Question 2: What is a heuristic? What role, if any, do heuristics play in explaining ethical judgements?

Am I Ready for This Question?

Take a quiz to check whether you are ready to answer this question.

Hints

You almost certainly want to focus on the Affect Heuristic.

You are likely to want to focus specifically on ethical intuitions (as these are probably the only kind of ethical judgements where heuristics play a distinctive role).

Also check the glossary entries on inaccessible, heuristic, intuition, and track.

Follow the general instructions for Short Essay Questions.

Lecture Notes

This is not an exhaustive list but may help you if you missed something. The list may grow over the weeks as lectures are added. Consider also using the search function.

The following sections contain material relevant to answering this question.

Why Is the Affect Heuristic Significant?

Moral Intuitions

Moral Intuitions and Emotions: Evaluating the Evidence

Moral Intuitions and an Affect Heuristic

Reading

If you are following the lecture notes and seminars, you should already know what to read. You do not need to consult this list. This is only for people coming to the assignment without using the lecture notes (not recommended).

Sinnott-Armstrong, Young, & Cushman (2010)

Pachur, Hertwig, & Steinmann (2012)

Where to Find the Reading?

In some cases the references section already includes a link to help you find the reading.

If there is no link in the references section, start by searching for the title (and, if that fails, by title and authors) on google scholar. If this fails, the library has resources. If those fail, please check first with others on the course. If you still have problems, you may email your seminar tutor.

Glossary

Affect Heuristic : In the context of moral psychology, the Affect Heuristic is this principle: ‘if thinking about an act [...] makes you feel bad [...], then judge that it is morally wrong’ (Sinnott-Armstrong et al., 2010). These authors hypothesise that the Affect Heuristic explains moral intuitions.
A different (but related) Affect Heurstic has also be postulated to explain how people make judgements about risky things are: The more dread you feel when imagining an event, the more risky you should judge it is (see Pachur et al., 2012.

ethical intuition : See moral intuition.

ethical judgement : For a claim to be among a person’s judgements is for them to take it to be true. An ethical judgement is just a judgement involving something ethical. (Same as moral judgement.)

heuristic : A heuristic links an inaccessible attribute to an accessible attribute such that, within a limited but useful range of situations, someone could track the inaccessible attribute by computing the accessible attribute.

inaccessible : An attribute is inaccessible in a context just if it is difficult or impossible, in that context, to discern substantive truths about that attribute. For example, in ordinary life and for most people the attribute being further from Kilmery (in Wales) than Steve’s brother Matt is would be inaccessible.
See Kahneman & Frederick (2005, p. 271): ‘We adopt the term accessibility to refer to the ease (or effort) with which particular mental contents come to mind.’

intuition : According to this lecturer, a person’s intuitions are the claims they take to be true independently of whether those claims are justified inferentially. (Other sources may define this term differently.)

moral intuition : According to this lecturer, a person’s intuitions are the claims they take to be true independently of whether those claims are justified inferentially. And a person’s moral intuitions are simply those of their intuitions that concern ethical matters.
According to Sinnott-Armstrong et al. (2010, p. 256), moral intuitions are ‘strong, stable, immediate moral beliefs.’

tracking an attribute : For a process to track an attribute is for the presence or absence of the attribute to make a difference to how the process unfolds, where this is not an accident. (And for a system or device to track an attribute is for some process in that system or device to track it.)
Tracking an attribute is contrasted with computing it. Unlike tracking, computing typically requires that the attribute be represented. (The distinction between tracking and computing is a topic of Moral Intuitions and an Affect Heuristic.)

References

Kahneman, D., & Frederick, S. (2005). A model of heuristic judgment. In K. J. Holyoak & R. G. Morrison (Eds.), The cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning (pp. 267–293). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pachur, T., Hertwig, R., & Steinmann, F. (2012). How Do People Judge Risks: Availability Heuristic, Affect Heuristic, or Both? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 18(3), 314–330. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028279

Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Young, L., & Cushman, F. (2010). Moral intuitions. In J. M. Doris, M. P. R. Group, & others (Eds.), The moral psychology handbook (pp. 246–272). Oxford: Oxford University Press.