The Neuroscience of Moral Judgment and Aquinas on Moral Expertise

In this fine book, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues for a "moderate Pyrrhonian" skeptical view about justified moral belief.1 His argument rests on the thesis that the justification of a belief is a relation between that belief and a class of alternatives (83-87). On this thesis, the "contrast-class view," we can assess the justification of a belief relative to various contrast classes. Sinnott-Armstrong argues that there is no showing that any particular class has epistemological priority (97-103; 117-129); because of this we should suspend belief about whether any moral beliefs are justified "without qualification" (130; 251). This is his "Pyrrhonian moral skepticism." Sinnott-Armstrong also argues that moral nihilism cannot be ruled-out (99, 133); given this, no positive moral belief is justified relative to contrast classes that include moral nihilism. Nevertheless, he thinks, some moral beliefs may be justified relative to alternatives that are taken seriously in ordinary deliberation (130-131). This is his "moderate moral skepticism." Sinnott-Armstrong's arguments are rich and subtle. His book includes a sophisticated assessment of debates in epistemology as well as a thorough examination of the epistemological resources of metaethical theories. I cannot do justice to all of this. I will attempt merely to raise problems for the contrast-class view and for Sinnott-Armstrong's position that nihilism cannot be ruled-out.

In this article, I provide a guide to some current thinking in empirical moral psychology on the nature of moral intuitions, focusing on the theories of Haidt and Narvaez. Their debate connects to philosophical discussions of virtue theory and the role of emotions in moral epistemology. After identifying difficulties attending the current debate around the relation between intuitions and reasoning, I focus on the question of the development of intuitions. I discuss how intuitions could be shaped into moral expertise, outlining Haidt’s emphasis on innate factors and Narvaez’s account in terms of a social-cognitive model of personality. After a brief discussion of moral relativism, I consider the implications of the account of moral expertise for our understanding of the relation between moral intuitions and reason. I argue that a strong connection can be made if we adopt a broad conception of reason and a narrow conception of expertise.

What role, if any, should our moral intuitions play in moral epistemology? We make, or are prepared to make, moral judgments about a variety of actual and hypothetical situations. Some of these moral judgments are more informed, reflective, and stable than others (call these ourconsideredmoral judgments); some we make more confidently than others; and some, though not all, are judgments about which there is substantial consensus. What bearing do our moral judgments have on philosophical ethics and the search for first principles in ethics? Should these judgments constrain, or be constrained by, philosophical theorizing about morality? On the one hand, we might expect first principles to conform to our moral intuitions or at least to our considered moral judgments. After all, we begin the reflection that may lead to first principles from particular moral convictions. And some of our moral intuitions (e.g., that genocide is wrong) are more fixed and compelling than any putative first principle. If so, we might expect common moral beliefs to have an important evidential role in the construction and assessment of first principles. On the other hand, common moral beliefs often rest on poor information, reflect bias, or are otherwise mistaken. We often appeal to moral principles to justify our particular moral convictions or to resolve our disagreements. Insofar as this is true, we may expect first principles to provide a foundation on the basis of which to test common moral beliefs and, where necessary, form new moral convictions.

This paper defends an expertise-centric account of moral intuition and Confucian sagehood in the Mencius . I argue that we should conceive of sages as moral experts and moral intuitions as intellectual seemings, some of which are expert-like in content and therefore afford prima facie epistemic justification to the moral beliefs that are based on them. Such a proposal rejects an intuition-based moral epistemology in favour of a broadly process reliabilist one. I motivate the proposal by arguing that it allows us to avoid three problems, two of which arise for moral intuitionist readings of Mencius: the problem that such readings posit a mysterious faculty of intuition and that we have difficulty explaining why some but not all relevant moral intuitions epistemically justify beliefs. The third problem arises for both moral intuitionist and connoisseurship readings: the problem that the moral intuitions of Confucian sages are epistemically inaccessible to ordinary people.

Foresight, Epistemic Reliability and the Systematic Underestimation of Risk Joshua A. Miller (bio) and Steven Douglas Maloney (bio) "Liberal governments cannot plan." —Theodore Lowi Good government must balance demands of legitimacy with those of accurate inquiry about the common good. David Estlund's work on epistemic proceduralism, culminating (to this point) with Democratic Authority, demands theories of democratic legitimacy respect this balance. Estlund compels his reader to doubt that either correctness theories or pure procedural democracy adequately manage this balance. Estlund moves the conversation on deliberative democracy dramatically forward by pushing all parties away from either extreme. Still, we wonder about Estlund's view that there exist no instances when a political regime might need to tilt heavily towards correctness at the expense of legitimacy. Perhaps some events are so cataclysmic that their avoidance must trump both legitimacy on the particular decision and general reliability on questions of less importance. Ultimately, Estlund's claims to balance the demands of truth-seeking and democratic justification raise many principled objections and empirical challenges to institutional design even as they lay others to rest. Estlund claims that public inquiry into moral and empirical facts is authoritative only when it is subordinated to a general acceptability requirement, "no one has the authority or legitimate coercive power over another without a justification that could be accepted by all qualified points of view."1 The general acceptability requirement ideally harnesses the preference aggregating and information-assessing functions of democratic institutions like voting, deliberating, and protesting while curbing elitist ("epistocratic") procedures. Moral experts are not, by virtue of this qualification, political authorities capable of making generally obligating policies. Since our moral intuitions and judgments are generally not biddable by unexplained appeals to expertise, democratic polities that defer to experts are, he claims, confusing correctness with authority. This caveat preserves the authority by which even dissenting citizens feel obliged to obey or face just coercion. Estlund's view is laudable for trying to force formal political theorists to consider epistemic demands, but it ignores the growing requirements of predictive inquiry necessitated by the state's exclusive claim to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its citizens. We agree that a fair procedure is insufficient if it is not also likely to produce good policy: "it must count in favor of a social decision procedure that it tends to produce the better decision."2 Still, a procedure that does this must successfully collect epistemically reliable evaluations of facts and norms. A functioning democracy must not only be able to determine basic fact-finding (that a flood or financial collapse is occurring or has occurred) and norm-discovery (to proclaim in retrospect that it ought to have been prevented.) A state must also prevent and prepare for future risks, to preserve its citizens' health, safety, and welfare. Even more difficult, it must handicap the likely risk of its occurrence against the expenditure of limited resources for prevention or ameliorative response. Strictly speaking, this is not normative inquiry. There are facts of the matter about future states of affairs, but they can only be measured in probabilities, cautiously and with constant corrections as new facts come to light. Nonetheless, future events have normative implications such that prediction and prescription are often conflated. We fear that predictive and preventative inquiry is a kind of empirical inquiry for which majoritarian institutions are ill suited. It appears, then, that Estlund cannot split the difference between authority and accuracy: for some decisions, at least, he must choose. A. The Challenge "What if democracy got most things right, but none of the most important things?"3 There are some decisions a state can make whose effects outweigh all others. The risks associated with failure in these decisions overshadow considerations of legitimacy, acceptability, and accuracy in lesser matters: getting those decisions right must be the first priority of any polity if it is to survive to make more banal choices. In this way, all regimes are truth-seeking, and all citizens should accept institutions that [End Page 54] get these decisions right the most often rather than trading off the possibility of cataclysm for some other goods like fairness. When considering cataclysmic risks, Estlund focuses on...

According to Haidt's (2001) social intuitionist model (SIM), an individual's moral judgment normally arises from automatic ‘moral intuitions’. Private moral reasoning—when it occurs—is biased and post hoc, serving to justify the moral judgment determined by the individual's intuitions. It is argued here, however, that moral reasoning is not inevitably subserviant to moral intuitions in the formation of moral judgments. Social cognitive research shows that moral reasoning may sometimes disrupt the automatic process of judgment formation described by the SIM. Furthermore, it seems that automatic judgments may reflect the ‘automatization’ of judgment goals based on prior moral reasoning. In line with this role for private moral reasoning in judgment formation, it is argued that moral reasoning can, under the right circumstances, be sufficiently unbiased to effectively challenge an individual's moral beliefs. Thus the social cognitive literature indicates a greater and more direct role for private moral reasoning than the SIM allows.

Philosophers have harbored doubts about the possibility of moral expertise since Plato. I argue that irrespective of whether moral experts exist, identifying who those experts are is insurmountable because of the credentials problem: Moral experts have no need to seek out others’ moral expertise, but moral non-experts lack sufficient knowledge to determine whether the advice provided by a putative moral expert in response to complex moral situations is correct and hence whether an individual is a bone fide expert. Traditional accounts of moral expertise require that moral experts give reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification, an account which, I argue, is too lean in allowing for the possibility of a moral expert who is motivationally indifferent to her own moral judgments and advice. Yet even if the proposition that a moral expert is an individual who provides reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification and is necessarily motivated by that advice exhausts the necessary and sufficient conditions for moral expertise, this proposition cannot function as an applicable criterion for non-experts to use in appraising would-be experts’ claims to expertise. The credentials problem thus remains unanswered.

The aim of this paper is to answer the question of whether moral intuitions, understood in terms of Jonathan Haidt's Social Intuitionist Model (SIM), have any normative power. The conclusion is no. And there are many separate arguments in favor of it. First, these moral intuitions cannot be objective, justifying reasons that are expected to arise in the course of making a ‘real’ moral judgment. Second, we do not even know if they actually represent the grounds for moral judgments. There are too few reasons to exclude the possibility that, when we make moral judgments, we unconsciously follow moral rules, which can be objective moral reasons. Furthermore, in Haidt's terms, moral intuitions are most probably heuristic by nature. But if they are, it is even more problematic for their normativity because they can lead to mistakes. There is also a lacuna in the research concerning problems with resolving moral dilemmas in which two strong moral intuitions are involved. Third, philosophers claim that there is some other kind of justified moral intuitions and psychologists often mistakenly mix together these two phenomena. In this paper, all of these arguments will be examined and they will serve to justify the lack of normativity of moral intuitions in the SIM.

With the Healthcare Ethics Consultant Certification (HEC-C) offered through the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH), the practice of clinical ethics has taken a decisive step into professionalization. But without an unambiguous sense of what clinical ethicists can contribute to the clinical environment, it is unclear what the HEC-C ensures clinical ethicists can do. Though the ASBH enumerates a set of core competencies, many disagree over what role those competencies empower ethicists to serve. Two recent publications are notable for advocating conflicting positions on the question of ethicists' competence: "Ethics Expertise: What It Is, How to Get It, and What to Do with It" by Christopher Meyers (2018) and Rethinking Health Care Ethics by Stephen Scher and Kasia Kozlowska (2018). In response to Scher and Kozlowska's argument that the primary role of ethicists is to create space to engage clinician's moral intuitions, this analysis follows Meyers in contending that ethicists can also contribute a kind of moral expertise. However, acquiring moral expertise is no easy task, and it is unlikely to be substantiated by a certification exam. This analysis draws on research from the psychology of expertise to outline the sort of training needed to cultivate and enhance moral expertise.

Impartial Attractiveness as a Moral Test Karol Edward Soltan (bio) How should we modify our systematic thinking about moral questions in order to achieve the following two goals? 1. Bring it in closer alignment with the modern scientific spirit, as it is understood today, not as it was understood in 17th or 18th century (no self evident moral truths as axioms, for example) and not as it was understood in 13th century either (no return to Aristotle or to Saint Thomas Aquinas). 2. Make systematic moral thinking as helpful as it can be in improving the world. Certainly it would then have to have normative force, and it would need to pay attention to the problem of motivation, and to possible supporting institutional instruments, such as the courts of law, or self-limiting social movements. This is the problem I would like to address in this essay. My suggestions are: first, help develop empirical normative ethics, (this is now done, for example, as part of the new experimental philosophy); and, second, adopt the project of "impartial attractiveness as a moral test," as part of this empirical normative ethics. I further suggest an interpretation of attractiveness that mixes emotion and cognition, so that moral judgments are not purely cognitive, and our concern is with attracting loyalties, and not simply attracting beliefs. [End Page 281] The project of impartial attractiveness as a moral test needs elaboration at a number of levels. It should consist of at least four activities. 1. We need to describe the test of impartial attractiveness in its ideal form, and contrast it with alternative methods of moral theory, such as the method of reflective equilibrium, or the test of agreement under ideal circumstances. 2. We need to describe various empirical tests and empirical procedures that can approximate this ideal test, so we can actually study impartial attractiveness. 3. We need to develop a theory of this test. Why should this be the moral test? On what grounds could we replace it with a better test? 4. We need to develop research programs, and hypotheses within those programs, using the test of impartial attractiveness. In this essay I sketch these four elements of the project. The impartial attractiveness research program is distinctive in two ways. First, it is an empirical program, although like any worthwhile empirical program it has room for conceptual elaboration, theory development, and speculative components. Second, its empirical interest lies not in studying moral judgments or moral beliefs, but rather studying a certain type of changes in moral judgments and beliefs (those caused by the impartial force of reasons for action, in one formulation). In empirical normative ethics we can identify two fundamentally different approaches: some study moral beliefs and moral judgments; others study changes in those beliefs, under the influence of a distinctive type of ideas. The first group can think of themselves as studying an aspect of the human mind. The second group studies instead an aspect of the interaction of human minds. I outline a project which belongs to this second group, and in which the test of attractiveness is formulated to make it as helpful as possible in making the world better. The empirical research program must produce normative guidance for our actions. It must be part of empirical normative ethics, with the normative emphasized. The practical effect is crucial. We do not want to interpret the world differently (or at least that is not the only thing we want to do), we want to make it better. [End Page 282] This preoccupation with practice supports the addition of two features that lead to unexpected results. First, our concern is with ideas supportive of human projects, a category broader than the more conventional concern with reasons for action. More importantly for the present essay, our concern is with motivation as well as justification, with emotion as well as cognition, with passion as well as reason. In ancient China an important debate pitted Confucians against Moists. The debate was complex, and there were many issues. But one seemed central. Moists argued for the promotion of universal love. Confucians countered that this was motivationally unrealistic, and developed an alternative based on...

An argument that moral reasoning plays a crucial role in moral judgment through episodes of rational reflection that have established patterns for automatic judgment foundation. Rationalists about the psychology of moral judgment argue that moral cognition has a rational foundation. Recent challenges to this account, based on findings in the empirical psychology of moral judgment, contend that moral thinking has no rational basis. In this book, Hanno Sauer argues that moral reasoning does play a role in moral judgment—but not, as is commonly supposed, because conscious reasoning produces moral judgments directly. Moral reasoning figures in the acquisition, formation, maintenance, and reflective correction of moral intuitions. Sauer proposes that when we make moral judgments we draw on a stable repertoire of intuitions about what is morally acceptable, which we have acquired over the course of our moral education—episodes of rational reflection that have established patterns for automatic judgment foundation. Moral judgments are educated and rationally amenable moral intuitions. Sauer engages extensively with the empirical evidence on the psychology of moral judgment and argues that it can be shown empirically that reasoning plays a crucial role in moral judgment. He offers detailed counterarguments to the anti-rationalist challenge (the claim that reason and reasoning play no significant part in morality and moral judgment) and the emotionist challenge (the argument for the emotional basis of moral judgment). Finally, he uses Joshua Greene's Dual Process model of moral cognition to test the empirical viability and normative persuasiveness of his account of educated intuitions. Sauer shows that moral judgments can be automatic, emotional, intuitive, and rational at the same time.

There is an ancient, yet still lively, debate in moral epistemology about the epistemic significance of disagreement. One of the important questions in that debate is whether, and to what extent, the prevalence and persistence of disagreement between our moral intuitions causes problems for those who seek to rely on intuitions in order to make moral decisions, issue moral judgments, and craft moral theories. Meanwhile, in general epistemology, there is a relatively young, and very lively, debate about the epistemic significance of disagreement. A central question in that debate concerns peer disagreement: When I am confronted with an epistemic peer with whom I disagree, how should my confidence in my beliefs change (if at all)? The disagreement debate in moral epistemology has not been brought into much contact with the disagreement debate in general epistemology (though McGrath [2007] is an important exception). A purpose of this paper is to increase the area of contact between these two debates. In Section 1, I try to clarify the question I want to ask in this paper – this is the question whether we have any reasons to believe what I shall call “anti-intuitivism.” In Section 2, I argue that anti-intuitivism cannot be supported solely by investigating the mechanisms that produce our intuitions. In Section 3, I discuss an anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement which relies on the so-called “Equal Weight View.” In Section 4, I pause to clarify the notion of epistemic parity and to explain how it ought to be understood in the epistemology of moral intuition. In Section 5, I return to the anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement and explain how an apparently-vulnerable premise of that argument may be quite resilient. In Section 6, I introduce a novel objection against the Equal Weight View in order to show how I think we can successfully resist the anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement.

This article proposes a novel integrative approach to moral judgment and a related model that could explain how unconscious heuristic processes are transformed into consciously accessible moral intuitions. Different hypothetical cases have been tested empirically to evoke moral intuitions that support principles from competing moral theories. We define and analyze the types of intuitions that moral theories and studies capture: those focusing on agents (A), deeds (D), and consequences (C). The integrative ADC approach uses the heuristic principle of “attribute substitution” to explain how people make intuitive judgments. The target attributes of moral judgments are moral blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, which are substituted with more accessible and computable information about an agent's virtues and vices, right/wrong deeds, and good/bad consequences. The processes computing this information are unconscious and inaccessible, and therefore explaining how they provide input for moral intuitions is a key problem. We analyze social heuristics identified in the literature and offer an outline for a new model of moral judgment. Simple social heuristics triggered by morally salient cues rely on three distinct processes (role-model entity, action analysis, and consequence tallying—REACT) in order to compute the moral valence of specific intuitive responses (A, D, and C). These are then rapidly combined to form an intuitive judgment that could guide quick decision making. The ADC approach and REACT model can clarify a wide set of data from empirical moral psychology and could inform future studies on moral judgment, as well as case assessments and discussions about issues causing “deadlocked” moral intuitions.

Several papers in this issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics focus on dilemmas of various sorts. Our feature article and accompanying commentaries discuss the dilemma facing Japanese citizens in...

This first chapter outlines the contents of the rest of the book and addresses three challenges to moral and religious belief from disagreement and evolution: Can one reasonably maintain one’s moral and religious beliefs in the face of interpersonal disagreement with intellectual peers? Does disagreement about morality between a religious belief source, such as a sacred text, and a non-religious belief source, such as a society’s moral intuitions, make it irrational to continue trusting one or both of those belief sources? Should evolutionary accounts of the origins of our moral beliefs and our religious beliefs undermine our confidence in their veracity? By considering together both evolution-based and disagreement-based challenges to both moral and religious belief from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, this volume cultivates insights on developing these objections and responding to them—insights that would be missed with a more narrowly focused approach. After explaining the rationale for the volume, this introductory chapter summarizes the contents of each of the volume’s chapters and then makes some suggestions for future research on the volume topics.