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Moral Knowledge Does Exist

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Notes

We are considering the following argument:

  1. Ethical intuitions are necessary for ethical knowledge.
  2. Ethical intuitions are too unreliable to be a source of knowledge; therefore:
  3. Ethical knowledge is not possible.

We will assume that premise 1 is true and that the argument is valid. But is premise 2 true?

Previously, in Moral Knowledge Does Not Exist, we considered two attempts to defend premise 2. This section introduces objections to each of those attempts.

I start with an objection to the second attempt ...

Objection to Attempt 2: Ethical intuitions are influenced by extraneous factors

Earlier we considered this argument:

  1. Ethical intuitions are influencd by extraneous factors; therefore
  2. Ethical intuitions are too unreliable to be a source of knowledge.

Is this a good argument?

The premise is uncontroversially true; the issue is whether the conclusion follows.

How do the extraneous factors influence the intuitions? How, for instance, does order of presentation influence philosophers’ intuitons about cases? Wiegmann & Waldmann (2014) offer evidence for the theory that this effect is a consequence of one scenario selectively highlighting an aspect of the causal structure of another scenario.[1] It is possible that, rather than undermining reliability of intuitions, philosophers might regard them as as vindicated. By contrasting the dilemmas, perhaps they can identify morally relevant differences.

How pervasive is the influence of extraneous factors? Wiegmann & Horvath (2021) find that ‘expert ethicists have a genuine advantage over laypeople with respect to some well-known biases.’ This finding suggests that do not know whether the consequences of extraneous effects on philosophers’ intutions are extensive enough to undermine their claims to knowledge. Perhaps extraneous factors have a significant but small effect on ethical intuitions. In that case, the influence of extraneous factors would not be a threat to the claim that ethical intuitions are a source of knowledge.

In many other domains—including the financial (Moreira Costa, De Sá Teixeira, Cordeiro Santos, & Santos, 2021), the medical (Druckman, 2001), the logical (Wason, 1960)[2] and the physical (Fini, Brass, & Committeri, 2015)—there is evidence that extraneous factors influence intuitions. In none of these domains does it follow that intuitions are never be a source of knowledge. We should not apply different standards to the ethical case.[3]

Conclusion: existing evidence for the influence of extraneous factors does not show that ethical intuitions are so unreliable that they cannot be a source of knowledge.

Further reading: Kagan (2023)’s chapter on ethical intuitions defends their reliability by comparison with physical intuitions.

Objection to Attempt 1: Ethical intuitions vary between cultures

Earlier we considered this argument:

  1. Between cultures there are inconsistent intuitions; therefore
  2. Intuitions are too unreliable to be a source of knowledge.

Is this a good argument?

To evaluate it, we need to ask why there is cultural variation ...

Purity matters for combating pathogens

Hominins are amazingly versatile, but we homo sapiens are distinctive even among hominins in the vast range of environments we inhabit (Roberts & Stewart, 2018, p. 542). Different places present different challenges. For instance, pathogens will typically be more prevalent in warm, humid environments than dry, cold ones.

How was our species able to adapt to such different environments? Because the spreading out happened relatively quickly (perhaps in the last seventy thousand years), evolution can explain only a limited range of homo sapiens’ abilities to adapt. (In the talk I will illustrate this by reference to genetic differences in saliva production (Perry et al., 2007). As important as these differences are, they are quite small.) Culture must have been a significant factor in enabling homo sapiens to adapt to different climates.

Purity appears to have been important for meeting the varying challenges posed by pathogens. van Leeuwen, Park, Koenig, & Graham (2012) had subjects answer questions which indicated the degree to which they endorsed moral concerns linked to purity, authority and loyalty (the ‘binding foundations’) compared to the degree to which they endorsed moral foundations linked to harm and unfairness (the ‘individual foundations’). They found a link between stronger endorsement of binding foundations and the historical prevalence of pathogens in the region subjects lived:

‘historical pathogen prevalence—even when controlling for individual-level variation in political orientation, gender, education, and age—significantly predicted endorsement of Ingroup/loyalty [stats removed], Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity; it did not predict endorsement of Harm/care or Fairness/reciprocity’ (van Leeuwen et al., 2012).

This is coherent with the idea that purity has been important because it enabled humans to mitigate risks from pathogens associated with their diet long before they understood pathogens.

Does cultural variation preclude knowledge?

Intuitions about purity have played a role in enabling our species’ colonization of diverse environments during difficult times in which, tragically, many other hominins species became extinct. This seems to indicate that the intuitions are in at least one important sense reliable after all.

This is not to say that intuitions are perfectly reliable—as we saw in Moral Knowledge Does Not Exist, between cultures there are inconsistent intuitions. But perhaps the inconsistencies do not run very deep. Perhaps (to speculate) they arise from different people attending to different aspects of a situation.

Languages appear on the surface to be very different but, famously, they turn out to have a common deep structure. Perhaps ethical intuitions are similar (as Mikhail (2007) argues).

To make the argument from cultural variation work, we have to show that not merely that ethical intuitions are a bit unreliable. We have to show that they are too unreliable to be a source of ethical knowledge. This would be very difficult. (How reliable would intuitions have to be? How can we measure degrees of reliability? How are intuitions supposed to enable ethical knowledge anyway?)

Conclusion: The first attempt to support the premise that ethical intuitions are too unreliable to enable ethical Knowledge does not appear successful, at least not as it stands.

Further reading: Bengson, Cuneo, & Shafer-Landau (2020) offer a defence of ethical intuitions based on the idea that they are part of a successful cognitive practice.

Conclusion so far

Are ethical intuitions are too unreliable to be a source of knowledge? Neither attempt to establish this appears to succeed. Ethical intuitions are not clearly more susceptible to extraneous influences than intuitions in other domains. And the existence of inconsistent ethical intuitions between cultures does not demonstrate that no ethical intuitions can be a source of knowledge.

Further, ethical intuitions play a role in explaining the relative success of our species over the last fifty thousand years or more. This is an indication that at least some ethical intuitions can be a source of knowledge.

Glossary

binding foundations : Categories of moral concern linked to social needs; these are often taken to be betrayal/loyalty, subversion/authority, and impurity/purity (Graham et al., 2011).
individual foundations : Categories of moral concern linked to individual needs; these are often taken to be harm/care, cheating/fairness (Graham et al., 2011). Sometimes called individualizing foundations.

References

Bengson, J., Cuneo, T., & Shafer-Landau, R. (2020). Trusting Moral Intuitions. Noûs, 54(4), 956–984. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12291
Druckman, J. N. (2001). Evaluating framing effects. Journal of Economic Psychology, 22(1), 91–101. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-4870(00)00032-5
Fini, C., Brass, M., & Committeri, G. (2015). Social scaling of extrapersonal space: Target objects are judged as closer when the reference frame is a human agent with available movement potentialities. Cognition, 134, 50–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.08.014
Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. P., & Ditto, P. H. (2013). Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism. In P. Devine & A. Plant (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 47, pp. 55–130). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-407236-7.00002-4
Graham, J., Haidt, J., Motyl, M., Meindl, P., Iskiwitch, C., & Mooijman, M. (2019). Moral Foundations Theory: On the advantages of moral pluralism over moral monism. In K. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of Moral Psychology. New York: Guilford Publications.
Graham, J., Nosek, B. A., Haidt, J., Iyer, R., Koleva, S., & Ditto, P. H. (2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 366–385. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021847
Kagan, S. (2023). Answering Moral Skepticism. New York, NY: Oxford 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
Moreira Costa, V., De Sá Teixeira, N. A., Cordeiro Santos, A., & Santos, E. (2021). When more is less in financial decision-making: Financial literacy magnifies framing effects. Psychological Research, 85(5), 2036–2046. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01372-7
Oaksford, M., & Chater, N. (1994). A rational analysis of the selection task as optimal data selection. Psychological Review, 101(4), 608–631. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.101.4.608
Perry, G. H., Dominy, N. J., Claw, K. G., Lee, A. S., Fiegler, H., Redon, R., … Stone, A. C. (2007). Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation. Nature Genetics, 39(10), 1256–1260. https://doi.org/10.1038/ng2123
Roberts, P., & Stewart, B. A. (2018). Defining the ‘generalist specialist’ niche for Pleistocene Homo sapiens. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(8), 542–550. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0394-4
van Leeuwen, F., Park, J. H., Koenig, B. L., & Graham, J. (2012). Regional variation in pathogen prevalence predicts endorsement of group-focused moral concerns. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33(5), 429–437. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.12.005
Wason, P. C. (1960). On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12(3), 129–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470216008416717
Wiegmann, A., & Horvath, J. (2021). Intuitive Expertise in Moral Judgements. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 100(2), 342–359. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2021.1890162
Wiegmann, A., & Waldmann, M. R. (2014). Transfer effects between moral dilemmas: A causal model theory. Cognition, 131(1), 28–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.12.004

Endnotes

  1. ‘Performing the proposed action in Switch leads to two outcomes–saving three persons and causing the death of one person. The negative outcome does not lie on the same causal path as the good outcome [...] To illustrate why causing the death of the one person does not lie on the causal path saving the three, imagine that the threatening train would stop for some reason shortly after being redirected but before reaching the one person. In this case, the one person would not get killed but the three persons would still be rescued. The feature that the different outcomes lie on different causal paths allows for selective highlighting of the causal relationship between the intervention and the good outcome. If this path is highlighted, the aspect of saving becomes salient in this dilemma. Analogously, the good outcome does not lie on the causal path leading from the intervention to the bad outcome. If this path is selectively highlighted, the aspect of killing dominates. In sum, the causal structure of Switch allows for selective highlighting of the causal relationship between the intervention and either the good or the bad outcome’ (Wiegmann & Waldmann, 2014, p. 30). ↩︎

  2. But see Oaksford & Chater (1994) who argue that participants’ choices in the Wason selection task are actually rational. ↩︎

  3. Kagan (2023) develops a comparison between ethical intuitions and physical intuitions in support of the view that intuitions are reliable enough to be a source of ethical knowledge. ↩︎