (1972) and Unger (1997). Singer’s argument may be an example of a successful precise argument from moral irrelevance. Surely, no one would want to suggest that we should resolve the conflict by concluding that we must not save the drowning child. See Campbell and Kumar (2012) for a related discussion.

  19. Unger has, however, “[i]nformally and intermittently […] asked many students, colleagues and friends” for their intuitions (Unger 1997, p. 31).

  20. Rini (2013, p. 267). Notice, though, that the morally irrelevant factors that Rini discusses also include factors that are external to the moral scenarios themselves, such as framing effects and psychological manipulation. I return to this point below.

  21. Unger (1997, pp. 11–12).

  22. See Bruni et al. (2014, p. 170), Ernst (2007, p. 136) and Kamm (2007, p. 417).

  23. Huemer (2005, p. 100); similarly DePaul (2006, pp. 599–600). Huemer points out elsewhere, however, that case-specific intuitions may eventually turn out to be more susceptible to debunking explanations (Huemer 2008, p 383).

  24. There is the third possibility of claiming that case-specific intuitions have priority over general ones. Preservationists like Frances Kamm are associated with this view. Ethical particularists, who do not believe in moral principles in the first place, are naturally inclined towards this view, too. While in principle conceivable, this would entail that arguments from moral irrelevance do not work at all, as they require that an intuition at a higher level of generality can override the case-specific intuitions. The third possibility is therefore not an option for proponents of arguments from moral irrelevance. These three ways of understanding the relation between general and case-specific intuitions are also distinguished by Kagan (1998, pp. 13–14) and Kamm (1993, pp. 5–7).

  25. Nye (2015).

  26. Singer (1972, p. 236). The principle Singer refers to is: “[I]f it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” (Singer 1972, p. 231). This raises an interpretative question: Is the duty to give to charity entailed by our obligation to save the drowning child and the moral irrelevance of spatial distance? Or is it directly entailed by the above principle (which would render the other argument obsolete)? I won’t address this interpretative question here (refer e.g. to Nye 2015, p. 630). Singer is inspired by Henry Sidgwick (1981), another utilitarian who favors intuitions at a high level of generality.

  27. Unger (1997). Another skeptic about case-specific intuitions is Shelly Kagan (1989, pp. 13–15, 2016).

  28. This is not to deny that there are many uncontroversial cases, in which Greene’s deontological/consequentialist distinction does not apply. He explains: “When it comes to uncontroversial moral questions, these terms have little meaning. Disapproving of child abuse is both ‘characteristically consequentialist’ and ‘characteristically deontological’, or neither—take your pick. […] These two ‘characteristically’ labels are not very meaningful outside the context of moral dilemmas in which considerations about rights and duties, at least superficially, appear to conflict with an impartial cost–benefit analysis.” (Greene 2016b, p. 179) But ethical inquiry is all about truly controversial questions that involve precisely such a conflict, and there are therefore plenty genuine ‘characteristically deontological’ intuitions that challenge consequentialism.

  29. Kumar and Campbell (2012, p. 313).

  30. See also Berker (2009, p. 325). Note that these intuitions possess independent intuitive plausibility, unlike perhaps the doctrine of double effect (Greene 2014, p. 721).

  31. Liao et al. (2012), Petrinovich and O'Neill (1996), Schnall et al. (2008), Schwitzgebel and Cushman (2012, 2015), Tobia et al. (2013a, b), Wheatley and Haidt (2005) and Wiegmann et al. (2012). In light of the replication crisis, findings like these should be taken with a grain of salt (see e.g. Landy and Goodwin 2015).

  32. As already mentioned, many but not all of the examples discussed by Rini (2013) concern external factors. On the unreliability of moral intuitions due to sensitivity to morally irrelevant external factors, see also Sinnott-Armstrong (2008).

  33. In fact, even Kamm, the leader of the preservationist camp, acknowledges, if only by lip-service, that a moral principle derived from case-specific intuitions may stand in need of further validation: We must “consider the principle on its own, to see if it expresses some plausible value or conception of the person or relations between persons. This is necessary to justify it as a correct principle, one that has normative weight, not merely one that makes all of the case judgments cohere.” (Kamm 2007, p. 5, see also pp. 346, 379). In practice, Kamm shows relatively little interest in whether a principle considered on its own is plausible (Nye 2015, p. 627).

  34. I am here bracketing the problem that intention does seem to be a morally relevant factor.

  35. Berker (2009, p. 325) and Königs (2018a).

  36. See again Campbell and Kumar (2012) for a related discussion.

  37. Greene (2014).

  38. See especially Weinberg et al. (2010), but also e.g. Kauppinen (2014, p. 295).

  39. Schwitzgebel and Cushman (2012, 2015), Tobia et al. (2013a, b) and Wiegmann et al. (forthcoming).

  40. Greene (2008, 2014, p. 718).

  41. See e.g. Uhlmann et al. (2009), Wheatley and Haidt (2005) and Wilson (2002).

  42. Greene (2008, p. 68).

  43. See Königs (2018b, pp. 388–389) and Mihailov (2016, p. 2).

  44. Greene’s argument from moral irrelevance is, however, only one of several different attempts to debunk deontological intuitions (see Berker 2009; Königs 2018a; Paulo 2019).

  45. On this see Königs (2018a, p. 197).

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the anonymous referee, Chiara Brozzo, Christian Seidel, Emilian Mihailov, Hanno Sauer, Irina Schumski, Katharina Brecht, Leo Menges, Michael W. Schmidt, Nora Heinzelmann, Norbert Paulo and audiences in Karlsruhe, Porto, Saarbrücken and Tübingen for their valuable comments.

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    Peter Königs

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Königs, P. Experimental ethics, intuitions, and morally irrelevant factors. Philos Stud 177, 2605–2623 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01330-z

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