Why Is Moral Dumbfounding Significant?

Moral dumbfounding is used in a variety of philosophical arguments. Dwyer (2009) argues that moral dumbfounding provides evidence for what she calls ‘The Linguistic Analogy’. Prinz (2007) argues that moral dumbfounding supports the view that emotions alone, not reasoning, determines which moral judgements humans make. This section critically evaluates both arguments. Have their proponents understood moral dumbfounding?

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Notes

What Does Moral Dumbfounding Show? A Misconstrual

Dwyer (2009, p. 294) takes the evidence for moral dumbfounding to show that

moral ‘judgments are [not] the conclusions of explicitly represented syllogisms, one or more premises of which are moral principles, that ordinary folk can articulate.’

This is a mistake. The abstract for Haidt, Bjorklund, & Murphy (2000) states:

‘It was hypothesized that participants’ judgments would be highly consistent with their reasoning on the moral reasoning dilemma’ [ie. reasoning concerning the morally provocative and harmfull events].

And this is what those researchers found.

Moral dumbfounding is investigated a matter of degree: some dilemmas lead to greater moral dumbfounding than others (and which dilemmas lead to more dumbfounding varies from place to place, as McHugh, Zhang, Karnatak, Lamba, & Khokhlova (2023) show).^[1]

Another Misconstrual of Dumbfounding

Prinz, commenting on moral dumbfounding, writes:

‘If we ask people why they hold a particular moral view, they may offer some reasons, but those reasons are often superficial and post hoc. If the reasons are successfully challenged, the moral judgment often remains. When pressed, people’s deepest moral values are based not on decisive arguments that they discovered while pondering moral questions, but on deeply inculcated sentiments.’ (Prinz, 2007, p. 29)

From this Prinz draws a bold conclusion:

‘basic values are implemented in our psychology in a way that puts them outside certain practices of justification. Basic values provide reasons, but they are not based on reasons. ... basic values seem to be implemented in an emotional way’ (Prinz, 2007, p. 32).

Prinz appears to be ignoring a key feature of the experiment he is discussing: it is structured as a comparison between harmless and harm-involving cases where subjects’ level of dumbfounding differs between these (see Moral Dumbfounding). The evidence he is (misre)presenting as favouring his view actually challenges it.

What Does Moral Dumbfounding Truly Show?

The existence of moral dumbfounding shows that some moral intuitions (and thus some moral judgements) are not consequences of reasoning from known principles.

The existence of moral dumbfounding does not show that no moral judgements are consequences of reasoning from known principles. Indeed, reflection on moral disengagement suggests that this is false (see Moral Disengagement: The Theory).

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