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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Moral psychology is the systematic inquiry into how morality works, when it does work, and breaks down when it doesn't work. In this comprehensive new textbook, Mark Alfano outlines the five central concepts in the study of moral psychology: agency, patiency, sociality, temporality, and reflexivity. Subsequent chapters each assess a key area of research, which Alfano relates both to the five central concepts and to empirical findings. He then draws out the philosophical implications of those findings before suggesting future directions for research. One of Alfano's guiding themes is that moral philosophy without psychological content is empty, whereas psychological investigation without philosophical insight is blind. He advocates and demonstrates a holistic vision that pictures moral psychology as a project of collaborative inquiry into the descriptive and normative aspects of the human condition. Featuring a glossary of technical terms, further reading sections and chapter-by-chapter study questions, this rich, systematic, and accessible introduction to moral psychology will be suitable for both undergraduates and researchers in philosophy, psychology and related fields.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Setting the stage
2 Patiency
3 Agency
4 Sociality
5 Reflexivity and temporality
6 Comparing emphases of major normative theories
7 Is and ought
Further readings
Study questions
Notes
1: Preferences
1 The function of preferences: prediction, explanation, planning, and evaluation
2 The role of preferences in moral psychology
3 Preference reversals and choice blindness
4 Philosophical implications of the indeterminacy and instability of preferences
5 Future directions in the moral psychology of preferences
Further readings
Study questions
Notes
2: Responsibility
1 Some incidents
2 The moral psychology of responsibility
3 Implicit bias
4 Philosophical implications of implicit bias
5 Future directions in the moral psychology of implicit bias and responsibility
Further readings
Study questions
Notes
3: Emotion
1 Introduction
2 The role of emotions in moral psychology
3 The neuroscience of emotions
4 Philosophical implications of the cognitive and affective neuroscience of emotion
5 Future directions in the moral psychology of emotion
Further readings
Study questions
Notes
4: Character
1 Introduction
2 The role of character in moral psychology
3 The person-situation debate in personality and social psychology
4 Philosophical implications of personality and social psychology
5 Future directions in the moral psychology of character
Further readings
Study questions
Notes
5: Disagreement
1 Introduction
2 The role of disagreement in moral psychology
3 The science of cross-cultural disagreement
4 Philosophical implications and future directions of the psychology of disagreement
5 Future directions in the moral psychology of disagreement
Further readings
Study questions
Notes
Afterword
Glossary
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Table I.1 Agency x patiency examples
Table 1.1 Choice matrix
Table 2.1 Illustrative concepts of control on three dimensions
Table 2.2 Yearly salaries for victims and beneficiaries of implicit bias
Table 2.3 Lifetime expectations of unfair brutalization for victims of and beneficiaries of implicit bias
List of Illustrations
Figure I.1 Agent–patient relation
Figure I.2 Agent–patient relation
Figure I.3 Recursively embedded agent–patient relations
Figure I.4 Doubly recursively embedded agent–patient relations
Figure 1.1
Figure 2.1 Recursively embedded agent–patient relations
Figure 3.1 Surprise
Figure 3.2 Disgust
Figure 3.3 Fear
Figure 3.4 Anger
Figure 3.5 Joy
Figure 3.6 Sadness
Figure 3.7 Contempt
Figure 3.8 Recursively embedded emotions
Figure 3.9 Your anger at me
Figure 3.10 Anger and guilt
Figure 3.11 Anger and indignation
Figure 4.1 Target domains, relevant emotions, and attendant virtues, vices of deficiency, and vices of excess
Figure 5.1 Slightly different weightings of shared values
Figure 5.2 Very different weightings of mostly shared values
Figure 5.3 Completely disjoint values
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Dedication
For EJA (1983–2015)
“The charm of knowledge would be modest if not for the fact that, on the way to her, so much shame had to be overcome.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (translated from the German by the author)
Copyright page
Copyright © Mark Alfano 2016
The right of Mark Alfano to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7224-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7225-0(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alfano, Mark, 1983– author.
Moral psychology : an introduction / Mark Alfano.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-7224-3 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-7225-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ethics–Psychological aspects. 2. Moral development. I. Title.
BJ45.A44 2016
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2015026465
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by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
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Acknowledgments
This book is the product of years of preparation (some of it intentional, much not), research, and writing. In May 2012, Sarah Lambert contacted me on behalf of Polity Press to ask for advice: she wanted to know who might be in a position to write a monograph on moral psychology for advanced undergraduate students. Flattered that anyone would consider my opinion worthwhile, I assembled some suggested contents and a list of four names (none of them “Mark Alfano”), and wished her well. A couple of months later, Sarah emailed me again to ask whether I would consider writing the book myself. I'd just finished a final draft of my first book, Character as Moral Fiction, and was thinking about what to do next. At the time, I had three monograph-length projects in mind: (1) Desire, Preference, and Value, which would grapple with the normative implications of prospect theory, implicit biases, and what Paul Slovic calls the “collapse function” (the more people who need help, the less we help); (2) Nietzsche's Socio-Moral Psychology, which would offer a naturalistic interpretation of Nietzsche and argue that he anticipated a number of important insights of twentieth-century empirical psychology; and (3) To See As We Are Seen, which would expand the discussion of the ethics of (in)visibility I began in chapter 8 of Character as Moral Fiction to include Plato, Epicurus, Bentham, Buber, Levinas, and Foucault, as well as contemporary psychological and philosophical work on faces, recognition, and privacy. In other words, an undergraduate textbook was not foremost in my mind. With a little cajoling, though, Sarah managed to get me to see that all three of my other projects would benefit from a comprehensive survey of contemporary moral psychology. (The Nietzsche book is next. After that – who knows?)
In preparing this manuscript, I've benefited from presenting research on moral psychology at a number of university colloquia and conferences. If extended memory serves, I discussed work related to this book as early as 2011 (Yale, Washington University in Saint Louis, New York University, Northwestern, Cardiff, University at Buffalo (SUNY), London School of Economics, the Eastern and Pacific APAs, and the North Carolina Philosophical Society Conference), then pretty steadily in subsequent years: 2012 (Princeton, University of Victoria, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the London Conference on Experiments on Ethical Dilemmas, the Sorbonne Conference on Ethics and the Architecture of Personal Dispositions, the Buffalo Experimental Philosophy Conference, the New Jersey Regional Philosophical Association); 2013 (Edinburgh's Eidyn Center, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, the Northwest Philosophy Conference again); and 2014 (Pacific APA, Zurich Center for Ethics, and the Bled Conference on Ethical Issues).
I've also learned a great deal from attending and presenting to the University of Oregon Institute for Cognitive and Decision Sciences research groups in Decision-Making, Social and Personality Psychology, and Scientific Study of Values. In the fall of 2013, I taught a graduate seminar titled “Naturalizing Virtue.” I hope my students (Jacob Levernier, Kathryn Iurino, Phil Mayo, Jesse Chambers, and Rain Baker) learned as much from me as I did from them. In the winter of 2014, I taught an undergraduate honors seminar on moral psychology; the students (Alex Harris, Aurora Laybourn-Candlish, Kendall Mack) in this course weren't mere guinea pigs; but they did provide me an excellent opportunity to pilot some material.
I've also learned a great deal from informal conversations with many, many people. I list them here in alphabetical order, since trying to weight how much I owe to each would be impossible: Abrol Fairweather, Adam Carter, Adam Morton, Aderemi Artis, Adriana Renero, Alex Voerhoeve, Alexander Todorov, Alexandra Plakias, Andrew Bailey, Andrew Conway, Andrew Higgins, Anthony Appiah, Azim Shariff, Brian Kim, Brian Robinson, Bryce Huebner, Chandra Sripada, Christian Miller, Colin Klein, Colin Koopman, Cristina Bicchieri, Dan Haybron, Dan Korman, Dan Shargel, Dana Rognlie, Daniel Kelly, Daniel Lapsley, Daniel Star, Danielle Wylie, David Morrow, David Rosenthal, David Wong, Derek Powell, Dhananjay Jagannathan, Don Loeb, Duncan Pritchard, Elliot Berkman, Emma Gordon, Eric Schwitzgebel, Fiery Cushman, Gabe Abend, Gerard Saucier, Gideon Rosen, Gilbert Harman, Gunnar Bjornsson, Hannes Schwandt, Hanno Sauer, Heather Battaly, Holly Arrow, Jacob Berger, James Beebe, Jason Baehr, Jason Stanley, Jennifer Cole Wright, Jennifer Corns, Jennifer Nagel, Jennifer White, Jesse Prinz, Jesse Summers, John Basl, John Doris, John Mikhail, Jonathan Webber, Jorah Dannenberg, Josh May, Joshua Alexander, Joshua Knobe, Julia Driver, Kate Manne, Kate Norlock, Kristina Gehrman, Lauren Olin, Liezl Van Zyl, Lorraine Besser-Jones, Lynn Kahle, Marc Fleurbaey, Mark Johnson, Markus Christen, Mike Otsuka, Myisha Cherry, Myrto Mylopoulos, Ned Block, Neera Badhwar, Neil Sinhababu, Nina Strohminger, Owen Flanagan, Paul Katsafanas, Paul Slovic, Paul Stey, Peggy Desautels, Peter Singer, Petter Johansson, Philip Pettit, Philipp Koralus, Rachel Cristy, Rachel Fedock, Robert Roberts, Roxanne Desforges, Sanjay Srivastava, Sara Hodges, Shannon Spaulding, Shaun Nichols, Shyam Nair, Stephen Brence, Stephen Stich, Sven Nyholm, Tad Zawidzki, Victoria McGeer, Wesley Buckwalter, Christopher Murtagh, and Zachary Horne. I'm sure there are others, and I can only hope they will forgive my oversight.
Valerie Tiberius deserves special thanks. She and I are, in a sense, competitors, as she also recently wrote a moral psychology textbook (the first to be published in English, as far as I know). Despite this, she generously shared a draft of her manuscript with me. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
I'm also extremely grateful to the Princeton University Center for Human Values and Center for Health and Wellbeing, where I spent the 2012–13 academic year as a research post-doc. Without the time and vibrant intellectual culture this made available, this book would have been completed sooner, and would have been the worse for it.
I am also grateful to the three anonymous referees of this manuscript, especially to reviewer 2, who taught me to appreciate more fully the basic charity accorded by referees 1 and 3.
Finally, two people deserve special thanks: my publishers, Emma Hutchinson and Pascal Porcheron. Emma and Pascal displayed remarkable patience, as I missed multiple deadlines to turn in the manuscript. Without their forbearance, this book would not exist.
Introduction
1 Setting the stage
Moral psychology is the systematic inquiry into how morality works, when it does work, and breaks down when it doesn't work. The field therefore incorporates questions, insights, concepts, models, and methods from various parts of psychology (personality psychology, social psychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology), neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, criminology, and of course philosophy (applied ethics, normative ethics, metaethics). These fields are – or at least can be – mutually informative. Indeed, one guiding theme of this book is that moral philosophy without psychological content is empty, whereas psychological investigation without philosophical insight is blind. Given their characteristically synoptic perspective, philosophers are ideally situated to organize and moderate a productive conversation among these sciences. Nevertheless, there is always the risk that investigators with different training and expertise may misinterpret, misconstrue, or misunderstand one another. In this book, I attempt to put the relevant disciplines in dialogue. They sometimes speak with different accents, jargons, vocabularies, even grammars. My aim is to make their conversation intelligible to the reader, even if they cannot all be brought to speak exactly the same language in exactly the same way.
Systematic inquiry depends on systematic questions. Science is not just a collection of facts about the same thing or class of things. Imagine how stupid it would be to conduct moral psychology by assembling all and only the motives that every person has ever had while responding to a moral problem (assuming this to be possible in the first place). This would be an utterly disorganized, uninformative, overwhelming mess. In the annals of the illustrious British Royal Society, you find descriptions of “experiments” like this: “A circle was made with powder of unicorne's horn, and a spider set in the middle of it, but it immediately ran out severall times repeated. The spider once made some stay upon the powder” (Weld 1848, p. 113). This would be a caricature of bad science if it hadn't actually happened. We might call this empiricism run amok. Science doesn't just ask what happens, as if this were a question that, when completely answered, would satisfy human inquirers. Science asks questions systematically. It asks, for instance, what the effect of X on Y is. It asks whether that effect is mediated by M. It asks whether the effect is moderated by Z.1 It attempts to determine which variables, organized in which configuration, accounts for the variability observed and experimentally induced in the field of inquiry.
In this endeavor, science is guided by insightful identification of relevant variables, careful distinction between similar phenomena, creative elaboration of alternative models, and skeptically imaginative construction of potential counterexamples. As the economist Paul Krugman put it recently on his blog, you can't just let “the data speak for itself – because it never does. You use data to inform your analysis, you let it tell you that your pet hypothesis is wrong, but data are never a substitute for hard thinking. If you think the data are speaking for themselves, what you're really doing is implicit theorizing, which is a really bad idea (because you can't test your assumptions if you don't even know what you're assuming).”2 One way to help make theorizing explicit rather than implicit is to ask systematic questions.
Unfortunately, in universities and in the contemporary education system more broadly, we typically spend far too much time answering (and learning to answer) questions and far too little asking (and learning to ask) questions. So, in this introduction, I'll try to show how questions are asked, how they become more nuanced and complicated, and how conditions of adequacy for answers are (tentatively) established.
Here's a moral question I've asked myself:
What should I do to him for her?
Picture this: I'm headed to work on a downtown subway car at 8:30 AM. Two seats to my right, a 20-something woman is intently reading a magazine, obviously somewhat tense because a man is standing over her, leaning in a bit too close, leering slightly, and alternating between asking her name and telling her to smile. She's presumably on her way to work and obviously uninterested in his conversation. She rolls her eyes and sighs. He seems obnoxious but mostly harmless. She casts about from time to time. Is she looking for help? for someone to share a moment of derisive eye contact with? for reassurance that, if her unwelcome interlocutor escalates to insulting or assaulting her, fellow passengers will not remain apathetic bystanders?
2 Patiency
What should I do to him for her?
This question presupposes an immense amount.
First, it presupposes patiency3 – that is, the fact that things happen to people. My fellow commuter can be made uncomfortable. She can feel threatened. She can be threatened. She can be assaulted. Things – some of them good and some of them quite bad – can happen to her. Some of them might be done by that jerk who keeps insinuating himself on her attention. The fact that good and bad things can happen to her – that she is, in technical terms, a patient – is presupposed by my question.
Things can also happen to him. He can be ignored and accommodated. He can be egged on. He can, alternatively, be confronted and challenged. He can be distracted or redirected. The fact that good, bad, and neutral things can happen to him – that he too is a patient – is also presupposed by my question.
Finally, things can happen to me. One reason I might do nothing is that I'm afraid of what might happen to me if I confront or even just accost him. Probably nothing – but I'm useless in a fight, and strangers can be unpredictable. She might express gratitude to me for intervening. Alternatively, she might be annoyed that a second stranger has made her business his business. I aim to be helpful, which among other things includes stymieing creeps, but I also aim to avoid trampling through strangers' lives uninvited. As I decide what to do, her patiency, his patiency, and my patiency are all quite salient.
Things happen to people. When they do, we have an example of patiency. In other words, when something happens to someone, she is the patient of (is passive with respect to) that event or action. Moral psychology asks what it is about us that makes us patients, and how our patiency figures in our own and other people's moral perception, behavior, decision-making, emotions, characters, and institutions. Several chapters of this book are directly related to patiency. For instance, in chapter 1 on preferences, we will see that some philosophers argue that your life goes well to the extent that your preferences are satisfied. In other words, your life is better when you get what you want than when you don't get it. If you, like most people, want to be healthy, but you end up contracting influenza, your life goes worse. Something happens to you that contravenes your preferences. On the flipside, if you, like most people, prefer temperate weather to frigid cold, and the weather where you are is temperate, then your life goes better. Something happens to you that satisfies your preferences. In chapter 4 on character, we will see that benevolence is typically considered a virtue. What makes someone benevolent? Wishing others well, and at least sometimes acting successfully on those wishes. If a benevolent person helps you in some way, you are the patient of her action.
Thus, patiency is a crucial concept in moral psychology. When I ask what I should do to him for her, I'm asking what follows from her patiency, his patiency, and my own patiency. This is an example of how questions are asked systematically: we start with something seemingly simple and comprehensible (“What should I do to him for her?”) and parse out some of the deeper questions and concepts it presupposes.
3 Agency
What should I do to him for her?
This question presupposes agency. Things don't just happen to people: sometimes people do things.
Return to the example of the woman on the train. She might do something. She might stand up and walk to the next train car. She might lean back and hold her magazine up in front of her face, blocking the stranger's attempt to make eye contact and muffling his voice. She might tell him off. She might kick him in the shin.
Likewise, he might do something. He might continue to bug her until she escapes the train car. He might sit down next to her. He might call her a bitch. He might throw his hands in the air and walk away. He might switch to bothering someone else. He might grow bored and start playing with his smartphone.
I, too, might do something. (There'd be little point in asking myself what I should do if I couldn't.) If my usual wariness of strangers holds up, I might cautiously eye the situation and hope impotently that nothing too bad happens. I might instead stride over and command him to stop bothering her. More helpfully, I might stroll over and ask her quietly whether she's OK.
People do things. When they do, we have an example of agency. In other words, some person is the agent of (is active with respect to) some event or action. Moral psychology asks what it is about us that makes us agents, and how our agency figures in our own and other people's moral perception, behavior, decision-making, emotions, character, and institutions.
Several chapters of this book are directly related to agency. Chapter 1 discusses how our preferences affect our choices, and hence our actions. It's tempting to assume that our preferences are stable, at least once we reach adulthood. Empirical research suggests otherwise. It's even more tempting to assume that our preferences are transitive: if I prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla and prefer vanilla to strawberry, then I'd better prefer chocolate to strawberry. Again, empirical research suggests that, at least in some cases, transitivity breaks down. To what extent can we be the authors of our own actions if our preferences are unstable and inconsistent? Chapter 2 is about the relation between deliberative agency, on the one hand, and implicit biases, on the other. The vast majority of people in the developed world would, if asked, reject racist and sexist beliefs. But social psychologists have demonstrated that most of us nevertheless implicitly harbor and even act on racist and sexist associations. When we do, are we fully responsible for our actions? If we aren't, why not? Chapter 3 asks whether we are more or less agentic when we are motivated by emotions. Particularly intense emotions seem to come over us like a hurricane, swamping our planning, deliberation, and policies. But deficits in emotion have been shown to correlate with demonstrably bad decision-making. Chapter 4 connects agency with virtue, which for many theorists is a matter of acting in accordance with practical reason.
If people were incapable of agency, if they were entirely passive beings, the contours of whose lives were completely determined by outside forces, there wouldn't be much for moral psychologists to think about. We could construct theories about what it meant for one person to have a better life than another, what it meant for one person to have as good a life as possible for such an impoverished creature, what it meant for such a life to improve or deteriorate. But that would be about it. The introduction of agency greatly complicates moral psychology. Now, things don't just happen to us; we do things. Some of those things turn out as we want or intend them to. Others don't. This imposes some constraints on what it means to act well, to be a successful agent. Sometimes we do what we want, but then we are disappointed by the result. This suggests that we need a better understanding of our own preferences. Sometimes we accomplish one goal but in so doing thwart our striving for a second goal. This suggests that we need to understand agency holistically, so that it involves progress toward a complete set of goals without too much self-undermining. Such constraints are discussed in chapter 1.
Thus, agency, like patiency, is a crucial concept in moral psychology, and it's a concept that complicates the inquiry. When I ask what I should do to him for her, I'm asking what follows from her agency, his agency, and my own agency. This is a further example of how questions are asked: we start with something seemingly simple and comprehensible (“What should I do to him for her?”) and parse out some of the deeper questions and concepts it presupposes.
4 Sociality
What should I do to him for her?
This question presupposes sociality. Things happen to people: they get sick, they enjoy pleasant weather, they endure the many small indignities of youth and the even more numerous small indignities of aging. People do things: they stand up and walk away, they shrink into their seats, they write books. In many interesting cases, though, one person does something to someone else. Indeed, some of the examples I gave above had this flavor. The only reason I asked myself what I should do to him for her was that he was doing something to her in the first place: he was harassing her. As I deliberated about what to do, I considered the fact that there were things she might do to him, such as pointedly ignoring him, additional things he might do to her, such as insulting her, and various things I might do to him on her behalf, such as confronting him for harassing her. Moral psychology asks what it is about us that makes us social, and how our sociality figures in our own and other people's moral perception, behavior, decision-making, emotions, character, and institutions.
As table I.1 illustrates, people can be simple patients, to whom things just happen; they can be simple agents, who just do things; but they can also be complex agents and patients: they can do things to each other. In such cases, agency and patiency are inextricably intertwined. One person's agency is the cause or even a constitutive part of another person's patiency. One person's patiency is the effect of another person's agency. When asked, “What happened to you?” my fellow commuter would be giving an incomplete answer if she responded, “I was harassed.” Being harassed is not like enjoying pleasant weather; it's not something that can happen to someone all on their own. A more complete answer would be, “I was harassed by a stranger.” Likewise, if someone later asked the creep, “What did you do on the train?” he would be giving an incomplete response if he answered, “I harassed.” Harassing isn't like standing up; it's not something someone can do all on their own.
Table I.1 Agency x patiency examples
Y
is a patient
Y
is not a patient
X
is an agent
X
harasses
Y
X
kicks
Y
in the shin
X
confronts
Y
X
stands up
X
shrinks into his seat
X
writes a book
X
is not an agent
Y
gets sick
Y
enjoys pleasant weather
Y
grows old
We can represent these relations with the schematic diagram illustrated in figure I.1.4 In this diagram (and others of its sort that I'll use below), a dot represents a person. An arrow proceeding away from a dot represents that person exercising agency. An arrow pointing at a dot or other array represents that entity enduring patiency (good, bad, or neutral). I'll put a box around each such relation.
Figure I.1
Agent–patient relation
Figure I.1 represents the simplest sort of sociality: one agent does something to another agent. Gray et al. (2012) suggest that the fundamental template for moral judgment is an agent (potentially) harming a patient. I agree in large part, but as the following sections show, I think things are more complicated. A more complex form of sociality emerges when two people are agents and patients with respect to each other at the same time: you do something to me while I do something to you. For instance, we dance together, each making suggestions to the other through subtle bodily movement, gestures, glances, and words. Call this interactivity. Figure I.2 represents interactive sociality of this sort.
Figure I.2
Agent–patient relation
Things happen to people; people do things; sometimes, these are the same event. But sociality is often more complicated than that. Interactivity is one source of complexity, but a minor one. Another source of complexity is the possibility – indeed, the prevalence – of recursively embedded agent–patient relations. This might sound frighteningly technical, but don't worry. Recursion is all over the place, and I'm certain that you're already familiar with it, if only informally. Recursion is a process in which objects of a given type are generated by or defined in terms of other objects of the same type. For instance, think of your ancestors. What makes someone an ancestor of yours? The answer to this question relies on recursion: the parents of X are ancestors of X (that's the non-recursive step) and ancestors of ancestors of X are ancestors of X (that's the recursive step). Your grandparents are your ancestors because they're the parents of your parents. Your great-grandparents are your ancestors because they're the parents of the parents of your parents. Your great-great-grandparents are your ancestors because they're the parents of the parents of the parents of your parents. The great-great-grandparents of your great-great-grandparents are your ancestors because they're the ancestors of your ancestors. And so on.
Social agent–patient relations can also be recursively embedded. The majority – probably the vast majority – of the complexity of moral psychology derives from such embedding. In fact, the example I started off with has a recursive structure. When I asked myself what I should do to him for her, I was thinking of myself as an agent who acts on a preexisting agent–patient relationship. After all, I would have had no reason to intervene if he hadn't been harassing her in the first place.
Figure I.3 illustrates the situation in which one person acts on a second person acting on a third person. Since this relation is recursive, it can be expanded yet another step (and another, and another…), as illustrated in figure I.4. Although figure I.4 might seem complicated, I think we can pretty easily conjure up a situation that it characterizes. For instance, imagine that I decide to stride over to the creep and aggressively command him to cut it out. As I confront the harasser, my friend intervenes between us, saying, “Look, everybody just knock it off.” My friend acts on me acting on him acting on her. This sort of thing happens all the time. And, as you can see, the more recursion there is, the most complicated the situation becomes.
Figure I.3
Recursively embedded agent–patient relations
Figure I.4
Doubly recursively embedded agent–patient relations
Moral judgments, likewise, can be embedded in other moral judgments to produce novel moral judgments (Harman 2008, p. 346). Indeed, there seem to be productive moral principles based on recursion: if it's wrong to x, then generally it will also be wrong to coerce someone to x. Similarly, if it's wrong to x, then generally it will also be wrong to command someone to x. From this it follows that if it's wrong to x, then it's wrong to command someone to coerce someone to x. Such moral embedding has been experimentally investigated by John Mikhail (2011, pp. 43–8), who argues on the basis of experiments using variants on the “trolley problem” (Foot 1978) that moral judgments are generated by imposing a deontic structure on one's representation of the causal and evaluative features of the action under consideration. One might also think that this feature of morality helps to explain the troubling “banality of evil” (Arendt 1963), which crops up when multiple layers of bureaucracy and other institutional structures lead to cases where an individual, like Adolf Eichmann, orders someone to order someone to order someone to murder someone. At a great many recursive removes, this might feel like dull paper-pushing, but from a moral point of view it might be at least as bad as committing the murder oneself.
Moral psychology asks what it is about us that makes us social, and how our sociality figures in our own and other people's moral perception, behavior, decision-making, emotions, characters, and institutions. Sociality is what makes moral psychology so complicated but also so interesting. In a way, it's the underlying theme of every chapter of this book, but it features most prominently in chapters 3, 4, and 5. In chapter 3 on emotion, we will see that emotions often function as signaling devices. When I display anger, I signal to you that I am prepared and committed to react aggressively to offenses. When you display disgust, you signal to me that the object of your disgust is contaminated and to be avoided. Emotional signaling fits well into the recursive embedding structure discussed here. When I display anger toward you, I also often signal to other people that they should be indignant over the offense you've caused me (a relationship like the one in figure I.3). When you display contempt toward my behavior, you also often signal to other people that they should feel superior to me. Chapter 4 on character discusses the interlocking virtues of generosity and gratitude. Chapter 5 on moral disagreement investigates the ways in which sociality influences agreement on moral values, norms, heuristics, and decisions.
Arguably, sociality is the key concept required to provisionally carve off the moral domain from related evaluative domains, such as the epistemic, the conventional, and the prudential. One common way of marking this distinction, due in part to Hare (1952), is to hold that the concept of morally wrong action involves four main components: seriousness, generality, authority-independence, and objectivity. This conception has been challenged by, among others, Sinnott-Armstrong & Wheatley (2014) and Haidt & Joseph (2007). At this early stage, I will settle for gesturing at a very broad moral domain including anything susceptible to judgments of being good, bad, better, worse, best, worst, obligatory, permissible, impermissible, virtuous, and vicious. As we proceed, these concepts will be fleshed out and made more precise, and conceptual and empirical connections among them will emerge. Already, we can see that this broad construal of morality encompasses the assessment of states of affairs (as good, bad, and so on), actions (as obligatory, forbidden, permissible), and states of character (as in various ways virtuous or vicious). Not all such assessments are properly moral; I will contend (especially in chapter 3 on emotion) that the properly moral involves the presuppositions of social emotions. If you express moral resentment toward me, your emotion involves an implicit call for me to respond with guilt (or to explain why your resentment is inappropriate) and for others to respond with indignation toward me (or likewise to explain to you why your resentment is inappropriate). This point will be familiar to some readers from Peter Strawson's “Freedom and resentment” (1960). This helps to explain why moral norms are sometimes conceived as those that demand not just retaliation by victims of their violation, but also third-party punishment (Fehr & Fischbacher 2004). Failure to respond appropriately is then itself considered a moral violation (Sripada 2005): if I respond to your justified anger not with guilt but with derision, I have committed another moral offense; if others respond to your justified anger not with indignation but with callousness, they have committed a moral offense just as much as I have.
Thus, sociality, like patiency and agency, is a crucial concept in moral psychology, and it's a concept that greatly complicates the inquiry. When I ask what I should do to him for her, I'm asking what follows from our sociality, that is, from the fact that I can act on him acting on her. This is another example of how questions are asked: we start with something seemingly simple and comprehensible (“What should I do to him for her?”) and parse out some of the deeper questions and concepts it presupposes.
5 Reflexivity and temporality
What should I do to him for her?
This question presupposes reflexivity. People do things; things happen to people; people do things to people. In some cases, the agent and the patient are the same person. In other words, people can do things to themselves. This is easiest to see if we also introduce the last main conceptual presupposition of my question: temporality. As I decide what to do to him for her, here are some considerations that might cross my mind:
If I don't intercede somehow, I'll feel guilty all day.
If I manage to distract him without starting a fight, I'll be proud.
If I act like a coward now, I'll be cultivating bad habits.
All these considerations involve thinking of my future self as the patient of my current self. Another way of putting the same point is that I'm taking a social perspective on myself: on the one hand, me-now is the agent who does something to a patient; on the other hand, me-in-the-future is the patient to whom something is done by that agent. These concepts also interact with sociality and the recursive embedding of agent–patient relations. For instance, suppose I make a bad decision on Monday (agent) that leads me to make an even worse decision on Tuesday (patient-to-Monday-me) that leads me to suffer immensely on Wednesday (patient-to-Tuesday-me). This is the sort of structure represented in I.3, except that all three nodes represent me – just at different stages of my life.
Whenever we engage in long-term projects – especially long-term projects that are meant to have some effects on our future selves – patiency, agency, sociality, reflexivity, and temporality are all involved. Were you to think of your future self as a stranger or even a friend, rather than as yourself, your planning would look very different. Likewise, if you were to think of your past actions as those of a stranger or even of a friend, rather than of yourself, your trajectory would change radically. It doesn't make sense to feel regret, remorse, guilt, or shame for the actions of a stranger, even a stranger who resembles you in some way. Moral psychology asks what it is about us that makes us reflexive and temporal, and how our reflexivity and temporality figure in our own and other people's moral perception, behavior, decision-making, emotions, characters, and institutions.
Several chapters of this book are directly related to reflexivity and temporality. The instability of preferences discussed in chapter 1 is a temporal instability, and it threatens agency because human agency as we normally conceive of it is meant to be temporally extended. I don't just do things now. I do things now so that I can do and experience things later. If my preferences change in the meantime, then setting myself up to do or experience something later may be pointless. The interaction between deliberative agency and implicit biases discussed in chapter 2 concerns, among other things, whether I'm able to reflectively endorse my own choices. Emotions, discussed in chapter 3, can function as social signals; they can also function as commitment devices. If I have a particular emotion, I'm committing myself (if only unconsciously and tentatively) to a plan of action in the future. If I act wrongly, one of the things that may happen to my future self is the suffering of remorse. Virtue, discussed in chapter 4, is acquired (according to Aristotle and many who follow in his footsteps) through long-term, goal-directed cultivation; I have a plan for my own life over time, which I proceed to carry out, making me my own patient over the course of months, years, and even decades.
Reflexivity and temporality complicate moral psychology in various ways. This is easiest to see if we imagine creatures that are otherwise just like humans but who have no long-term memory, no sense of self, and no capability to plan, to feel proud of their accomplishments, or to experience remorse. Although such creatures would be patients (things would happen to them) and agents (they would do things) who were in some ways social (they would do things to each other), they would be very unlike us insofar as they could not intentionally do things to and for themselves, could not be grateful to or disappointed with their past selves, could not engage in long-term projects, and could not enjoy long-term friendships. Clearly, these are crucial aspects of human moral psychology.
Thus far, we have explored five crucial concepts in moral psychology: patiency, agency, sociality, reflexivity, and temporality. I don't mean to suggest that these are the only concepts moral psychologists find worth studying, but I do think they are among the most central. Other important concepts will crop up throughout this book. Some, such as emotion and intuition, will be treated at greater length. Others, such as imagination and mindfulness, will receive less attention. I encourage you to follow up on any and all of the concepts that capture your interest, and will provide lists of secondary sources at the end of each chapter to help direct and slake your curiosity. In the remainder of this introduction, I will characterize some of the major normative theories that you might already be aware of in terms of their emphases on patiency, agency, sociality, reflexivity, and temporality. After that, I'll conclude by considering an objection to moral psychology that might be raised because of the ever-fraught relationships among contingency, necessity, and normativity. In particular, I'll focus on the truism that one can never deduce a normative claim from a descriptive claim, an ought from an is.
6 Comparing emphases of major normative theories
In the history of Western philosophy, four major normative theories have emerged: utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, and care ethics. Since it's likely that you've encountered at least some of these views before reading this book, in this section, I compare how they relate to the five core concepts of moral psychology.
6.1 Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is the best-known variety of a family of views called consequentialism. According to consequentialism, the goodness of an act is determined solely by the goodness of the consequent state of affairs. This view is typically combined with a theory of what makes a state of affairs good and a theory of right action. For instance, hedonist act utilitarianism says that the only thing that contributes to the goodness of a state of affairs is pleasure, that the only thing that detracts from the goodness of a state of affairs is pain, and that an action is right if (and only if) it maximizes the amount of goodness in the consequent state of affairs.
Pleasure and pain are mental states that humans and other animals enjoy and suffer. Thus, utilitarians and other consequentialists place their primary emphasis on patiency. Jeremy Bentham, one of the foremost utilitarian thinkers in philosophical history, exemplified this attitude, while asking what determines whether a creature has moral worth and bears moral consideration:
Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
(1789/1961, ch. 17, fn.)
For someone like Bentham, it doesn't matter whether you can engage in reasoning (including the practical reasoning required for agency and the reflexivity required for long-term planning). It doesn't matter whether you can talk. The main moral question for him is whether you can suffer, whether things can happen to you – in particular, bad and painful things.
Utilitarianism thus gives pride of place to patiency and de-emphasizes agency and reflexivity. Bentham's lack of concern for talking might lead one to think that he and other utilitarians have no regard for sociality. In one sense, that's correct. However, utilitarians and other consequentialists also tend to think that every being capable of suffering matters equally. And they recognize that people are capable of both inflicting suffering on one another and alleviating one another's suffering. For this reason, utilitarians put a great deal of emphasis on sociality, though deriving that emphasis from its relation to patiency and suffering.
Naturally, there are more sophisticated versions of consequentialism that shift the emphasis to some extent away from patiency. For example Amartya Sen (1985) has developed a consequentialist framework in which the primary bearers of value are not occurrent states of pleasure, but human capabilities (e.g., literacy, being ambulatory, having enough food to eat even if one chooses to fast, a full emotional repertoire, political control), along with the freedom to exercise agency in choosing the set of capabilities one eventually acquires.
Lastly, utilitarians tend to put great emphasis on temporality. What I have in mind here is the fact that the consequences of an action are typically construed not just as what happens immediately afterwards, but as everything that flows from the action. Everything, for all time? At the very least, everything that could be foreseen by a very intelligent and dedicated investigator. Utilitarians care so much about such long-term consequences that they have debates about population ethics, asking questions such as “How many people should there be?” (Blackorby et al. 1995)
6.2 Kantian ethics
Kantian ethics, the best-known exemplar of deontological ethics, puts most emphasis on the two concepts that utilitarianism deemphasizes (agency and reflexivity), while according less weight to the concepts utilitarianism emphasizes (patiency, sociality, and temporality). Kant thought that an account of moral obligation could be derived from the structure of agency itself. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he called this the categorical imperative, because it applies to every agent in every action they undertake regardless of their desires, preferences, and values. The best-known formulation of the categorical imperative states that you must “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (Groundwork 4:421). My book is not an introduction to major moral theories, let alone the history of philosophy, so I will not go into much detail interpreting the categorical imperative. Kant's idea, though, is that simply in virtue of being an agent you are constrained to act from some motives rather than others. Clearly, then, agency figures importantly in Kantian ethics.
The other core concept that receives primary emphasis in Kantian ethics is reflexivity. This is already somewhat evident from the first formulation of the categorical imperative, which requires you to reflect on and extrapolate from your own motives, but it comes into focus if we consider the third formulation: act as if you were, through your maxim, always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends (Groundwork 4:439). On this view, a moral act is one that can be self-legislated – i.e., an act that is in accordance with a law one could give not only to others but also to oneself.
Agency and reflexivity have pride of place in Kantian ethics, but the other three core moral psychological concepts receive some attention. Patiency and sociality get their due in the second formulation of the categorical imperative: treat humanity – whether your own or someone else's – never merely as the means to some end, but always as an end in its own right. In this formulation, we can see that Kant cares not only about agency, but also about what's done to people. He thinks it's always wrong to treat someone as a mere means to your own end. However, patiency matters for Kant only derivatively because he thinks that what's wrong with treating someone as a mere means is that, in so doing, you don't respect their agency. Thus, the importance of what happens to us and what we do to each other depends on the antecedent importance of agency.
Finally, Kantian ethics doesn't totally discount temporality (Kant argues that we have an imperfect duty to develop our own talents, for instance), but it also doesn't place primary emphasis on it.
6.3 Virtue ethics
Virtue ethics is a family of views that focuses less on what it's right to do and more on what sort of person it's good to be. A good person is someone with many virtues (compassion, courage, honesty, trustworthiness) and few vices (selfishness, laziness, unfairness, rashness). Ancient Greek philosophers were basically all virtue ethicists of one kind or another. Plato emphasized the virtues of courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. Aristotle famously thought that every virtue was a middle state between a pair of vices. For instance, courage is the disposition to fear neither too many things nor too few things, to fear them neither too intensely nor not intensely enough, to fear them neither for too long nor for too short a period, and so on.
