Conclusion

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Notes

Do all forms of normative guidance require attitudes?

Not if the conjecture that socially coordinated feelings of disgust, bitterness, or pain function to enable us to adopt norm-like patterns is correct.

Why does it feel wrong when we know it isn’t?

Because (so my speculative proposal)

actual or anticipated violations of norm-like patterns create (i) metacognitive feelings of disfluency and (ii) anticipation of sanctions or of feelings of disgust, bitterness or pain,

where the anticipation of sanctions or feelings unconsciously biases me to interpret the feeling of disfluency as wrongness.

Note that on this view, feelings of disgust, bitterness or pain are only indirectly directly tied to the feeling of wrongness (via metacognitive disfluency).^[1]

How do incidental feelings influence moral judgements?

Indirectly. They may play a role in establishing and maintaining norm-like patterns. And they could play a role in biasing us to interpret metacognitive feelings of disfluency associated with violations of norm-like patterns as feelings of wrongness.

What is the best computational description of fast ethical processes?

Wildly speculative conjecture: the processes likely to be evolutionarily ancient, to appear early in development and which influence adults’ ethical intuitions involve coordination around norm-like patterns.

Are evolutionarily ancient processes which appear early in development guided by principles adaptive in prehistoric environments?

Not if the conjecture that these processes involve socially coordinated feelings of disgust, bitterness, or pain which function to enable norm-like patterns is correct.

The processes do not encode principles. However they may appear to do so insofar as some things are most likely to provoke feelings of bitterness, disgust or pain.

Why is there a gap between material and ethical understanding?

Because (i) intuitions are recognized a constraint by many researchers in ethics, and (ii) one source of these intuitions is norm-like patterns which are not suited to theoretical generalization.

References

Giner-Sorolla, R., Kupfer, T., & Sabo, J. (2018). What Makes Moral Disgust Special? An Integrative Functional Review. In J. M. Olson (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 57, pp. 223–289). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2017.10.001

Piazza, J., Landy, J. F., Chakroff, A., Young, L., & Wasserman, E. (2018). What disgust does and does not do for moral cognition. In N. Strohminger & V. Kumar (Eds.), The moral psychology of disgust (pp. 53–81). Rowman & Littlefield International.

Endnotes

As Piazza et al. (2018, p. 73) note, there is ‘lack of covariance between felt disgust and wrongness judgments’. See also Giner-Sorolla et al. (2018, p. 264): ‘ambient incidental disgust does not seem to have strong and consistent effects on moral judgment.‘ ↩︎