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Lecture 01:
Moral Psychology
\def \ititle {Lecture 01}
\def \isubtitle {Moral Psychology}
\begin{center}
{\Large
\textbf{\ititle}: \isubtitle
}
\iemail %
\end{center}
\section{Introduction}
Moral psychology is the study of psychological aspects of ethical abilities.
linguistic / mathematical / aesthetic /
This is a course about ethical abilities.
- act
- judge
- be open to moral suasion
- feel
- ...
What are ethical abilities?
ACT. These are abilities to act on the basis of ethical considerations,
as when you refrain from doing something because, as you later tell me, ‘it is wrong’.
JUDGE. These are also abilities to judge your own and other’s actions as morally right or wrong,
and to distinguish moral transgressions from conventional ones.
SUASION. And they are abilities to be influenced by others’ moral reasoning.
FEEL. And they are abilities to feel things like disgust or guit.
Note that we should allow that there is room for discoveries about which ethical abilities
particular kinds of individual possess.
For example, what ethical abilities do dogs have, or do humans in the first year of life have?
There is even room for discovery about the ethical abilities of adult humans.
Moral psychology is the study of psychological aspects of ethical abilities.
Similar questions could be asked about linguistic abilities, that is, abilities to communicate with words.
[psycholinguistics]
We can also compare ethical abilities to mathematical or aesthetic abilities.
While ethical abilities are in some ways more fundamental---because they explain the possibility
These comparisons are going to be useful in what follows. Because more is known about linguistic and
mathematical abilities, we may be able to use theories about these as a model for ethical abilities.
But this is a course about ethical abilities. Our main question is ...
Questions for this course:
What ethical abilities do humans have? What states and processes underpin them?
What, if anything, do discoveries about ethical abilities imply for political conflict, and what do they imply about ethics?
Structure of this course
Course Structure
Part 1: psychological underpinnings of ethical abilities
Part 2: political consequences
Part 3: implications for ethics
There will also be a little on the evolution, and the development, of ethical abilities along the way.
And we will also explore a little of the research on cultural diversity.
How to Use the Online Lectures
\section{How to Use the Online Lectures}
Watch with a friend, and talk
Components of This Course
\section{Components of This Course}
Assessed Work
long essay,
summer 2021
three in term-assignments
Formative Work
weekly seminar tasks on yyrama
in-lecture micro-tasks on zoxiy
events
seminar (to discuss what you wrote about)
live whole-class question session (ask questions in advance in the teams channel for live meetings)
Why Investigate Moral Psychology?
\section{Why Investigate Moral Psychology?}
\emph{Reading:} §Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. ‘Complex Societies’. Human Nature 10, no. 3 (1 September 1999): 253–89. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-999-1004-y., §Haidt, Jonathan, and Craig Joseph. ‘Intuitive Ethics: How Innately Prepared Intuitions Generate Culturally Variable Virtues’. Daedalus 133, no. 4 (1 September 2004): 55–66. https://doi.org/10.1162/0011526042365555., §Haidt, Jonathan, and Jesse Graham. ‘When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions That Liberals May Not Recognize’. Social Justice Research 20, no. 1 (1 March 2007): 98–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-007-0034-z., §Hamlin, J Kiley. ‘The Infantile Origins of Our Moral Brains’. The Moral Brain: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, 2015, 105–22., §Feinberg, Matthew, and Robb Willer. ‘From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?’ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 7 October 2015. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167215607842., §Markowitz, Ezra M., and Azim F. Shariff. ‘Climate Change and Moral Judgement’. Nature Climate Change 2, no. 4 (April 2012): 243–47. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1378., §Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Young, L., and Cushman, F. (2010). Moral intuitions. In Doris, J. M., Group, M. P. R., et al., editors, The moral psychology handbook, pages 246–272. OUP, Oxford., §Greene, Joshua D. ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive (Neuro)Science Matters for Ethics’. Ethics 124, no. 4 (2014): 695–726. https://doi.org/10.1086/675875.
Why moral pscyhology?
What led you here? Discuss with the person next to you.
Most interesting answers on a post it, stick them on the board
during the break.
Reason 1: it enables us to better understand human sociality
Modern humans
have recently (~10 000 years ago) begun to
live in societies roughly as complex as those of social insects
but cooperate with non-kin.
(~10 000 years ago, relative to the 100 000 years since they first appeared)
‘Humans are [...] adapted [...] to live in morally structured communities’
thanks in part to ‘the capacity to operate systems of moralistic punishment’
and susceptibility ‘to moral suasion’
\citep[p.~257]{richerson:1999_complex}.
Richerson and Boyd, 1999 p. 257
We can see how this might be true, in outline, by reflecting on something called ‘intuitive ethics’
Now we can get a sense of why
Richardson and Boyd might think
this by looking at in a very
brief and preliminary way.
One of the leading theories
about moral abilities.
So according to Hayden,
various collaborators,
including the anthropologist
psychologist Graham.
All ethical abilities rest on what they call intuitive ethics. The idea is
that there are five. Actually mainly maybe 4, sometimes 5 basic abilities
which are largely separate. And fairly primitive in the sense. That they
operate across a wide range of animals that have existed for a long time. So
these are abilities too. Respond to cases where there is harm or cases where
there is care to distinguish fairness from unfairness. To recognize ingroup
loyalty and also to be loyalty ingroup members in a way that you're not
loyalty out group members respect for authority, and in some cases. There is
thought to be. Abilities linked to purity and sanctity. Now, this last case
I put in brackets that I want to get out. That's pretty special case,
because you actually only find that in humans. That's a really interesting
one, because the theory is that they need for purity and sanctity arises.
Inhuman or prehuman history from people starting to have a heavily meat
based diet right without having the kind of immune systems that vultures
have, so it's very important that unlike a vulture, the human when they're
trying to wrestle the meat from the carcass, doesn't do what the Vulture
does, right? 'cause the voucher has this very special immune system that
allows to allow the vultures put its head up the anus, right? Then humans?
That would be extremely bad for them. So the thought is that and their
ancestors that evolutionary ancestors. So the thought is that they need this
kind of purity, sanctity ability that you don't see another animals which
don't have the same.
Background: ‘intuitive ethics’ \citep{haidt:2004_intuitive,haidt:2007_when} claims that
there are five evolutionarily ancient, psychologically basic abilities linked to:
\begin{enumerate}
\item harm/care
\item fairness (including reciprocity)
\item in-group loyalty
\item respect for authorty
\item purity, sanctity
\end{enumerate}
‘intuitive ethics’ (Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Haidt & Graham, 2007)
harm/care
fairness (including reciprocity)
in-group loyalty
respect for authorty
[purity, sanctity]
Haidt and his collaborators claim that:
1. that humans are disposed to respond rapidly to events evaluated along these five lines;
(‘We propose that human beings come equipped with an intuitive ethics, an in- nate preparedness to feel flashes of approval or disapproval toward certain pat- terns of events involving other human beings’ \citep[p.~56]{haidt:2004_intuitive});
2. the first four of these dispositions are all found in nonhuman animals;
3. that these dispositions have an evolutionary history;
4. and that these dispositions provide starting points for the cultural evolution of morality.
For our purposes, let’s suppose they are roughly right.
But let’s exclude purity
(which they regard as a relatively late phenomenon, possibly a consequence of
the socialization of dispositions linked toward s the shift to a heavily meat-based diet:
‘the human transition to a heavily meat-based diet occurred quite recently (1–3 million years ago; see Leakey, 1994). The move to meat, which may have included scavenging carcasses, coincided with the rapid growth of the human frontal cortex, and these two changes (meat eating and cortical growth) appear to have given humans—and only humans—the emotion of disgust (see Rozin et al., 2000). Disgust appears to function as a guardian of the body in all cultures, responding to elicitors that are biologically or cul- turally linked to disease transmission (feces, vomit, rotting corpses, and animals whose habits associate them with such vectors). However, in most human societies disgust has become a social emotion as well, ...’
\citep[pp.~106--7]{haidt:2007_when}).
You can see how all of these remaining four might collectively be important for living in large,
cooperative societies with non-kin.
For example, intuitive loyalty towards ingroup members may be part of a defence against freeriders.
You can reach the same conclusion without buying into the ‘intuitive ethics’ idea.
For example, Hamlin writes, on the basis of different arguments (to be considered later),
that:
‘humans (both individually and as a species) develop morality because it is required for cooperative systems to flourish’
\citep[p.~108]{hamlin:2015_infantile}.
Hamlin 2015, p. 108
That was human sociality:
the idea was that investingating moral psychology is worthwhile because
it enables us to better understand human sociality.
political conflict,
e.g. over climate change?
Reason 2: it enables us to better understand one aspect of political conflict,
and will perhaps even eventually suggest ways of overcoming some political conflicts.
Relatedly, moral psychology matters for understanding why political change is sometimes difficult;
especially in democratic societies.
I can’t provide much support for this claim now, and, being philosophers,
one of our questions will be whether it is true at all.
But I think there is a reasonable case to be made for it.
The idea that moral psychology can help us to understand, and perhaps even to overcome,
political divides
comes out sharply in research on attitudes to climate change ...
Feinberg & Willer, 2013 figure 1
Why are liberals generally more concerned about climate change than conservatives?
It is striking that liberals are generally more concerned about climate change than conservatives.
But why should this be?
Why are liberals more likely than conservatives to regard climate change as an ethical issue?
[error bars show SEM (or SE), Standard Error of Mean. (We aren’t going to use that
in interpreting the figure; we’re not relying on the graph but on an interaction
identified using a regression analysis).]
‘Simple-slopes analyses revealed that more liberal participants (1 SD
below the mean) in the not-recycle condition rated the target as
significantly less moral (M = 3.59) than did their liberal counterparts
in either the recycle condition (M = 4.54), b = 0.95, p < .001, or the
control condition (M = 4.31), b = 0.72, p < .001. We found no
significant differences across conditions for more conser- vative
participants (1 SD above the mean), ps > .15.’
‘participants read one of three vignettes describing an average day of
a target individual. The vignettes were identical, describing a day’s
activities for the target. The one difference was whether or not, after
eating his lunch, the target chose to recycle his plastic water bottle
(recycle condi- tion) or throw it away as garbage (not-recycle
condition). In the control condition, there was no mention of this
bottle. Participants then rated the target on how moral they
perceived him to be overall on a scale from 1 (not moral at all) to 6
(extremely moral).’
So maybe the difference is that liberals are more likely to see climate change as an ethical issue
than conservatives
This raises another question:
Why are liberals more likely than conservatives to regard climate change as an ethical issue?
To answer this question,
we need to think about cultural differences.
Recall the ‘intuitive ethics’ idea I mentioned earlier
(and which we will critically consider in more depth later in the course).
‘intuitive ethics’ (Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Haidt & Graham, 2007)
harm/care
fairness (including reciprocity)
in-group loyalty
respect for authorty
purity, sanctity
One of the biggest cultural divides, ethically: liberals vs conservatives.
Typically when we think about cultural differences, we imagine contrasting a society like the
US or UK with some very remote place, a place so remote and special that even knowing
how to pronounce its name makes you feel special.
But one of the best studied cultural differences concerning ethics involves communities many of us
move between every day: social conservatives and social liberals.
According to Haidt & Graham,
‘Conservatives have many moral concerns that liberals simply do not recognize as moral concerns.’
\citep[p.~99]{haidt:2007_when}
(Broader issue: cultural variety in the boundaries of morality.)
In particular, liberals have an ethics in which only the first two really matter; they have
removed the last three.
Conservatives have all five ‘foundations’.
[*todo MOVE what follows]
It starts with observations about a cultural difference.
[Liberals: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity
‘On this definition of morality, conservative opposition to social justice programs appears to be immoral’]
[‘from an anthropological perspective, the moral domain is usually much broader
...
ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity.
Political liberals have moral intuitions primarily [ignoring these],
and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conservatives,
who generally rely upon all five foundations.’
\citep[p.~98]{haidt:2007_when} (from the abstract)]
[‘Recognizing ingroup, authority, and purity as moral concerns—even if they
are not your moral concerns—is crucial both for scientific accuracy and for
the application of social justice research’
\citep[p.~111][p.~98]{haidt:2007_when}]
[‘Conservatives and many moderates are opposed to gay marriage in part due
to moral intuitions related to ingroup, authority, and purity, and these
concerns should be addressed, rather than dismissed contemptuously.’
\citep[p.~112][p.~98]{haidt:2007_when}]
This idea has been advanced by Markowitz & Shariff ...
Why are liberals generally more concerned about climate change than conservatives?
‘The moral framing of climate change has typically focused on only the first two values:
harm to present and future generations and the unfairness of the distribution of burdens
caused by climate change. As a result, the justification for action on climate change holds
less moral priority for conservatives than liberals’
\citep[p.~244]{markowitz:2012_climate}
Markowitz & Shariff, 2012 p. 244
Similarly, you can understand a bit about why nationalism tends to be associated with
conservatives rather than liberals (although it varies from place to place).
Ok, that was the second reason for studying moral psychology:
it may help us to understand an aspect of political conflict.
political conflict,
e.g. over climate change?
A third reason brings us closer to home.
Not a few researchers in moral psychology have argued that their discoveries
about the psychological underpinnings of moral abilities have consequences for
ethics and metaethics.
[Reason 3: according to many researchers, discoveries in moral psychology undermine
various claims that have been made by philosophers in ethics; they may also challenge
some philosophical methods. (This is going to be controversial.)]
You can see I put a question mark here; I am not convinced they are right.
But anyone who studies ethics should at least understand the challenges posed by
researchers in moral psychology.
And they may well turn out to be right.
[Add something about the question mark missing from the module title: the science of good and evil?]
Some claims made by moral psychologists.
Humans lack direct insight into moral properties
\citep{sinnott:2010_moral}
(Sinnott-Armstrong et al, 2010 p. 268).
Intuitions cannot be used to counterexample theories
\citep{sinnott:2010_moral}
(Sinnott-Armstrong et al, 2010 p. 269).
Intuitions are unreliable in unfamiliar* situations
\citep[p.~715]{greene:2014_pointandshoot}
(Greene, 2014 p. 715).
‘Let us define unfamiliar* problems as ones with which we have inadequate evolutionary, cultural, or personal experience.’
\citep[p.~714]{greene:2014_pointandshoot}
Philosophers, including Kant, do not use reason to figure out what is right or wrong, but ‘primarily to justify and organize their preexising intuitive conclusions’
\citep[p.~718]{greene:2014_pointandshoot}
(Greene, 2014 p. 718).
So that was the third reason ...
non-reason: it enables us to better shape our own, individual morality.
Comparison with linguistics changing how you communicate with words.
Could happen, but not likely to be a good thing.
Also be aware that there is a high degree of uncertainty here.
One of my friends, a professor in the US, has a course called
‘better living through cognitive science’. I think that is a mistake:
there is too much uncertainty.
You wouldn't get in a plane on the basis of theories defended by physicists:
you rely on engineers and safety standards.
And even then, few of us would want to be on the first flight a new type of plane made.
We don’t yet have engineers of human moral psychology.
Which is perhaps for the best.
Time for a summary ...
Why investigate moral psychology?
human sociality
political conflict
ethics
...
Two Questions about Moral Intuitions
\section{Two Questions about Moral Intuitions}
\emph{Reading:} §Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Young, L., and Cushman, F. (2010). Moral intuitions. In Doris, J. M., Group, M. P. R., et al., editors, The moral psychology handbook, pages 246–272. OUP, Oxford.
Moral psychology is the study of psychological aspects of ethical abilities.
Part I: What ethical abilities do humans have? What states and processes underpin them?
Do emotions influence moral intutions?
But what are these?
Short answer: unreflective moral judgements.
Long answer ... some comparisons may help ...
Sinnott-Armstrong et al (2010), ‘Moral Intuitions’ in Doris et al (ed)
What are moral intutions?
Unreflective ethical / linguistic / mathematical judgements
Nothing special to say here ...
[1] He is a waffling fatberg of lies.
[2]* A waffling fatberg lies of he is.
Which box contains more dots?
Two projects -- everyday life vs philosophy
We are interested in moral inuitions in everyday life.
They are an important part of our moral abilities.
You might also be interested in moral intuitions as a basis for evaluating philosophical
approaches to reaching conclusions in ethics. This would be psychology of philosophy.
My primary concern will not be with this, but with everyday unreflective ethical
judgements.
Moral psychology is the study of psychological aspects of ethical abilities.
Part I: What ethical abilities do humans have? What states and processes underpin them?
Do emotions influence moral intutions?
What do adult humans compute that enables their unreflective judgements to track moral attributes (such as wrongness)?
I am working with a contrast between tracking and computing.
To say that a state tracks an attribute is to say ...
Simple example (1) [old]: toxicity/feeling of disgust
Simple example (2) [new]: motion sensor tracks presence of a human by computing infared energy (say).
Important because shows that the distinction can be understood in a way that does not hinge on consciousness,
nor on any particularly deep notion of representation.
So this is a way of setting up Sinnott-Armstrong et al’s 2010
‘unconscious attribute substitution’ idea
in a way that makes it easier to operationalise.
Hypothesis:
They rely on the ‘affect heuristic’: ‘if thinking about an act [...] makes you feel bad [...], then judge that it is morally wrong’.
Sinnott-Armstrong et al, 2010
The ‘affect heuristic’: ‘if thinking about an act [...] makes you feel bad [...], then judge that it is morally wrong’ \citep{sinnott:2010_moral}.
consider an analogy
What do adult humans compute that enables their unreflective judgements to track toxicity?
| device | What is tracked? | What is computed? |
| motion sensor | human movement | infared energy |
| poison detector | toxicity | how encountering it makes me feel |
| moral intuition | right and wrong | how it makes me feel |
Q1. Do emotions influence moral intutions?
Q2. What do adult humans compute that enables their unreflective judgements to track moral attributes (such as wrongness)?
Hypothesis [re Q2 & Q1]:
They rely on the ‘affect heuristic’: ‘if thinking about an act [...] makes you feel bad [...], then judge that it is morally wrong’.
Sinnott-Armstrong et al, 2010
The ‘affect heuristic’: ‘if thinking about an act [...] makes you feel bad [...], then judge that it is morally wrong’ \citep{sinnott:2010_moral}.
What evidence could bear on the issue?
/ex/TorF/qq/Humans sometimes track the toxicity of potential foods by computing how smelling or tasting the potential food makes them feel|Humans sometimes compute the toxicity of potential foods by tracking how smelling or tasting the potential food makes them feel
Moral Intuitions and Emotions: Evidence
\section{Moral Intuitions and Emotions: Evidence}
\emph{Reading:} §Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Young, L., and Cushman, F. (2010). Moral intuitions. In Doris, J. M., Group, M. P. R., et al., editors, The moral psychology handbook, pages 246–272. OUP, Oxford., §Schnall, Simone, Jennifer Benton, and Sophie Harvey. ‘With a Clean Conscience: Cleanliness Reduces the Severity of Moral Judgments’. Psychological Science 19, no. 12 (1 December 2008): 1219–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02227.x.
Q2: What do adult humans compute that enables their moral intuitions to track
moral attributes (such as wrongness)?
Hypothesis:
They rely on the ‘affect heuristic’: ‘if thinking about an act [...] makes you feel bad [...], then judge that it is morally wrong’.
Prediction:
if you make people feel bad (/good) without them realising it, they will be more (/less) inclined to judge that something is morally wrong.
Let me explain correlational vs intervention evidence ...
Q: What do adult humans compute that enables their moral intuitions to track
moral attributes (such as wrongness)?
Hypothesis:
They rely on the ‘affect heuristic’: ‘if thinking about an act [...] makes you feel bad [...], then judge that it is morally wrong’.
Prediction:
if you make people feel bad (/good) without them realising it, they will be more (/less) inclined to judge that something is morally wrong.
Evidence:
Schnall et al., 2008
‘(Schnall et al., 2008) probed subjects’ responses to moral scenarios featuring morally relevant actions such as eating one’s dead pet dog while priming subjects to feel disgusted. In one experiment, subjects filled out their questionnaires while seated at either a clean desk or a disgusting desk, stained and sticky and located near an overflowing waste bin containing used pizza boxes and dirty-looking tissues. Subjects who were rated as highly sensitive to their own bodily state were more likely to condemn the actions when seated at the disgusting desk than at the clean desk.’
Schnall et al, 2008 Experiment 4
3 groups: induce disgust, sadness or neither using video clips
‘The sadness clip (from The Champ) portrayed the death of a boy’s mentor,
the disgust clip (from Trainspotting) portrayed a man using an unsanitary toilet,
and the neutral clip (from a National Geographic special) portrayed fish at the Great Barrier Reef’ \citep{lerner:2004_heart}.
Judge how wrong an action is in six vignettes
Half the vignettes involve disgusting actions.
What do you think the predictions should be (sanity check)
Disgust (but not sadness) will influence moral judgements,
irrespective of whether the actions judged are disgusting.
Complication: Private Body Consciousness
Result: ‘disgust influenced moral judgment similarly for both disgust and nondisgust vignettes’.
What about this prediction?
Six vignettes (also used in Experiment 2):
‘Three of these vignettes involved a moral violation with disgust—Dog (a man who ate his dead dog),
Plane Crash (starving survivors of a plane crash consider cannibalism),
and Kitten (a man deriving sexual pleasure from playing with a kitten)—and
three of the vignettes involved a moral violation with no disgust—Wallet
(finding a wallet and not returning it to its owner), Resume (a person falsifying his resume),
and Trolley (preventing the death of five men by killing one man).
The instructions told participants to go with their initial intuitions when responding’
\citep[p.~1100]{schnall:2008_disgust}
Private Body Consciousness: ‘Miller, Murphy, and Buss (1981) devised a scale to measure people’s general
attention to internal physical states, which they refer to as Private Body Consciousness (PBC)‘
\citep[p.~1100]{schnall:2008_disgust}.
\subsection{Vignettes from Schnall et al (2008) Experiment 4}
\emph{Dog}
Frank’s dog was killed by a car in front of his house. Frank had heard that in China people occasionally eat dog meat, and he was curious what it tasted like. So he cut up the body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. How wrong is it for Frank to eat his dead dog for dinner?
\emph{Plane Crash}
Your plane has crashed in the Himalayas. The only survivors are yourself, another man, and a young boy. The three of you travel for days, battling extreme cold and wind. Your only chance at survival is to find your way to a small village on the other side of the mountain, several days away. The boy has a broken leg and can- not move very quickly. His chances of surviving the journey are essentially zero. Without food, you and the other man will probably die as well. The other man
suggests that you sacrifice the boy and eat his remains over the next few days. How wrong is it to kill this boy so that you and the other man may survive your journey to safety?
\emph{Wallet}
You are walking down the street when you come across a wallet lying on the ground. You open the wal- let and find that it contains several hundred dollars in cash as well the owner’s driver’s license. From the credit cards and other items in the wallet it’s very clear that the wallet’s owner is wealthy. You, on the other hand, have been hit by hard times recently and could really use some extra money. You consider sending the wallet back to the owner without the cash, keeping the cash for yourself. How wrong is it for you to keep the money you found in the wallet in order to have more money for yourself?
\emph{Resume}
You have a friend who has been trying to find a job lately without much success. He figured that he would be more likely to get hired if he had a more impressive resume. He decided to put some false information on his resume in order to make it more impressive. By doing this he ultimately managed to get hired, beating out several candidates who were actually more qualified than he. How wrong was it for your friend to put false information on his resume in order to help him find employment?
\emph{Kitten}
Matthew is playing with his new kitten late one night. He is wearing only his boxer shorts, and the kit- ten sometimes walks over his genitals. Eventually, this arouses him, and he begins to rub his bare genitals along the kitten’s body. The kitten purrs, and seems to enjoy the contact. How wrong is it for Matthew to be rubbing himself against the kitten?
\emph{Trolley}
You are at the wheel of a runaway trolley quickly approaching a fork in the tracks. On the tracks extend- ing to the left is a group of five railway workmen. On the tracks extending to the right is a single railway workman. If you do nothing the trolley will proceed to the left, causing the deaths of the five workmen. The only way to avoid the deaths of these workmen is to hit a switch on your dashboard that will cause the trolley to proceed to the right, causing the death of the single workman. How wrong is it for you to hit the switch in order to avoid the deaths of the five workmen?
Schnall et al, 2008 figure 3
Showing results from Experiment 4. Induce either Disgust or Sadness or neithre using a video clip.
Then make moral judgements.
‘For high-PBC [Private Body Consciousness] (but not low-PBC) people,
our disgust manipulations increased the severity of
moral condemnation relative to the neutral conditions’
\citep[p.~1105]{schnall:2008_disgust}
Note:
Sinnot-Armstrong et al (2010)’s heuristic is about ‘feeling bad’;
Schnall et al are making a case for effects of disgust specifically.
Schnall et al, 2008 conclusions:
‘the effect of disgust applies regardless of whether the action to be judged is itself disgusting.
Second, [...] disgust influenced moral,
but not additional nonmoral, judgments.
These nonmoral judgements concerned policies.
‘Six public policy items asked participants to rate whether they would support these pro- posals if they were up for a vote in the U.S. Congress on a scale from 0 (strongly oppose) to 9 (strongly support). Three items involved issues of contamination or guarding borders (i.e., spending more money for waste treatment, spending more money to “patrol the borders” against ille- gal immigrants, and making it easier for the government to “expel foreigners” with suspected links to terrorism). The other three issues did not involve such themes (i.e., allowing nondenominational school prayer, increasing federal funding for social science research, and decreasing the number of students per classroom).’ \citep[p.~1100]{schnall:2008_clean}
Third, because the effect occurred most strongly for people who were sensitive to their own bodily cues,
the results appear to concern feelings of disgust rather than merely the primed concept of disgust.
Fourth, [...] induced sadness did not have similar effects.’
\citep[pp.~1105--6]{schnall:2008_disgust}
Schnall et al, 2008 pp. 1105--6
Is the prediction confirmed?
Q: What do adult humans compute that enables their moral intuitions to track
moral attributes (such as wrongness)?
Hypothesis:
They rely on the ‘affect heuristic’: ‘if thinking about an act [...] makes you feel bad [...], then judge that it is morally wrong’.
Prediction:
if you make people feel bad (/good) without them realising it, they will be more (/less) inclined to judge that something is morally wrong.
Evidence:
Schnall et al., 2008
Prediction NOT confirmed: only high Private Body Consciousness yields significant effect of disgust.
This actually is not quite what Sinnot-Armstrong et al’s theory predicts!
Schnall et al. (2008) are intested in high vs low PBC as a marker of those who really
felt the disgust. If this is right, Sinnot-Armstrong et al’s prediction seems well supported.
An alternative possibility, however, is that it is only high-PBC people that moral intuitions
are influenced by affect (disgust in this case). That would not support Sinnot-Armstrong et al’s
theory (but might indicate that the theory only applies to high-PBC people).
Of course it’s just one piece of evidence.
But they cite it in favour of their view.
‘For high-PBC [Private Body Consciousness] (but not low-PBC) people,
our disgust manipulations increased the severity of
moral condemnation relative to the neutral conditions.’ (p. 1105)
Is Schnall et al. (2008) evidence against Sinnott-Armstrong et al (2010)’s theory?
Note: Possible that there is an effect in low-PBC people that’s too small for
these methods to detec, so this is not evidence against Sinnot-Armstrong et al’s theory.
Note: ‘We found a significant Condition × PBC interaction’ (p. 1105)
So everything hangs on the significance of high vs low PBC.
If it is an indicator of how disgusted subjects actually are, Schnall et al is
evidence in favour of Sinnott-Armstrong et al (2010)’s theory.
But if low PBC subjects’ moral judgements are not influenced by their disgust, no
matter how disgusted they are, then
Schnall et al would appear to be
evidence in favour of Sinnott-Armstrong et al (2010)’s theory.
What’s needed here is a manipulation check.
Never trust a philosopher on science.
You really need to read the studies and think about the details.
This is why I put the vignettes on the handout.
On the other hand, you have to be careful.
Our job as philosophers is not to find methodological defects in the research
(you aren’t trained to do this, and will probably not fully understand the methods).
So the rule of thumb is: take what scientists say about their research at face value
in the Results second, exercise some caution in the scientific Discussion section,
and never trust a philosopher.
/ex/TorF/qq/Schnall et al, 2008 aim to show that emotion and moral judgement are correlated.|Schnall et al, 2008 aim to show that intervening on a person’s feelings can influence their ethical judgements.|Schnall et al, 2008 establish that your moral intuitions are a consequence of how an act makes you feel.|Schnall et al, 2008 establish that your moral intuitions are not a consequence of how an act makes you feel.
\section{Conclusion}
conclusion
In conclusion, ...
Moral psychology is the study of psychological aspects of ethical abilities.
matters for: human sociality; political conflict; ethics?
initial focus : moral intutions
two questions
Do emotions influence moral intutions?
What do adult humans compute that enables their unreflective judgements to track moral attributes (such as wrongness)?
a hypothesis: the Affect Heuristic
‘if thinking about an act [...] makes you feel bad [...], then judge that it is morally wrong’.
... which generates a prediction, for which there is some evidence.
\section{Seminar Tasks (yyrama)}
share your writing with your seminar tutor each week
seminars are to discuss your writing
