Introduction to Part III: Could scientific discoveries undermine, or support, ethical principles?

In Part III of this course we aim to find out whether moral psychology really is the science of good and evil. Here we start by looking at a range of claims, positive and negative, that philosophers and scientists have made about whether discoveries about moral psychology could undermine, or support, ethical principles.

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Notes

In Part III of this course we will consider whether discoveries about moral psychology could undermine, or support, ethical principles.

We will consider a variety of argument strategies in the lectures. These will draw on, and extend, the research on the psychological underpinnings of ethical abilities considered in Part I of the course.

Background

Kant famously answered our question negatively:

‘Hier sehen wir nun die Philosophie in der Tat auf einen mißlichen Standpunkt gestellt […] Hier soll sie ihre Lauterkeit beweisen als Selbsthalterin ihrer Gesetze […] Alles also, was empirisch ist, ist als Zutat zum Princip der Sittlichkeit nicht allein dazu ganz untauglich, sondern der Lauterkeit der Sitten selbst höchst nachteilig […] Wider diese Nachlässigkeit oder gar niedrige Denkungsart in Aufsuchung des Princips unter empirischen Bewegursachen und Gesetzen kann man auch nicht zu viel und zu oft Warnungen ergehen lassen, indem die menschliche Vernunft […] gern […] der Sittlichkeit einen aus Gliedern ganz verschiedener Abstammung zusammengeflickten Bastard unterschiebt, der allem ähnlich sieht […], nur der Tugend nicht’ (Kant, 1870, p. AK 4:425–6).¹

I was unable to identify an argument for this view. It may be best to start neutral and see whether there are ways in which moral psychology can inform ethics.

Preview

We will consider a variety of claims according to which discoveries in moral psychology can:

1. inform some decisions about which intuitions to keep when considering particular cases (e.g. Kumar & Campbell, 2012);²
2. show that any judgement about a particular moral scenario stands in need of justification (e.g. Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008);
3. enhance the ability of ethicists to abstract away from personal idiosyncrasies (e.g. Rini, 2013);
4. show that judgements about unfamiliar moral scenarios are generally unreliable (e.g. Greene, 2014);
5. undermine the project of reflective equilibrium (e.g. Singer, 2005); or
6. eliminate objections to systematic normative ethical theories (e.g. Singer, 2005 again).

To this end we will draw on, and extend, what we learned in Part I about humans’ ethical abilities and the processes underpinning them.

Glossary

References