Abstract
It is a common socio-moral practice to appeal to reasons as a guiding force for one’s actions. However, it is an intriguing possibility that this practice is based on fiction: reasons cannot or do not motivate the majority of actions—especially moral ones. Rather, pre-reflective evaluative processes are likely responsible for moral actions. Such a view faces two major challenges: (i) pre-reflective judgments are commonly thought of as inflexible in nature, and thus they cannot be the cause of the varied judgments people rely on in everyday life, and (ii) if reflective reason-based judgments do not play a strong causative role in judgment, why do people rely on the articulation of reasons in their moral practices? And how is moral agency and moral theorizing possible without it? We argue that the pre-reflective judgments motivating moral actions are embodied in nature. The experience of the rightness of an action that drives a person to act depends on the sensorimotor interactions that have cultivated an agent’s perspective on the world. These interactions are embedded in relational contexts, relative to which judgments are individuated. Because of this relational embeddedness, they are more flexible than they are commonly thought to be, enabling us to explain the variety of human behavior by appealing to them. The Anglo-European practice of appealing to reason as if they were propositional belief-statements motivating actions can be accounted for as nothing more than an idiosyncratic way of constructing narratives to clarify and express the relational context of intentional actions.
Highlights
Since the Enlightenment, our understanding of what it means to be human is marked by a sharp division into mind and body. Doris and Nichols (2012, p. 425) argue that “much of the work in contemporary [sic!] cognitive science and moral philosophy is Cartesian in spirit: it appears to presuppose that human beings reason best on their own, windows closed and curtains drawn, after the gripping fiction of Descartes’ Meditations.” For all the good the Enlightenment brought to the western world, it may have entrenched some questionable assumptions
After we explore the nature of these judgments, we will return to the role of reasons; we will argue that, FIGURE 1 | Rationalist account of moral action
We set out to understand the nature of moral judgments
Summary
Since the Enlightenment, our understanding of what it means to be human is marked by a sharp division into mind and body. Doris and Nichols (2012, p. 425) argue that “much of the work in contemporary [sic!] cognitive science and moral philosophy is Cartesian in spirit: it appears to presuppose that human beings reason best on their own, windows closed and curtains drawn, after the gripping fiction of Descartes’ Meditations.” For all the good the Enlightenment brought to the western world, it may have entrenched some questionable assumptions. We see this division most clearly in dual process theories of the mind (cf Kahneman et al, 1982; Greene et al, 2001, 2009; Sunstein, 2005; Kahneman, 2011; Greene, 2014) These theories posit two modes of cognition, one based on reason, control, and rational agency, and one based on emotion, automaticity, and external determination. If factors that motivated behavior irrespective of reasons are identified, those are usually dismissed as biases or automatic reactions This intuition is dominant in contemporary research on moral cognition, which is built on the assumptions of orthodox cognitivism: “a rationalist model in which emotions and body states may be taken into account by reason but it is pure reasoning that leads to moral decisions” (Wilson and Foglia, 2017). They are not motivational, reasons play a critical role in moral conduct (Figure 1)
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