Which Moral Scenarios Are Unfamiliar?

There are at least two reasons to suspect that the moral scenarios philosophers typically consider are unfamiliar situations.

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Do we have reason to suspect that the moral scenarios philosophers typically consider are unfamiliar situations?

Reason 1: Philosophical Methods

Even on the view most charitable to the argument’s likely opponents (e.g. Railton, 2014), some moral scenarios will be bizarre enough to count as unfamiliar. Although we do not know which these are (as far as I can tell), philosophers’ interest in fine distinctions and edge cases increases the probability of hitting on unfamiliar situations.¹

Reason 2: Signature Limits

We also know that there fast processes in other domains exhibit a range of signature limits even in adults and are unaffected by expertise, including:

• object cognition (Kozhevnikov & Hegarty, 2001)
• mindreading (Low, Apperly, Butterfill, & Rakoczy, 2016)
• number cognition (Feigenson, Dehaene, & Spelke, 2004)

This is no accident. Any broadly inferential process must make a trade-off between speed and accuracy. As more than a century of cognitive science has found (Henmon, 1911; Link & Tindall, 1971; Heitz, 2014).²

Consequently, even for experts with much experience, some quite ordinary-seeming scenarios may be turn out to be unfamiliar. We should therefore be suspicious that at least some moral scenarios philosophers consider will turn out to involve signature limits, which would make them unfamiliar.

Going Deeper

Greene (2017) takes up the topic in detail.

Which comparison: Linguistic or Physical?

The slides and recording use a comparison between ethical and physical cognition. This assists in arriving at the two reasons above.

How would things look if instead we compared ethical to linguistic cognition? As we saw in Cognitive Miracles: When Are Fast Processes Unreliable?, on any standard view it is not possible that a linguistic theory could discover that fast processes embody a systematically distorted view of the linguistic. One consequence is that is no easy way to make sense of the idea that there could be unfamiliar problems in the linguistic domain. So accepting the comparison with linguistic cognition might well lead us to reject this premise of the argument and deny that we would have any reason to suspect that the moral scenarios philosophers typically consider are unfamiliar situations.

Would accepting the comparison with linguistic cognition allow us to defend some proposed methods for gaining ethical knowledge such as Foot’s, Kamm’s or Thomson’s Other Method of Trolley Cases?

While accepting the comparison with linguistic cognition would mean that philosophers can avoid the conclusion of the loose reconstruction of Greene (2014)’s argument, it leads to a distinct, no less pressing challenge.

In linguistics, there is growing awareness that it is a mistake to rely on expert judgements (see, for example Wasow & Arnold, 2005; Gibson & Fedorenko, 2010; and Dąbrowska, 2010). Understanding how fast linguistic processes work requires careful experiment, not introspective guesswork. Similar considerations apply in the case of ethics.

Therefore, even if we accept the comparison with linguistic cognition, we can still reach a conclusion that is close to, and has much the same implications for ethics as, the conclusion of the loose reconstruction of Greene (2014)’s argument:

[alternative conclusion] Premises about judgements about particular moral scenarios need to be supported by carefully controlled experiments if they are to be used in ethical arguments where the aim is to establish knowledge of their conclusions.

Glossary

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