In recent work Joshua Greene argues that when we realize that many of our characteristically deontological moral judgments arise from emotional reactions rather than deontological reasoning, we will lose our confidence in these deontological judgments. In contrast, when we learn that many utilitarian judgments arise from cognitive processes that engage in cost/benefit analysis, then this vindicates these judgments. And (to simplify Greene’s reasoning) the conclusion of all this is that we should become utilitarians.
For example, when people consider the trolley case they usually make utilitarian judgments, since this case is not so emotionally loaded. But, when we consider the footbridge case, in which we have to physically push somebody in front of the runaway train, then we make a deontological judgment to the effect that the end does not justify the means. This judgment, Greene argues, is caused by an emotional reaction rather than deontological cognitive processes.
If we look at the empirical literature on moral judgment, we also learn that psychopaths and people with lesions in the emotional centers of their brains are more likely to make utilitarian moral judgments. These people tend to directly conclude that we should push the fat man in front of the train. And, if asked to evaluate a scenario in which we could say our own lives only by smothering some baby, then these people quickly judge that we should do it, whereas others with normal emotional capacities have to think carefully about this before reaching a conclusion.
I was just curious about what people think about the following observation. Utilitarianism, as this last observation helps us to see, is in one way the morality of psychopaths. This observation may lead us to doubt whether empirical research on moral judgment really does debunk these deontological judgments in the way that Greene and others think it does. I agree that the evidence he appeals to undermines the idea that what he calls characteristically deontological judgments usually derive from moral reasoning. But, does it really give us reason to think that, because of this, we should not trust/rely on these intuitions in our moral thinking?
It might seem a little silly to say that utilitarianism is the morality of people with brain damage or of psychopaths, and since we don’t want to be like such people, we shouldn’t be utilitarians. But, it is interesting, I think, to think about that piece of data when considering the kinds of arguments that people like Greene give. Thoughts?
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25 April, 2009 at 1:10 pm |
Hey Sven,
Interesting post. A quick thought: while I can see how an explanation of how I make moral judgments might have a debunking effect with respect to my moral judgments, it’s less clear that how an explanation of how others (who are sufficiently unlike me) make moral judgments might have a debunking effect with respect to my moral judgments. If I were to learn that people who have suffered a certain combination of torture and brain damage are strongly inclined towards atheism, this would not lead me to question my atheism. So, if I were a utilitarian, I wouldn’t be fazed by the psychopath data.
25 April, 2009 at 3:20 pm |
Hey Steve, thanks for the comment.
I think your response on behalf of the utilitarian is a little too quick. Part of the reason why is that I am not sure analogy works/takes seriously the potential worry. The potential worry is something like this: if we advocate the view that all our moral thinking should be strictly utilitarian, then we are advocating a view according to which all our moral thinking should work in the way that emotionally detached/emotionally impaired people’s moral thinking works. That seems to apply to our own thinking. Our own thinking does not work like this. Most of our actual moral judgments—if empirical psychologists like Haidt and others are right—are caused by affective responses to representations of possible or actual situations. And most of our actual moral thinking is not utilitarian, though much of it is. So, our own actual thinking, if made wholly utilitarian, would be turned into the moral thinking of emotionally cold/impaired people. Is that a good ideal for moral thinking?
In the case of your atheism, it is not as though anybody is advocating reasoning about religion in the way that people with brain damage would. Now if somebody suggested that you should think about religious questions using the same kind of reasoning as people with brain damage tend to engage in, then wouldn’t that seem like a bad suggestion? This would be a better analogy.
So, while I don’t claim that this observation about how utilitarian moral thinking comes natural to people with emotional deficits proves that utilitarianism is false, I do think the utilitarian should be “fazed by the psychological data” to some extent. Just like Greene’s data gives us reason to reflect on our deontological thinking, the data I mentioned gives us reason, I think, to reflect on our utilitarian thinking.
25 April, 2009 at 4:12 pm |
A naive question: why don’t we want to be psychopaths? Less naively, in which (types of) situations would we not want to morally judge as sociopaths do? Finally, are trolley cases like those situations, and in which relevant respects?
25 April, 2009 at 4:24 pm |
That’s a good question, Sam. I am assuming that we don’t want to be psychopath-like. Or, rather, I’m personally disturbed by the prospects of changing my thinking in such a way as to make it more like that of somebody with abnormal emotional tendencies. So, for me there is something intrinsically disturbing about that prospect. But, there might also be other kinds of reasons to want our emotional capacities to keep functioning the way they do. After all, our social emotions do help to make social interactions work smoothly, and people with impaired emotional capacities don’t function well socially. How many friends would you be able to have if you actually always reasoned like a utilitarian (supposing that, if our thinking was more like that of the psychopath, then our thinking would on the whole be more utilitarian)? Thoughts?
25 April, 2009 at 4:35 pm |
I agree with your intuition, Sven. We don’t want to be always be like psychopaths. But this is very different from the claim that we want to never be like sociopaths.
True, there are many situations in which I would not want to judge and reason as psychopaths do. That seems like an important force behind your (and my) intuition. But in some other situations, we also hear people say “Oh, I wish I wouldn’t let my emotion get in the way. I wish I were more rational in my judgment.” Plausibly, what is being expressed is the desire to be more like psychopaths. Now, do we have some criteria to antecedently separate the two kinds of situations? (Undoubtedly I am simplifying, but I hope you see the general point.)
That we ought to judge as psychopaths do in trolley cases would only be a worrying conclusion if we thought that trolley cases are like the other cases in which we don’t want to judge as psychopaths do. Do we have reason to think that?
25 April, 2009 at 4:50 pm |
Good question. I’m not sure. I’d be interested in hearing what others think.
25 April, 2009 at 8:47 pm |
Hi Sven – what do you have in mind by “our moral thinking”? Are you talking about everyday moral thinking, or abstract philosophical moral theorizing?
Most utilitarians recognize that someone who thought like a utilitarian in everyday life would not turn out to be (by utilitarian standards) a competent moral agent. So they would agree that utilitarianism shouldn’t guide our everyday moral thinking/behaviour. But I take it the philosophical question here is not what patterns of thought are beneficial, but which are accurate and truth-tracking. Like Shen-Yi, I’m not sure why we should necessarily doubt the philosophical capabilities of psychopaths.
Compare: a sportsman in the field probably shouldn’t think like an idiot savant. But a physicist theorizing about the trajectory of the ball might well benefit from savant-like abilities.
25 April, 2009 at 11:35 pm |
Hi Richard, good question.
I think Greene has everyday moral thinking in mind, but I may be wrong. Perhaps he is talking about abstract, philosophical moralizing. Perhaps his point is that this type of more ambitious or sophisticated moral thinking should be more utilitarian, less influenced by affective intuitions. In that case the thing to think about would be why to make this kind of ambitious moral thinking be more like that of psychopaths or people with abnormal emotional capacities.
Now if we think that there is a moral truth out there, independent of our evaluative attitudes, to use Sharon Street’s way of talking, then sure, perhaps a psychopath-like mind would be better at discovering or tracking it, since their judgment would be less clouded by their emotional reactions. But, if our leanings are more towards the style of view according to which moral truths depend on how we would respond to things in whatever conditions are deemed relevant, then it is less clear that an emotionless, psychopathic mindset is the right one to use for moral thinking.
26 April, 2009 at 5:39 am |
Sven,
FWIW, I’ve always thought that Greene’s argument, with its undefended prejudice in favor of reason over emotion, was bizarrely question-begging w.r.t. the epistemology of morality. Of course, from a historical point of view, when the Kantian claims that his deontological theory of morality is based in reason alone, it looks like Greene can pretty easily undermine him. But it seems pretty likely to me that certain metaethical views will be friendlier to emotion than to cold calculation as a basis for learning moral ‘facts’.
j
p.s. if i put a website does it publish it? i’m about to find out!
27 April, 2009 at 9:43 pm |
I’m not convinced that sociopaths are utilitarians. They don’t seem to care about maximizing *general* happiness — either by act or by rule. Rather, sociopaths appear to be hedonists. They care about maximizing their *own* happiness: let the rest of the world take care of itself.
But more importantly, sociopaths are impulsive. They cannot correctly evaluate the long-term consequences of their actions. Or if they can, they cannot enforce their own judgments about what they ought to do. (A similar set of deficits can be seen in the case of Phineas Gage.)
27 April, 2009 at 10:51 pm |
Sven, following up on Jonathan’s point, can you say a bit more about what the evidence is that psychopaths make utilitarian judgments? Is it just that, when presented with vignettes in which they are asked to make either the characteristically deontological or the characteristically consequentialist choice, they go with the consequentialist one? If so, that in itself wouldn’t mean that psychopaths really think like utilitarians. As Jonathan suggests, they may not value the general happiness the way a utilitarian like Peter Singer does.
One other point: Is this argument some kind of extended ad hominem? If a psychopath says one should push the fat man, you might say “Your opinion can’t be right, psychopath! You’re a friggin’ psychopath!!” That sounds like an ad hominem dismissal to me. And if I say one should push the fat man, you might say “Your opinion can’t be right, Campbell! You’ve reasoned your way to that opinion just like a friggin’ psychopath would!!”
In the ballpark, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum
27 April, 2009 at 11:49 pm |
Sure, your paradigmatic/stereotypical psychopath is unlikely to desire to maximize overall happiness. I mostly had in mind people whose normal emotional responses to things have been altered by lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and similar brain structures associated with emotional reactions. Such patients do not have some of the emotional inhibitions and reactions that normals do.
Steve: I think you are still focussing on the outcome rather than the process. A psychopath or Nazi, to use the example from your link, might end up with the “right” opinion/the right output. But, the question I was interested in hearing what people thought about was whether it appears desirable to reason and think like somebody with brain damage, lacking in normal emotional capacities.
My own first instinct is that there is something objectionable about that idea. And this feeling remains even if I try imagining that I’d agree with many of the outputs of their reasoning. I was interested in whether others had similar intuitions about this, or whether this is merely an idiosyncratic impulse of mine.
28 April, 2009 at 2:02 am |
Sven, I’m not sure that you’ve given us enough information to distinguish process and product here. Steve’s question gets at this. If I have it right, sociopaths can be made to give utilitarian-sounding judgments about cases like trolley cases. From this, you argue that utilitarians should be unsettled, since they think like sociopaths. But that hasn’t been established. All that has been established is that utilitarians give the same answers as sociopaths in some cases. That is a product of reasoning. It doesn’t help us to decide whether utilitarians reason poorly, at least not until we are shown that the utilitarians reason to their conclusions in the same way that sociopaths do. That is, that they share the same process of reasoning.
Suppose that some brain structures collectively function as “morality detectors”, i.e. they output moral judgments. And further suppose that when these structures are properly functioning (defined statistically based on the population?), the output judgments are reliable. If I tell you that a person who has sustained damage to some of these structures — and thus has a broken detector — makes a specific moral judgment, can you confidently assert that the moral judgment is incorrect? If so, with what degree of confidence? (My own feeling is that the suppositions just aren’t informative enough to make confident assertions about such a judgment.)
And, of course, this gets trickier when one notes that many people who do not seem to have any deficit make the same judgment.
28 April, 2009 at 11:15 am |
Sven, interesting post. I have a few comments, so I’ll throw them up a bit at a time.
I think psychopaths are going to be a problematic case for several reasons: first, it’s controversial whether they actually make moral judgments (rather than ‘moral’ judgments), and also for the reasons discussed above. So I’ll focus more on VMPC patients.
First, Richard’s question is, I think, an important one. Most if not all of the evidence Greene has is based on VMPC patients’ performance in experimental settings. So there’s less-to-little evidence about how they’d perform in everyday moral tasks/behavior. (I say ‘little’ evidence because some of the data on these patients, such as their performance on the Iowa Gambling tasks, suggests they suffer from certain impairments which would adversely affect behavior, including moral behavior, outside the lab.) So the question of whether you and I would be better off acting like these patients in our daily lives might be up in the air until more info comes in.
Your last comment makes it sound as though you’re wondering whether it might be preferable not just to get the same outcome as these patients but to reason the way they do. My immediate response is: no, for reasons given above re: Iowa Gambling task. The deficits of VMPC patients are most visible, maybe, when it comes to moral judgment, but they extend way beyond that.
But pretend for the sake of argument that they don’t, and that the deficits are restricted to inhibiting the role of emotion/affect in moral judgment. Now I think Sam has a great question. And, I will come back to comment on it in a few hours, but right now I have to go downstairs and cause the destruction of the universe, in order to prevent a scratch to my little finger…
28 April, 2009 at 11:26 am |
Thanks for this Alex. As should be obvious, I named the post “the morality of psychopaths?” since this is more catchy than “the morality of VMPC patients?” (though the latter is what is most interesting to discuss). I hope to add more responses later after acting in ways that reveal that I prefer my own acknowledge’d lesser good to my greater, with a more ardent affection for the former than the latter…
12 June, 2009 at 12:03 pm |
>It might seem a little silly to say that utilitarianism is the morality of people with brain damage or of psychopaths, and since we don’t want to be like such people, we shouldn’t be utilitarians.
It seems far sillier to say that utilitarianism is the morality of people with brain damage or of psychopaths, so we _should_ be utilitarians.