Moral Intuitions and an Affect Heuristic

How, if at all, do emotions and feelings influence moral intuitions? And what do adult humans compute that enables their moral intuitions to track moral attributes (such as wrongness)?

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Notes

Our long term aim is to answer this question: [Question 1] Do emotions influence moral intuitions?

Question 2

What do adult humans compute that enables their moral intuitions to track moral attributes (such as wrongness)?

To illustrate the distinction between tracking and computing: a motion detector tracks the presence of people by computing patterns of infrared energy.

The Affect Heuristic

The Affect Heuristic offers an answer to Questions 1 and 2.

The Affect Heuristic: ‘if thinking about an act [...] makes you feel bad [...], then judge that it is morally wrong’ (Sinnott-Armstrong, Young, & Cushman, 2010).

Why is this an answer to Question 2? Because it says that humans compute how an act makes them feel in order to track whether it is morally wrong.

Compare: humans track the toxicity of potential foods by computing how smelling or tasting the potential food makes them feel.

What about Question 1? If the Affect Heuristic is a true answer to Question 2, then the answer to Question 1 is yes, emotions do influence moral intuitions. For it is by computing emotions that our moral intuitions track moral attributes. (This assumes that feeling bad is an emotion, of course.)

Note that we have not yet considered whether the hypothesis about the Affect Heuristic is true.

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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, Hertwig, & Steinmann, 2012, which is discussed in The Affect Heuristic and Risk: A Case Study).

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.’

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: OUP.