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Moral Psychology
The Science of Good and Evil?

Moral Attributes Are Accessible

Here we consider arguments derived from Mikhail (2014) for the view that moral attributes are accessible.

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Notes

Consider two questions of the same form but about different domains:

  1. What do humans compute that enables them to track moral attributes?
  2. What do humans compute that enables them to track syntactic1 attributes?

A standard answer to the second question, (2), is: they compute the syntactic attributes themselves. Of course, humans are all, or mostly, unaware of computing syntactic attributes. But they do in fact do this, probably thanks to a language module.

Mikhail (2014) offers some considerations which can be used to argue for a parallel view about moral attributes:

Humans track moral attributes by computing moral attributes.

This view would appear to imply that moral attributes are accessible.

Why Is This Relevant?

In Moral Attributes Are Inaccessible we considered Sinnott-Armstrong, Young, & Cushman (2010, p. §2.1)’s argument that moral attributes are inaccessible.

I take that argument to depend on this premise:

If it is hard to articulate some rules or how they apply to a situation, then any attribute characterised by those rules must be inaccessible.

Against this we may object:

It is hard to articulate syntactic rules, and to articulate how they apply to a sentence. But such rules characterise syntactic attributes, and syntactic attributes are not inaccessible. (Or if they are inaccessible, at least they are not inaccessible in any way that would support the argument for the hypothesis that the Affect Heuristic explains why humans have certain moral intuitions.2)

This is not merely a hypothetical objection. For Mikhail (2007) argues that there is a relevant parallel between syntactic and ethical abilities.

What Is Mikhail’s (Best) Argument?

  1. ‘adequately specifying the kinds of harm that humans intuitively grasp requires a technical legal vocabulary’ (Mikhail, 2007, p. 146)

    Therefore:

  2. The abilities underpinning unreflective ethical judgements must involve analysis in accordance with rules.

    But:

  3. Humans do not know the rules.

    Therefore:

  4. The analysis is achieved by a modular process.

Mikhail’s argument for the first premise that ‘adequately specifying the kinds of harm that humans intuitively grasp requires a technical legal vocabulary’ (Mikhail, 2007, p. 146) depends on an analysis of pairs of dilemmas like the Trolley/Transplant pair presented in the recording. Many subjects make apparently inconsistent judgements when presented with such pairs of dilemmas; they appear to say that killing one to save five people is both permitted and impermissible. Mikhail argues that the inconsistency is merely apparent. For there is a morally significant difference between the dilemmas: one (Transplant) involves purposive battery while the other (Trolley) does not. This supports the idea that the pattern of judgements, far from being inconsistent, reflects the operation of principles and the identification of structure in the scenarios.3

An Objection to Mikhail

Moral judgements are subject to order effects: which in a pair of dilemmas is presented first sometimes influences subjects’ responses to the dilemmas (Petrinovich & O’Neill, 1996, p. Study 2; Wiegmann, Okan, & Nagel, 2012). This is true even for professional philosophers (Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2015). No such effect is predicted by Mikhail’s hypothesis that subjects’ moral intuitions are a consequence of their correctly identifying structure and applying principles consistently.

Mikhail’s hypothesis therefore at least requires qualification. This means his argument does not provide sufficient grounds to conclude that humans track moral attributes by computing moral attributes.

What Should We Conclude?

None of the arguments we have considered are sufficient to establish the view that moral intuitions are a consequence of a moral module.

But they are sufficient to show that the arguments considered in Moral Attributes Are Inaccessible are not sufficient to establish that moral attributes are inaccessible.

This is an obstacle to establishing the hypothesis that the Affect Heuristic explains moral intuitions. For, as we saw (in The Affect Heuristic and Risk: A Case Study) the best argument for that hypothesis depends on establishing that moral attributes are inaccessible.4

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).
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.’
module : A module is standardly characterised as a cognitive system which exhibits, to a significant degree, a set of features including domain specificity, limited accessibility, and information encapsulation. Contemporary interest in modularity stems from Fodor (1983). Note that there are now a wide range of incompatible views on what modules are and little agreement among researchers on what modules are or even which features are characteristic of them.
moral intuition : According to this lecturer, moral intuitions are unreflective ethical judgements.
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 Two Questions about Moral Intuitions.)
Transplant : A dilemma. Five people are going to die but you can save them all by cutting up one healthy person and distributing her organs. Is it ok to cut her up?
Trolley : A dilemma; also known as Switch. A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people. You can hit a switch that will divert the trolley onto a different set of tracks where it will kill only one. Is it okay to hit the switch?

References

Dwyer, S. (2009). Moral Dumbfounding and the Linguistic Analogy: Methodological Implications for the Study of Moral Judgment. Mind & Language, 24(3), 274–296. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2009.01363.x
Fodor, J. (1983). The modularity of mind: An essay on faculty psychology. Cambridge, Mass ; London: MIT Press.
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.
Mikhail, J. (2007). Universal moral grammar: Theory, evidence and the future. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(4), 143–152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.12.007
Mikhail, J. (2014). Any Animal Whatever? Harmful Battery and Its Elements as Building Blocks of Moral Cognition. Ethics, 124(4), 750–786. https://doi.org/10.1086/675906
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
Petrinovich, L., & O’Neill, P. (1996). Influence of wording and framing effects on moral intuitions. Ethology and Sociobiology, 17(3), 145–171. https://doi.org/10.1016/0162-3095(96)00041-6
Roedder, E., & Harman, G. (2010). Linguistics and moral theory. In J. M. Doris, M. P. R. Group, & others (Eds.), The moral psychology handbook (pp. 273–296). Oxford: OUP.
Samuels, R. (2004). Innateness in cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(3), 136–141.
Schwitzgebel, E., & Cushman, F. (2015). Philosophers’ biased judgments persist despite training, expertise and reflection. Cognition, 141, 127–137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.04.015
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.
Wiegmann, A., Okan, Y., & Nagel, J. (2012). Order effects in moral judgment. Philosophical Psychology, 25(6), 813–836. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2011.631995

  1. As an example of a syntactic attribute, consider being a (grammatical) sentence. For example, the sequence of words ‘He is a waffling fatberg of lies’ is a sentence whereas the sequence of words ‘A waffling fatberg lies of he is’ is not a sentence. These are syntactic attributes of the two sequences of words. ↩

  2. In Fodor (1983)’s characterisation of modularity, limited accessibility is one of the characteristics of modules. But note that limited accessibility is characteristic of the inner workings of a module, not of the judgements which modular processes influence. ↩

  3. Mikhail (2014) provides more detail on the argument for this premise. (I also provide some detail in the recording.) ↩

  4. This is not end of the story. We will find support for the view that, in some cases of moral intution, the moral attributes being tracked are inaccessible in Why Is Moral Dumbfounding Significant?. ↩