A brief note on “moral psychology”

Psychology’s interest in the moral dimensions of life and thought is as old as the dialogues of Plato and Aristotle’s ethical treatises, and as recent as research in neuroscience (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001). Historians of psychology will recall the central place that Wundt himself assigned to moral psychology (Wundt, 1901) and the special interest that leading Gestalt psychologists had in the subject. Illustrative are works by Köhler (1944) and by Karl Dunker (1939). Then, too, the specific theories of Piaget and later of Kohlberg (1984) on moral cognition and moral development are by now fixtures in the major texts.

Having mentioned Dunker, I might begin my substantive remarks by recalling his insight into the problems of assessment and interpretation arising from serious inquiries into the nature of moral decisions. Dunker was well aware of the anthropological findings supporting ethical relativism but, as an accomplished experimental psychologist, he was also aware of factors likely to confound real as opposed to apparent influences on the dependent variables in such research. He chose the practice of money-lending to test whether, in fact, values differed markedly in estimations of the ethical or moral features of the practice. What he found was that ethical appraisals of money-lending depended on whether persons took the practice to be one of assistance or of exploitation. In other words, different persons might praise or blame the money-lender, suggesting here the seeming “relativity” of moral values, but on grounds that actually reveal entirely compatible moral values; namely, the value of treating others fairly and with respect. Note then that establishing judgments or decisions as “moral” will call for something much more fine-grained than a questionnaire.

This duly noted, let me turn to the question that serves as the title of my remarks: Just what it is that qualifies a decision as a moral decision, or a problem as a moral problem. More abstractly and neutrally, What makes a “D” an “M” rather than a “non-M”? To a first approximation, such questions are answered by way of one or more of the following considerations:

In the general order of things, laws and principles are in the service of functions, and functions supervene on relevant properties. In other words, it is by way of what might be called a properties ontology that one is able to determine whether a function is correctly or accurately or relevantly performed; and it is by way of the actual functions that one is able to identify certain laws or principles as regulatory.

Ontologically speaking, reality, at least at the level of experience, begins with properties. What would make a decision a moral decision, then, would seem to depend on certain properties taken to be moral as such. Then, grounded in these properties, certain functions are thereby recognized as “moral” in nature. These functions are then subsumed finally under a set of precepts or principles now qualified as “moral” owing to the properties and functions thus determined.

At least since the influential writing of David Hume the weight of philosophical and psychological authority has been invested in one or another anthropological account of moral properties: Those features of actions and events that we judge to be moral are those that arouse sentiments and feelings of a certain kind. Thus, were we radically different in our constitutions, in our affective processes, in our brain states, etc., we would be radically different in our moral perceptions and appraisals. To make a “moral” decision, on this account, is to record how one would “feel” about outcomes likely to arise from the option chosen from among the possibilities.

The persistence and dominance of this general perspective cannot be explained on the basis of its soundness for, considered closely, it is at once odd and impracticable. G. E. Moore (1922) did much to explode the theory 80 years ago, but it hangs on tenaciously nonetheless. What the theory appears to assert is something along these lines:

What is odd and impracticable about this entire story, of course, is that neither John nor Mary has any basis on which to claim accurate knowledge of the feelings of the other. Accordingly, neither could make sense of what the other is referring to with words such as “wrong” or “greater wrong.” It follows, therefore, that there could not be any intelligible basis on which John and Mary could have an essentially moral disagreement. And if John and Mary have no firm basis on which to predict how the other is likely to “feel” about such matters, they surely have no basis on which to predict how the entire human population will feel! As a result, there could be no coherent grounds on which to universalize or even timidly generalize a moral precept.

Beyond this there is the patent fact that the very phenomenology of moral appraisals is so radically distinct from that of taste and feeling as to occupy a distinctly different phenomenological space. Persons know the differences between events that are morally right and those that merely bring them pleasure.

These days, explanations of moral properties are rendered chiefly in terms either of what is called “social constructionism”—coupled with that convenient exercise known as the “linguistic turn”—or in terms of evolutionary processes, real or alleged. There is so much that is woolly in such accounts that a brief critique has no place to begin. In the present context, it is sufficient to note that social constructionism leaves virtually no room for that persistent activity of self-criticism by which moral progress is achieved; progress often at the expense of what the social community has held most dear. As for the “linguistic turn,” one can agree that there are aspects of moral life that remain problematical chiefly because of enduring conceptual and linguistic ambiguities. Accordingly, if there is a real moral dimension of events, it is one that surely must be extricated from the subtleties of discourse and the artificial straits of semantics. Nevertheless, it is simply counterintuitive to suggest that the moral issues that stand as the defining marks of entire lifetimes—even entire epochs—have been rooted in nothing more substantial than the parts of speech!

As for evolutionary psychology, its assets duly noted, it should be clear that, even if evolutionary science were able to “explain” (in some sense) the appearance of, e.g., altruism or, for that matter, the Constitution of the United States, it would not thereby establish their moral value. Within the framework of evolutionary theory, altruistic behavior is neither more nor less “moral” than, e.g., nest building or assortative mating. Indeed, the evolutionary account appears to be a kind of category mistake of the sort Ryle had in mind with the couplet, “She arrived in a veil of tears and a sedan chair” (1949, p. 22). I would offer as a comparably misguided couplet, “She gave the gravely ill patient and the hospital windows a protective treatment.” Absent a self-conscious, self-directed, and morally competent being, the proper response to the claim that the human race could not survive without altruism must be, “So what?”

I should make clear that the sketchy critique here is intended to reach all versions of psychological determinism, to the extent that determinism is at the expense of moral reality. To those who would predicate this reality on the merely contingent facts of “human nature”—such that moral properties, to exist, must be causally brought about by some “mechanism”—the proper answer is that the requirement itself begs and does not answer significant moral questions. The very nature of any systematic analysis of action is likely to find the analyst breaking the event into separate components: antecedent conditions, past “reinforcement history,” current states of need or desire, behavioral options, the given course of behavior. But the leap from the unavoidable steps in a formal analysis to the conclusion that the action itself necessarily followed the same steps is at once daring and deceiving. If it is eerie to think that a moral decision is able to induce a complex sequence of actions, it is no less eerie to think that the same is achieved by neuronal excitation, oxidation rates in the gastric epithelium, or patterns of activation in the extrapyramidal pathways.

In this connection, at least a word is in order regarding the now ubiquitous functional MRI as ineliminably and irreducibly complex phenomena are compressed so as to fit into one or another “module” in the brain. Actions presuppose actors and actors can achieve ends only by doing something. To suppose, however, that the right moral theory has some special obligation to identify the particular mechanical or biochemical mode of activation is a supposition that would reach comic proportions in any other sphere of significant human endeavor. The best accounts of the architect’s plans, the university’s curriculum, Fall fashions, and peace initiatives in the Middle East are not neuroanatomical. The best accounts are common sense accounts, based on a folk psychology the validity of which must be granted even if the notion of an “account” is to be intelligible.

It was Hume, not Bentham, who first deployed the notion of “utility” in a way that would inform what we now take to be the Utilitarian school of ethics. And it was J. S. Mill who brought this to heights of authority and philosophical respectability, answering many of the criticisms that Bentham’s version had aroused. This is not the occasion for evaluating Utilitarianism. It is sufficient to observe that the promotion of something regarded as “happiness” or “flourishing” is not at the expense of moral properties but rather presupposes just such properties. For what sort of life can be said to be a flourishing one just in case it is lacking in such moral properties as moderation, justice, courage, wisdom, magnanimity, etc.? On this question, there is no greater authority in the ranks of Utilitarians than the person who first gave the term its current philosophical meaning. These lines from J. S. Mill leave no doubt as to the “happiness” envisaged by Utilitarianism:

Typically arrayed against Utilitarianism is one or another version of deontological ethics, the chief architect being Kant. It is central to such moral theories that events and actions are moral insofar as they instantiate a moral precept regarded as universal in reach. Kant’s categorical imperative is the textbook example. If it is granted that one should act in such a way that the maxim of the action be installed if possible as a universal law of nature, then certain actions would be transparently immoral or would stand in a contradictory relation to one’s avowed principles.

In the tradition of Aristotle, still other moral theories focus on a perfectionist ideal, never reached but always the aim of persons of virtue. What counts as a moral basis on which to ground actions and choices is the refinement and fuller development of one’s character. Happiness, even in the rich sense endorsed by Mill, would not be the principal aim in such a life and even the dignity of which Mill wrote would be utterly interiorized.

In light of such considerations, it becomes clear that the basis on which different persons are thought of as making “moral” decisions might actually be diverse and even incompatible—even when the same course of action is taken. Just in case Tom subscribes to the sentimentalist theory of morals, Patricia to the utilitarian version, Harry to Kant’s formal theory, and Philippa to (Aristotelian) perfectionism, it is not at all clear that their agreement about the wrongfulness of a specific action would reveal anything of moral significance in the matter of their principles. Indeed, given the number and range of respectable but incompatible moral theories on offer, it would be highly confusing just in case the same “centers” in the brain were activated. Rather, one would expect perhaps a deontology center, a utilitarian center, etc., but now with the additional need for a center that weighs each of these moral theories and somehow leads to the choice of one over the rest. Alas…

What makes a decision a “moral” decision is, among other considerations, its grounding in the real moral properties engaged by the prevailing state of affairs; by the overall state of the immediate and more distant world affected by each of the candidate decisions; by the disposing principle and its recognized aptness. In a word, what makes a decision a moral decision is at once the real moral content of the world at risk, and the character of the person making the decision. The foundational subject of morals is, then, not psychology but metaphysics; a realist metaphysics able to guide and assess the methods and findings of such derivative subjects as moral psychology.