Book Review: Moral Psychology: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (Vol. 2) (2008)

This edited volume is, for the most part, about a moral theory called intuitionism and a philosophical debate called moral realism. Intuitionism, the ‘intuition’ in the title, is the view that our moral judgements are most often determined by quickly formed beliefs as opposed to lengthy deliberation and reasoning. Moral realism is the thesis that moral facts are objective, with the corollary that moral disputes can be resolved decisively through the appeal to objective facts and that moral certainty is an achievable goal. But, as the word ‘diversity’ in the title foreshadows, the debate surrounding moral realism is far from being over.The book has two very appealing features. The first is a lively format of target essay followed by two commentaries and an author(s)’s response, which leads to an engaging back and forth. The second is the approach used; the authors generally combine philosophical arguments with psychological evidence. As I’ll explain later, the combination of philosophy and psychological research has parallels with a recent debate within character education.Psychological research shows that people form moral beliefs quickly. This is in contrast to a view that our moral beliefs emerge out of deliberative reasoning. Where do quickly formed moral beliefs come from? The various authors have different answers. Our moral beliefs may have origins in our use of heuristics (1 - Gigerenzer ‘Moral Intuition = Fast and Frugal Heuristics?’), our possession of a moral faculty analogous to a language faculty (3 - Hauser, Young, and Cushman “Reviving Rawls Linguistic Analogy”), a small innate set of intuitions that are then shaped through development (4 - Haidt and Bjorklund “Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions about Moral Psychology”), or a set of emotional mechanisms (5 - Nichols “Sentimentalism Naturalized”).This psychological research has philosophical import. In downplaying the role of deliberation in morality, moral intuitionism weakens the link between morality and reason. According to the view argued here, the bulk of what we call morality in fact occurs through, often fast, psychologically determined processes. But individuals are psychologically unique, with different tastes, opinions, and feelings. If moral judgments emerge out of these sorts of subjective psychological processes, or have the same status as these variable processes, how can they be objectively justified? That is, how can moral certainty be achieved?The upshot of intuitionism is that we may need to question the thesis of moral realism. If our beliefs have nonmoral, psychological origins, then perhaps these intuitions only make things seem right or wrong (2 - Sinnott-Armstrong “Framing Moral Intuitions”). And when we talk about morality, we may only be expressing subjective emotions or attitudes originating in these intuitions, and not objective facts (7 - Loeb “Moral Incoherentism”). This means that if you and I disagree about some moral problem, there may be no objective way to resolve these disagreements (6 - Doris and Plakias “How to Argue about Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism”). The doubt that arises surrounding the status of moral claims makes the job of attributing moral responsibility more difficult (8 - Driver “Attribution of Causation and Moral Responsibility”).If morality is not rooted in objective facts about right and wrong, then an alternative to consider involves rejecting moral realism and instead adopting moral antirealism. Moral antirealism is the thesis that moralities are formed of subjective, judgments that are at best “useful devices for controlling either our own experiences or others’ behavior” (Sayre-McCord, 1988, p. 7). If we reject the objectivity of morality, the pathway to moral nihilism seems open. At the very least, scepticism toward moral claims seems justifiable (see Sinnott-Armstrong, 2006).It is unlikely that supporters of character education will be very happy with the implications of moral antirealism. Educating our character is supposed to produce “a profound change, one that goes … all the way down” (Hursthouse, 1999, p. 12), and moral anti-realism makes these profound changes into something of a delusion. However, character education has survived previous philosophical-empirical challenges. Long ago, Hartshorne and May (1928) set out to examine the millions of dollars “spent annually by churches, Sunday schools, and other organizations for children and youth with almost no check on the product” (p. 5) and found that children did not seem to behave in a particularly consistent, that is, trait-like, manner. This finding led Kohlberg (1968) to dismiss character education as a “bag of virtues” approach (p. 26). Still, virtues are not an easy feature of morality to dismiss.Even as Kohlberg was deriding the virtues, a revived virtue ethics movement was picking up steam in philosophy (Foot, 1978/2003). This cleared the way to a “character debate” that pitted individual, or intrinsic, character traits against situational, or extrinsic, factors as the primary determinants of behavior (Flanagan, 1991). This debate ended with some arguing that the idea of moral character needed to be rejected, or at least severely overhauled (Doris, 2002).Obviously, the idea of character has not disappeared. One factor that may have contributed to the limited impact of the character debate on character education was the extremely limited psychology used to structure the debate. Psychological options were restricted to two bland flavours: either moral behavior originated in “character” (stable character traits) or else ‘the situation’ (features of a particular situation). But like all other dualities in psychology (nature/nurture, person/society) the answer here is “both,” and by far the greater challenge is actually stitching together how all of this comes together.Something analogous happens in the ‘intuitionism-realism debate’ when all of the essays that make up moral psychology are considered together. The debate within the volume cleaves to an analogous dualism: either morality is diverse, and subjective, or else morality is fixed, and objective. And the fact the morality seems to spring from diverse psychological intuitions strongly suggests that morality is subjective.But here the debate takes an unlikely turn. Perhaps wanting to avoid this unpalatable conclusion about subjectivity, many of the authors of the chapters on intuitionism have chosen to ground moral intuitions in another psychological level that is supposedly fixed. This innate, universal level is drawn from evolutionary psychology. The title of a article by Tooby and Cosmides pithily summarizes this approach: “The Past Explains the Present” (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). Other contributors to this view, such as Preston and de Waal (2002), state the past-present relation as one of determining ultimate, or distal (evolutionary), factors and proximal factors in moral development. In Preston and de Waal’s terminology, the argument presented in this volume is that there is moral diversity at the proximal level, but moral commonality, and thus moral realism, at the ultimate level. In the chapters such as those by Gigerenzer or Hauser, Young, and Cushman, the issues of moral nihilism or moral scepticism are avoided through an appeal to an evolutionarily and morally prepared mind. Moral diversity lies only on the surface—in the “moral phenotype.” In fact we all share some deep, genetic, moral similarities.I agree that human morality is characterized by both diversity and universality. But locating these at two different levels—the diverse in psychology, the universal in the gene—may be reason for another sort of scepticism. Narvaez (commenting on Haidt and Bjorklund) points out, there is no evidence given to support the existence of an additional, evolutionary level that somehow grounds present diversity. The philosophical function of an appeal to an evolutionary level of organization is merely to “disappear” the serious, but interesting, problems of learning, inventing, and the divergence and convergence of moral practices. Commenting on Chomsky’s view that there was an “innate” language faculty, neuroscientist Donald Hebb and colleagues once pointed out that, “heredity and innate ideas are not being used to provide explanation, but to get rid of the problem by removing it from psychological consideration” (Hebb, Lambert, & Tucker, 1971, p. 213). A similar criticism could be levied at Hauser, Young, and Cushman’s Chomskian-derived model of a moral faculty. Moreover, Prinz (commenting on Hauser, Young, and Cushman) notes that “[t]here are alternative explanations of the current data” (p. 157). Indeed, there must be, as “DNA is a relatively inert molecule, requiring activation from without” (Robert, 2004, p. 50). I again agree with Narvaez that this alternative could be found in an evolutionary-developmental (or “evo-devo”) approach to morality (see e.g., Sansom & Brandon, 2007). In the evolutionary-developmental approach, the focus is on the whole organism. This means that rather than fixing (moral or other) constraints on the genetic level, these can arise from different sources. An important constraint on moral development is found in social interaction (Carpendale, 2009).Also like Narvaez, I think that a closer look at the development of morality, especially through the work of Piaget would be a good start (Chapman, 1988; Piaget, 1932/1965 [1932]). One of the more fascinating, though often totally ignored, aspects of Piaget’s work is his distinction of action and reasoning, and in particular his view that the former shapes the latter (Campbell, Christopher, & Bickhard, 2002, p. 799). Why does activity matter to questions of moral realism? When you and I are in the midst of intractably disagreeing, what else are we doing? We are arguing, which, analyzed at the level of action (or interaction) is a form of cooperation (Bunge, 1989, pp. 149-150). We might agree to disagree, agree to stop talking, agree to wait and see.In other words, moral disagreement on one level does not cause moral systems to fall apart on other levels, if morality is also extended to the level of activity and interaction. The authors in the present volume tend to locate moral stability in the ancestral past, forgetting to explain how the past structures the moral present. In doing so, they overlook the shared morality of shared activity.

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