See also a second post in this series here: What Does Normativity Add to Moral Discourse? and a third post here: Why Insights in Evolutionary Moral Psychology Help Resolve Long-Standing Meta-Ethical Questions.
Early last year, Massimo Pigliucci posted a blog essay criticising aspects of cognitive and moral psychology, especially the latter. Pigliucci is a Professor of Philosophy at CUNY-City College and one of the most visible contemporary academic philosophers. He’s also a scientist, which is relevant to this particular issue. His post was inspired by an article by philosopher Tamsin Shaw. I’m writing this in response to Pigliucci’s post – rather than Shaw’s article – because I think he manages to condense the important criticisms, while also adding some useful analogies.
His main criticism is this: moral psychologists frequently make normative moral claims under the guise of science. The problem, as Pigliucci points out, is that this violates David Hume’s is-ought gap: no amount of knowledge about how people behave can lead us to derive how they ought to behave. The two are separate domains. What’s really happening, he suggests, is that moral psychologists are interjecting their personal moral beliefs, without acknowledgement, to bridge the gap.
Pigliucci isn’t just
pointing out a logical fallacy and warning about its potential to mislead
people, though. He’s also objecting to what he sees as an attempt by moral
psychologists to encroach on the field of moral philosophy. For Pigliucci, it
seems, the domains of descriptive and normative morality map onto the fields of
moral psychology and moral philosophy, respectively, and each field should
stick to its area of expertise.
***
Pigliucci draws on a
couple of analogies to illustrate his criticism. First, he contrasts a
mathematician with someone studying other
people doing mathematics. The latter can never replace the former, he
argues. He also draws on a second analogy: a scientific argument between himself
and a creationist. While both parties may engage in similar psychological
processes, there is a significant difference, Pigliucci argues: his beliefs
correspond with the facts.
These analogies illuminate
Pigliucci’s model of morality: normative moral statements are theories of a moral realm, just as
evolution and creationism are theories of the natural world. This implies two
things. First, that studying people engaging in morality, as moral
psychologists do, adds an intermediary to the study of morality. In other
words, moral philosophers study the moral realm directly, while moral psychologists only do so indirectly, through
other people. Second, some moral theories are truer than others, and moral
psychologists have no method of determining which ones. To do so, one must
study the moral realm directly and then compare it to various theories that
people hold.
On this view, of
course, Pigliucci’s criticisms of moral psychology make sense. No psychologist would
dream of proposing mathematical or physical theories based on cognitive studies,
so why should morality be different? Why do some psychologists think they can
derive morality from studying the human mind, but not mathematics or physics?
***
The answer is that it’s
not clear Pigliucci’s model is correct. In fact, Pigliucci’s model assumes precisely the thing that moral
psychology disputes, namely that moral beliefs are theories of a moral realm.
Jonathan Haidt’s work,
in particular, demonstrates the extent to which people’s moral views are driven
almost entirely by moral intuitions, and that what people think are moral deliberations are really rationalisations of these
underlying moral intuitions. The potential implication, although Haidt doesn’t
explicitly draw it himself, is that there is
no moral realm; humans trick themselves into thinking their moral beliefs
are theories of an objective moral realm, perhaps so they sound more convincing
to others.
Haidt’s examples of moral dumbfounding provide strong evidence
that rationalisation-posing-as-rationality works even on the subjects
themselves. (People wouldn’t be dumbfounded if they knew they were
rationalising.) This suggests, at the very least, that we should be sceptical of
our belief in a moral realm, however obvious it seems.
There is also a
different area of human activity that reveals a strikingly similar pattern:
religious mythology. Take the Jewish biblical prohibition on eating pork. Presumably,
this was developed as a social norm to avoid disease and/or to foster
community. But the Ancient Jews didn’t describe it as such. They described it
as a command from God. (And most likely believed that it was.) There are many
religious myths, across many different cultures, some much more elaborate than
this one. Which seems to demonstrate the propensity humans have for not only rationalising
their behaviour, but to believe the rationalisations they produce.
Consider how poorly a
model of moral beliefs as a theory-of-a-moral-realm seems to work here. Do we
really want to label the belief that eating pork is morally wrong as true or false?
That seems to completely miss the point. Surely a much better model would be
that the moral belief that eating pork is morally wrong is a codification of that society’s social
norms, embedded in a myth. In other words, the description is inward, not
outward. It just appears to be
outward. And that is essentially what Haidt is saying about individuals as
well. Our moral beliefs are descriptions of our moral intuitions, embedded in
rationalisation.
***
Morality-as-individual-preferences
is not a new philosophical view, it’s been around in some form since ancient
Greece. But the historical objection to it has been that it lacks the universality
that morality seems to have. This is addressed in the evolutionary aspect of
the work of Haidt and other moral psychologists. While a person’s moral views
are individual, describing his or her individual moral intuitions, those
intuitions have evolved to form universal modules, which can be acted on by natural
and social forces.
The benefit of this
theory is that it combines a form of relativism with a form of universalism.
Both people and societies can have different moralities, depending on their environments/experiences,
yet these can still be understood through a universal framework. This seems to
me to be a far superior explanatory tool to the view of morality as theory of a
moral realm. In that view, there really is only one degree of freedom:
ignorance. When dealing with different societies or people in radically
different environments, this seems hopelessly inadequate.
***
What are the
consequences of rejecting Pigliucci’s model of morality? Well, it reverses the
accusation. If we assume that moral deliberation is really a process of
rationalising one’s moral intuitions, as opposed to theorising about a moral realm,
then moral philosophers are actually doing
moral psychology. They’re essentially describing their cognitive state. The only
difference is that they’re doing it less methodically, and with a population
size of one. In other words, if moral philosophers are to stick to their field
of expertise – theorising about the moral realm – and moral psychologists are to
stick to their field of expertise –
describing how people engage in morality – there’s nothing left for moral
philosophers to do.
There is merit in
Pigliucci’s main claim, though. Moral psychologists clearly do make normative
moral claims on occasion. Since people have a tendency to produce normative
statements as rationalisations, that’s understandable. But it’s also a problem,
as normative statements can’t be logically derived from descriptive statements,
as Hume suggested, which harms the validity of the science. The solution, I think,
is to simply strive to avoid normative language as well as unacknowledged value
assumptions. It’s a question of precision.
Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDelete