Abbreviated Draft: 2010-v-28
Experiments, Intuitions, and Methodology in Moral and Political Theory 1
David Copp
University of California, Davis
Moral and political philosophers commonly appeal to moral “intuitions” at crucial points
in their reasoning. They tend to assume that moral theories and moral principles are problematic
if they conflict with their intuitions, and they tend to appeal to intuitions in constructing and
defending their own theories. My goal here is to consider recent challenges to this practice
based in empirical studies of moral intuitions. The question I will address is whether studies of
these kinds ground radical or revisionary conclusions about the methodology of normative moral
and political philosophy, which I will simply call “the Methodology.” This is a key question to
those working in the field. I will contend that the empirical studies do not justify any radical or
revisionary conclusions. Despite this, I do think that the studies are important, for they reveal
pitfalls of the Methodology that we might not otherwise have taken sufficiently into account.
To decide whether the empirical studies undermine the Methodology, it is obvious that
we need to think about methodology. A methodology is aimed at achieving certain goals. To
vindicate it or undermine it, one must consider whether it is well-directed to achieving these
goals. The key issue, obviously, is the nature of these goals. I will argue against a realist view,
according to which the relevant goal is to discover the truth about moral and political matters. I
believe a Rawlsian view is more plausible, but such a view, I will suggest, has some surprising
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and perhaps unwelcome deflationary implications. So although I think the empirical studies do
not justify radical or revisionary conclusions, I shall propose a way of conceptualizing the
Methodology that might itself seem revisionary.
I begin, in section 1, by discussing a case study. In section 2, I review some of the more
striking observations about moral intuitions that have emerged from recent empirical studies. In
section 3, I offer some preliminary thoughts about these observations. In section 4, I offer an
account of the Methodology and discuss the role in it of moral intuitions. In section 5, I address
a central objection to my account and offer a distinction between the “proximate goals” of a
discipline and proposed “ultimate goals.” Finally, in section 6, I return to the empirical studies
and ask whether they can ground a radical or revisionary critique of the Methodology.
1. A Case Study: The Trolley Problem
The familiar “trolley problem” is a useful example for my purposes. It bears on issues in
both ethics and political philosophy. For instance, it has been used to test the plausibility of the
principle of double effect, which can be invoked in just war theory, to give one example. Most
important for my purposes, people’s intuitions about the problem have been studied by
experimental philosophers.
The trolley problem involves a family of cases in which a runaway trolley is heading
down a track toward five workers.2 The men cannot escape and will be killed unless a bystander
does something to save them. In the case called Bystander’s Two Options, there is a spur track
heading off to the right and the bystander can throw a switch, sending the trolley down the spur
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track, thereby saving the five. Unfortunately, there is a worker on the spur track who cannot
escape. The bystander has only two options. She can do nothing, letting the five die, or she can
use the switch to turn the trolley to the right, thereby killing the one. In this case, the “standard
intuition” – as I will call it – is that the bystander is permitted to throw the switch.3 In a second
case, called Fat Man, there is no spur track, but instead the bystander and a fat man are on a
footbridge over the track. If the fat man were to fall onto the track, he would be killed, but his
body is large enough that it would stop the trolley, thereby preventing it from running into the
five. The bystander herself is a small person, and her body would not stop the trolley. She has
two relevant options. She can do nothing, letting the five die, or she can push the fat man onto
the track, thereby saving the five but killing the fat man. Here, the “standard intuition” is that
the bystander would be wrong to push the man onto the track.4
In both cases, the bystander must choose between killing one and saving five. The
trouble is that it is difficult to see how both of the standard intuitions could be true. Why might
it be wrong to save five lives by pushing a man in front of a trolley, thereby causing the trolley to
kill the man, but not wrong to save five lives by diverting a trolley in the direction of a man,
thereby causing the trolley to kill the man? This is the problem. To solve it, we must either
justify both of the standard intuitions or show that one of them is false.5
Philosophers have attempted, of course, to identify a principle that would justify both
intuitions. One example is the Principle of Double Effect. On this principle, it is crucial that, in
Bystander’s Two Options, the bystander does not intend to kill the man on the track, but merely
foresees that he will be killed, whereas in Fat Man, the bystander deliberately and intentionally
causes the man’s death in order to stop the train.6 Unfortunately, other trolley examples can be
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used to challenge the Principle of Double Effect.7 A substantial literature has developed in
which principles are proposed and then putative counter-examples are discovered.
The debate within this literature illustrates the standard Methodology. It is important to
note that the debate includes a controversy as to the appropriateness of using trolley cases and
other similarly artificial examples in testing the plausibility of moral and political principles.8
The Methodology in this way makes room for the assessment of argumentative strategies. I will
return to the Methodology in section 4, but I now turn to the experimental and other empirical
results that bear on the reliability of our intuitions.
2. Some Results in Experimental Philosophy and Cognitive Psychology
The central issue is whether work in experimental philosophy undermines the standard
Methodology by undermining the credibility of our moral intuitions. As Joshua Knobe and
Shaun Nichols have written, in their “manifesto” for experimental philosophy, “The goal is to
determine what leads us to have the intuitions we do .... The ultimate hope is that we can use this
information to help determine whether the psychological sources of the beliefs undercut the
warrant for the beliefs.”9
Four kinds of research seem to be especially important. First, there are anthropological
and sociological studies of cultural variations in moral belief.10 Second, there are surveys of
people’s responses, in controlled circumstances, to questions about morally or politically
interesting examples, such as trolley cases. These surveys may be designed to show the extent to
which people disagree. Or they may be designed to show which factors correlate closely with
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differences in people’s answers. Or they may be designed to show how people’s responses can
be affected by various morally irrelevant factors, such as the order in which questions are asked.
Third, there is research that aims to uncover what kinds of mental processing underlie people’s
responses to questions of these kinds. There have been functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) studies of brain activity in subjects while they are answering questions about trolley
problems. Fourth, some research invokes theoretical proposals or observational results from
general cognitive psychology, such as prospect theory or the theory of framing effects. Of
course, these kinds of research can be combined. Some have conducted surveys in an attempt to
determine whether moral beliefs are subject to framing effects.
Empirical studies show that people agree by and large with the standard intuitions about
the trolley examples, but also that there is considerable disagreement. In Bystander’s Two
Options, more than 80 percent of subjects who were polled agreed that the bystander is
permitted to turn the trolley.11 In Fat Man, roughly 70% of subjects agreed that the bystander
would be wrong to push the man onto the track.12
Joshua Greene and his fellow researchers conducted functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) studies in which subjects answered questions about trolley examples.13 They
discovered that areas if the brain that are involved in emotion were more active when subjects
were thinking about Fat Man than when subjects were thinking about Bystander’s Two Options.
They then proposed that this difference in emotional response explains people’s differing
judgments about the cases. More generally, they hypothesized that “personal dilemmas” tend to
be associated with greater emotional engagement than “impersonal dilemmas” and that these
“differences in emotional engagement” affect people’s judgments.14
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Other researchers have found that inducing emotions in their subjects can affect their
moral judgments. Wheatley and Haidt hypnotized subjects to feel disgust when they heard a
trigger word, such as “often.” Subjects were then told a morally innocuous story about a high
school student who “often” picks interesting topics for discussion. Those who were hypnotized
to feel disgust when they heard the word “often” tended to think there was something morally
suspect about the student, but subjects who had not been hypnotized had no such tendency.15
Another line of research has shown that demographic factors are associated with
differences in moral judgment.16 And many studies have shown that ethical judgments are
subject to “framing effects.”17 For example, Thomas Schelling studied his students’ intuitions
about fairness. He described an income tax schedule intended to encourage taxpayers to have
children by imposing a smaller overall tax liability on taxpayers with children than on childless
taxpayers, all other things being equal. He found roughly that whether his students thought the
policy would be fair depended crucially on whether it was described as giving a tax benefit to
taxpayers with children or as imposing a surcharge on childless taxpayers.18 Framing effects
have also been found in studies of responses to trolley cases. People’s judgments apparently can
be influenced by the wording of examples and the order in which examples are presented.19
Overall, the research seems to show quite clearly that, in the words of John Doris and
Stephen Stitch, responses to thought experiments “may be strongly influenced by ethically
irrelevant characteristics of example and audience.”20 As Walter Sinnott-Armstrong concludes,
the empirical evidence shows “ways in which our moral intuitions do not reliably track the
truth.”21 All of this is troubling. Whether it would be right or wrong to turn the trolley in
Bystander’s Two Options must depend on the (stipulated) facts of the case. It can hardly depend
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on how the facts are described, or on whether subjects were told about the case before or after
they were told about some other example, or on whether they were sitting at a filthy desk while
thinking about the example!22 In the face of this evidence, can the Methodology be sustained?
3. Preliminary Thoughts
A few preliminary issues need to be addressed right away. First, the critics tend to
suggest that their target is philosophers’ reliance on moral intuitions, but their own argument
seems to rest on the intuition that certain factors that influence people’s moral intuitions are
morally irrelevant. Hence, as we saw, Doris and Stitch say that the experiments show that
people’s responses to thought experiments “may be strongly influenced by ethically irrelevant
characteristics of example and audience.”23 They present this claim as intuitively obvious. So
their argument seems to presuppose that at least some moral intuitions can serve as premises in
epistemically respectable philosophical argument.
Second, the critics are questioning the epistemological credentials of moral intuitions.
Knobe and Nichols write that the goal is to decide “whether the psychological sources of [moral]
beliefs undercut the warrant for the beliefs.”24 Walter Sinnott-Armstrong claims that the
empirical research shows that “no moral intuitions are justified noninferentially.”25 Weinberg,
Nichols, and Stitch contend that intuitions are not a sufficient basis for justifying normative
claims.26 I shall focus instead on the empirical and experimental challenge to the standard
methodology of normative moral and political theory. If I am correct, it is possible to vindicate
this methodology without answering certain kinds of skeptical epistemological worry. I will
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explain this in what follows.
4. The Standard Methodology
I assume that the methodology of a discipline is a procedure standardly used to achieve
the goals of the discipline. Hence, an account of the methodology of a discipline must specify
the goal of the discipline, or at least what researchers take the goal to be. And it must describe
in general terms the kind of research that is done in the discipline. To vindicate the
methodology, an account must show that, if all goes well, research of this kind is well-directed
toward achieving the relevant goal. I will argue that we do well to distinguish between the
proximate goal of a discipline, by which I mean the goal that is relevant to evaluating the
discipline’s methodology, and any putative ultimate goals. I will explain this in what follows.
Accordingly, a satisfactory account of the Methodology must accomplish three tasks.
First, it must specify the proximate goal of the discipline. Second, it must describe at an
appropriate level of generality the actual practice of moral and political philosophers, or at least
the practice of those whose approach is viewed as exemplary by other philosophers. And third,
it must show that the practice is, or is at least plausibly believed to be, well-directed to achieving
the relevant goal. If the account purports to vindicate the methodology, it must make it plausible
that philosophers who do well in carrying it out are more likely than they otherwise would be to
reach the proximate goal. To undermine the methodology, one would have to argue that the
practice is not well-directed to achieving the proximate goal.
First, then, what is the relevant goal? In an influential passage in A Theory of Justice,
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John Rawls proposed that normative moral philosophy can be understood, at least provisionally,
as an attempt to “characterize” our “moral capacity” or “moral sensibility” in a certain way. To
“characterize our moral sensibility” in the relevant way, he suggests, is to formulate a set of
principles that, when conjoined with relevant nonmoral beliefs, imply all and only moral
propositions we accept.27 This provisional account is, however, an oversimplification.28 29 For
the goal is not to characterize our moral sensibility as it is at a particular time. It is to
characterize our moral sensibility as it would be at the end of an ideal process of critical
reflection in which we took into account everything we knew that might be relevant and where,
as a result, we reached a stable state of moral belief that Rawls calls “reflective equilibrium.”
Reflection on the principles that would systematize our everyday judgments might lead
to a change in the judgments we are prepared to endorse. We might come to doubt some
judgments that Rawls would classify as “considered judgments,” judgments we make “under
conditions favorable for deliberation and judgment in general.”30 And we might come to doubt
moral principles that we initially thought to be correct.31 Given this, Rawls proposes that the
goal is to characterize our moral sensibility as it would be in reflective equilibrium, where a
“reflective equilibrium” is a stable and coherent state of moral belief that we would reach after
thorough reflection in conditions favorable for deliberation and judgment. In reflective
equilibrium, the moral principles we accept would be in accord with our more specific
considered moral judgments and our moral beliefs would cohere with our nonmoral beliefs.32 In
brief, then, the Rawlsian goal is to characterize our moral sensibility in reflective equilibrium.
Rawls’s refers to “our” moral sensibility and “our” considered judgments, and it is worth
asking whom he has in mind. It is also worth asking whether it is reasonable to think that people
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would have the same moral and political views in reflective equilibrium. Experimental
philosophers rightly press these questions.33 Rawls suggests that we should take A Theory of
Justice as concerned with “the views of the reader and the author.”34 I will return to these issues,
but for now, I will continue to talk about the goal of characterizing “our” sensibility.
One might object that there is no need to insist that the Methodology has only one goal. I
agree, of course. Philosophers aim to discover true principles, to discover principles with
genuine normative clout, to discover principles for use in decision-making and deliberation, to
improve people’s behavior, and so on.35 For any such goal, we could ask whether the
Methodology is well-directed to achieving it. The important point, however, is that we are not
attempting to catalogue the goals philosophers have in doing moral and political philosophy.
The issue, instead, is, which goal is appropriately invoked in attempted vindications of the
Methodology? Which goal (or small set of goals) is of such central concern to the discipline that
if the Methodology is not well-directed to achieving it, then the discipline is sensibly taken to be
uninteresting as currently practiced? I contend that the Rawlsian goal has this status. To
indicate this, I call it the “proximate goal” of the discipline. I will return to this idea.
A realist might object that the proximate goal of normative theory is to discern the true
principles of morality and politics. Call this the realist goal. A realist might claim, for instance,
that we should aim to determine whether Rawls’s theory of justice is correct, not merely whether
we would accept it in reflective equilibrium. I will return to this objection in the next section.
For now, let me say simply that Rawls intends his proposal to be neutral among meta-ethical
positions.36 And his proposal does seem to be compatible with realism.
If we accept Rawls’s proposal about the goal of normative moral and political theory, our
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second task is to describe at an appropriate level of generality philosophers’ actual practice in
pursuing this goal. The basic idea is familiar:37 We work toward reaching a reflective
equilibrium, taking our current considered judgments as proxies for the judgments we would
accept in reflective equilibrium while treating them as provisional and subject to
reconsideration. In some cases, we might decide that certain of our considered judgments are
incorrect. In other cases, we might refine a conjectured principle to make it better accord with
our considered judgments, or we might decide that a principle is incorrect if we find we cannot
bring it into accord with our considered judgments. A global reflective equilibrium is perhaps
beyond us, but we can at least seek to achieve a coherent and stable state of moral belief on
specific subject matters, such as distributive justice. This is a vague characterization of the
Methodology, but I think it is a recognizable characterization of the procedure philosophers have
followed in discussing trolley examples.
So far my account of the Methodology has made no mention of moral intuitions. Shelly
Kagan talks about the importance of fitting a moral theory with our “considered judgments,”38
but he also talks about the importance of showing that a moral theory provides “a good fit for
our moral intuitions.”39 We need to understand the relation between these ideas.
What, then, is an intuition?40 For my purposes, it is enough to adopt a working
definition. I will say that a person “intuits” that p if and only if she finds p “intrinsically
plausible.” And I will say that she finds p “intrinsically plausible” if and only if she finds p
plausible “simply through entertaining [it],”41 such that her finding p plausible is not due to her
awareness of any arguments or evidence for p or for not-p..”42 On this account, a person might
not believe a proposition that she finds intuitive, for she might be aware of arguments against it.
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When she does believe such a proposition, I will say she believes it intuitively.43
For Rawls, a “considered moral judgment” is a belief that meets certain specified
epistemic conditions. Rawls says our considered judgments are moral beliefs that we have in
circumstances “favorable for deliberation and judgment in general.”44 This means that a
considered judgment might not qualify as an intuition since someone might not find a considered
judgment to be intrinsically plausible. Moreover, our moral intuitions do not automatically
qualify as considered judgments since we might have an intuition in epistemically unfavorable
circumstances. Philosophers who aim to test moral or political principles for coherence with
intuitions presumably have in mind intuitions that do arise in favorable circumstances, but even
if I find a proposition intuitive in favorable circumstances, I might deny it because it might seem
implausible overall. If so, Rawls would not count my intuition as a considered judgment.
We might then wonder whether philosophers’ practice in pursuing the Rawlsian goal is
better understood to involve testing moral and political theories against moral intuitions or
against considered judgments. To me, it seems appropriate to have a hybrid understanding of
the Methodology. In evaluating the plausibility of a moral or political theory, we should test it
against our intuitive moral beliefs as well as our current considered moral judgments. It counts
against a theory if, given our other beliefs, it conflicts with intuitive moral beliefs, and it also
counts against a theory if it conflicts with our current considered moral judgments. Of course,
given the Rawlsian goal, it would be a fatal difficulty if a theory were to conflict with considered
judgments we would have in reflective equilibrium.
I will call the practice I have been describing, the standard Methodology. Our third task
is to show that this practice is at least plausibly believed to be well-directed to achieving the
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Rawlsian goal of characterizing our moral sensibility as it would be in reflective equilibrium.
Our moral intuitions and considered judgments presumably express our moral sensibility, so it
seems plausible that the standard practice can hope to reach this goal by taking our moral
intuitions and considered judgments as data. To be sure, it is no simple matter to use this data
sensitively, in a way that can reveal the structure of our underlying sensibility. Success in the
Methodology requires the exercise of normative moral and political judgment as well as a kind
of sympathetic understanding of the moral sensibility that it is our goal to characterize. To the
extent that philosophers have the required judgment and understanding, it seems reasonable to
think that the practice I have described is well-directed to achieving the Rawlsian goal.
5. The Central Realist Objection to the Standard Methodology
A moral realist would presumably think that moral and political philosophy ought to aim
at the realist goal of discerning the true principles of morality and politics. It is not obvious,
however, that the standard Methodology can be expected to bring us to the realist goal. Are
philosophers who do well in pursuing the standard Methodology more likely than they otherwise
would be to discover the truth in morals and politics? This is not clear. So if we understand the
success of the Methodology as depending on whether it is well-directed to achieving the realist
goal, we might be on the road to undermining it.
I will argue, however, that the Methodology is defensible even if there is reason to doubt
that it is well-directed to reaching the realist goal. It might be defensible as a methodology even
if the achievement of a reflective equilibrium among our moral and political principles and
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considered judgments would not be any evidence at all that those principles and judgments are
true and would not be any reason to believe them to be true.
The key idea is that we need to distinguish between the proximate goal of a discipline
and any putative ultimate goal. I am here using the term, “proximate goal,” as a technical term
to refer to the goal (or small set of goals) in relation to which the methodology of a discipline is
to be vindicated or vitiated. That is, to be more exact, the “proximate goal” of a discipline is the
goal (or small set of goals), whatever it is, such that if the methodology of the discipline is not
well-directed to achieving this goal (or goals), then the discipline is vitiated, as currently
practiced. As such, the proximate goal must obviously be of central concern to the discipline.
The proximate goal of normative moral and political philosophy must be meta-ethically
neutral; that is, it must be such that its nature can be specified and our knowledge whether we
have reached it can be understood in a way that is neutral among competing meta-ethical
theories or philosophical accounts of the metaphysics, epistemology, and semantics of moral and
political discourse. Put differently, there must be no discipline-specific philosophical problems
regarding what achieving the goal would consist in, or whether those following the methodology
of the discipline can know whether they have reached it. The methodology of a discipline is a
procedure for its practitioners to follow, and it ought to be possible, if the methodology is wellconceived, to specify a neutral proximate goal – a goal such that practitioners who do well at
following the methodology can tell whether they have achieved it without first doing the
philosophy of the discipline, or, in the case of interest to us, without first doing meta-ethics.
An analogy might help, so, at the risk of oversimplifying, consider the so-called scientific
method.45 A realist might contend that the goal of science is to provide a complete and true
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account of the laws that underlie natural processes. Yet this goal is not suitably “metadisciplinarily” neutral. There are philosophical controversies among realists and
instrumentalists about what achieving such a goal would consist in. There are philosophical
controversies as to whether the scientific method is a way to discern the truth. I take it that these
points are commonplaces.46 The central point, however, is that the methodology seems
defensible as a way of proceeding in science despite these worries. But if so, then the realist
goal is not the proximate goal of the scientific method. Instead, I suggest, the proximate goal is
to develop theories that explain and help us to predict the operation of various apparent natural
processes. This goal is “meta-scientifically neutral.”
In the moral case, the realist goal also is not suitably neutral. It is not meta-ethically
neutral. For there is philosophical controversy regarding the nature and existence of moral facts
and about the notion of truth. So there is controversy as to what achieving the realist goal might
consist in. Realists and anti-realists have different views about this, and naturalist and nonnaturalist varieties of realism also have different views about it, as do deflationists about truth.
The realist goal therefore is not meta-ethically neutral.
Why must a plausible account of the proximate goal be meta-ethically neutral?47 The
central point is that, as seems apparent, the issue whether the Methodology can be vindicated
does not plausibly turn on how various meta-ethical controversies are resolved. It would be a
mistake to think that the systematic philosophical study of moral and political questions is
worthless and ought to be abandoned unless moral realism can be vindicated or unless various
other meta-ethical challenges can be resolved in one way rather than another. If this is correct,
then the goal relative to which it would be plausible to evaluate the Methodology must be meta15
ethically neutral. Since the realist goal is not relevantly neutral, vindicating the Methodology
does not require showing that the approach is well-directed at achieving the realist goal.
I am not denying that it is an interesting and important question whether the
Methodology is well-directed to achieving the realist goal. Moreover, I think the Methodology
can be vindicated in relation to the realist goal. My claim is only that the realist goal is not the
proximate goal of the Methodology. Nevertheless, if we thought there were a better way to
reach the realist goal, we might follow it instead of the standard Methodology. In this sense, the
realist goal is arguably the ultimate goal of moral philosophy, even if not the proximate goal.
The Rawlsian goal, the goal of characterizing our moral sensibility as it would be in
reflective equilibrium, is meta-ethically neutral. Given this, given that the Rawlsian goal is
worth striving for, and given that pursuing it does not conflict with pursuing the realist goal, it
makes sense to evaluate the Methodology relative to it rather than relative to the realist goal.
Someone might claim that the Rawlsian goal is not worth striving for. But I think such a claim
would be implausible. It would be implausible to claim that there is no value or little value in
understanding the structure of our own moral and political view.48
6. Vindicating the Standard Methodology in the Face of the Empirical Objections
Given what I have argued to this point, the issue is whether experimental and other
empirical studies of moral beliefs undermine the methodology of normative moral and political
philosophy by showing that it is not well-directed to achieving the Rawlsian goal. There are two
basic kinds of worry. First is the worry that the research may show or suggest that the Rawlsian
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goal is not achievable at all. Second is the worry that the research may show or suggest that the
standard Methodology is inadequate to achieve it. If either of these worries are well-founded,
then, of course, we might want to reconsider my claim that the Rawlsian goal is the relevant
proximate goal, but I will argue that the worries are not well-founded.
First, the worry that the Rawlsian goal is not achievable. Begin with observations about
moral disagreement. Each of us was raised in a given familial and cultural context and our
moral beliefs presumably have been heavily influenced by what we were taught by key members
of our family and extended social circle. People who were raised and taught in different
contexts may well have different moral views. This means that there may be no such thing as
the structure of our underlying moral and political viewpoint. There may be no such thing to
characterize. Beyond this, moreover, the empirical research might suggest that most people’s
moral and political views are an incoherent cluster of beliefs and attitudes that are best
explained by the interplay of causal factors that are variable and morally irrelevant. Perhaps,
then, most people do not have an underlying coherent moral and political viewpoint that we
might aim to characterize. The upshot is that the Rawlsian goal might not be achievable.
These worries rest on two ways in which our characterization of the Rawlsian goal has
been left overlay vague. If we can tighten up its characterization, then I think we can set the
worries aside as reflecting misconceptions about the goal. First, we need to recognize that the
Rawlsian goal is not merely to describe the moral conception of the relevant population. And
second, we need to clarify the nature of the relevant population.
First, the Rawlsian goal is not merely to characterize the moral and political conception
of the relevant population as it happens to be at a specific time. It is to characterize the structure
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of the moral and political conception of the population in question as it would be if people with
this conception were to reach a reflective equilibrium in which all their moral beliefs were
coherent with the moral principles they would then accept and with all their other beliefs.
Hence, the fact that there is widespread moral disagreement, even given that the moral
conceptions of many people are a mere collection of unsystematized moral beliefs and attitudes,
cuts no ice. The question is to what extent there would be disagreement in reflective
equilibrium. Of course, it does seem reasonable to suppose that there would be substantial
disagreement even in reflective equilibrium.
Second, what is the population whose moral conception is to be characterized? There are
two natural ideas about this. The first is that this population is the population of theorists in the
discipline itself, and the second is that it is the population at large. Philosophers who have
written about the standard Methodology sometimes seem to waver uncertainly between these
two ideas.49 But we can be ecumenical.
If it is reasonable to think that literally everyone would have the same fundamental moral
and political view in reflective equilibrium, then the discipline can aim to characterize the
structure of this view. If not, then different researchers can aim to characterize the structure of
different views. For it will be useful and valuable to understand the structure and unifying
principles of the different moral and political views on offer.
For obvious reasons, it is natural for a theorist to be interested in characterizing the
structure of her own view. This is the view she understands best, and it is the view regarding
which she is best placed to attempt to decide what it might be like in reflective equilibrium. If
all theorists in the discipline would have the same fundamental view in reflective equilibrium,
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then one central task for the discipline will be to chart the moral view common to all theorists.
If, as seems much more likely, theorists would have somewhat different views, even in reflective
equilibrium, then it will be useful and valuable to chart the structure of the different views on
offer – Kantian views, consequentialist views, pluralist views, virtue theoretic views,
particularist views, and the like. Once we have an understanding of the most theoretically
attractive ways to characterize these different moral conceptions, we can perhaps make further
progress in the familiar way, by following the Methodology, and, if all goes well, reduce the
number of options that are taken seriously in the community of researchers.50
We have been considering the worry that the experimental research on moral beliefs
might show that the Rawlsian goal is not achievable. I agree that it might not be achievable, but
I don’t see that the empirical research shows this. I now turn to a different worry.
Second, the worry that the standard Methodology is inadequate to achieving the Rawlsian
goal. As we saw, the empirical research suggests that our moral beliefs can be influenced by
features of ourselves that are morally irrelevant, such as our mood or emotional state, our
culture, and our socio-economic status. Because of this, the moral beliefs that the standard
Methodology takes as input might not be evidence of the underlying structure of our moral and
political view. They might instead indicate merely the play on our sensibilities of a variety of
morally irrelevant causal factors. So the standard Methodology arguably is not well-directed to
achieving the goal of characterizing the underlying structure of our moral and political view.
My response is that the empirical research can help researchers see which kinds of
intuition in which kinds of circumstance are likely to be misleading as to the underlying more
stable moral views that would be retained in a person’s moral view in reflective equilibrium. It
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is already a feature of the Methodology to discount intuitions that either are not endorsed or that
likely would not be endorsed in reflective equilibrium or that are only endorsed in epistemically
problematic circumstances. From this perspective, the value of the empirical research is that it
brings more information to bear on researchers’ attempts to determine what the structure of a
moral view would be like in a state of reflective equilibrium.
7. Conclusion
To conclude, it seems to me that the experimental and other empirical studies of moral
belief that we have examined do not ground revisionary conclusions about the standard
methodology of normative moral and political philosophy. They do nevertheless make
significant contributions to the Methodology once we clarify its nature. First, the proximate goal
of moral and political philosophy permits us to investigate the structure of the large variety of
moral and political conceptions that seem to be on offer. To the extent that we aim to
characterize the moral conceptions of ordinary people, there is a need for research that will
reveal what ordinary people tend to believe. Experimental philosophers are correct about this.
Second, the proximate goal is to characterize the structure of moral and political conceptions as
they would be in reflective equilibrium. This means that we do well to take into account the fact
that, as the empirical research shows, moral intuitions and judgments can be heavily influenced
by morally irrelevant factors. In order to accurately characterize the structure of a moral view as
it would be in reflective equilibrium, we need to discount intuitions and beliefs that have been
influenced by irrelevant factors, and empirical research can help to show the way to do this.
20
Experimental philosophers are also correct about this.
In the course of the argument, I have provided an account of the standard methodology of
normative moral and political philosophy and I have explained how, in my view, this
methodology can be vindicated. Crucial to the argument is a distinction between the proximate
goal of the discipline, which I argued is the Rawlsian goal, and the putative realist ultimate goal.
To vindicate a methodology is to show that it is well-directed to achieving the relevant
proximate goal. I contended that a vindication of the standard Methodology would be a showing
that it is well-directed to achieving the Rawlsian goal. In any event, there is no obvious
alternative to the Methodology.51 If we are going to pursue the philosophical study of moral and
political questions, there is no obvious alternative to attempting to determine what our moral and
political views would be if we reached a stable state of moral belief, in epistemically favorable
conditions, in which our moral views were internally coherent and coherent with everything else
we believe. This is the standard Methodology, understood as aiming at the Rawlsian goal.
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Notes
1.
I am grateful to many people for helpful discussion of the ideas in this paper as well as
helpful comments on earlier drafts. I would like to thank, in particular, Matt Bedke,
Jerry Dworkin, Joshua Earlenbaugh, Bernard Molyneux, Johnnie Pedersen, Adam
Sennet, and Paul Teller. An earlier version of this paper was presented to Molyneux’s
spring 2010 seminar on intuitions at U.C. Davis, and I am grateful to the participants for
helpful comments and suggestions.
2.
Trolley examples were introduced by Philippa Foot in her paper, “The Problem of
Abortion and the Principle of Double Effect,” in Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other
Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). The
examples have been extensively discussed by many philosophers. Important discussions
are in Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” and “The
Trolley Problem,” both in Thomson, Rights, Restitution, and Risk, ed. William Parent
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). See also Judith Jarvis Thomson,
“Turning the Trolley,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36 (2008), pp. 359-374.
3.
Thomson, “Turning the Trolley,” p. 361.
4.
Thomson, “Turning the Trolley,” p. 362.
5.
Thomson, “Turning the Trolley,” p. 363.
6.
See Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Principle of Double Effect.”
7.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
22
2008), pp. 90, 05. Appiah cites an example called “loop.” Another relevant example is a
variation of Fat Man called “trap door.” See Jesse J. Prinz, The Emotional Construction
of Morals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 25, citing J. D. Greene, D.
Lindsell, A. C. Clarke, L. E. Nystrom, and J. D. Cohen, “What Pushes Your Moral
Buttons? Modular Myopia and the Trolley Problem” (forthcoming).
8.
David Velleman questioned the value of thinking about trolley cases in a paper he
presented on April 1, 2010, to the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American
Philosophical Association, in an Author Meets Critics session on John Martin Fischer,
Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009).
9.
Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, “An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto,” in Joshua
Knobe and Shaun Nichols, eds., Experimental Philosophy (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008), p. 7.
10.
Jesse J. Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007), includes discussions of sociological and anthropological studies of
variations in sexual mores and taboos (e.g. pp. 280-285) and in the acceptance of
practices such as cannibalism (e.g. pp. 223-229).
11.
Appiah, Experiments in Ethics, p. 89. Appiah does not cite the specific surveys.
12.
Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals, p. 25, citing Greene, et al., “What Pushes
Your Moral Buttons?”
13.
Joshua D. Greene, R. Brian Sommerville, Leigh E. Nystrom, John M. Darley, Jonathan
D. Cohen,“An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment,”
23
Science, 293 (14 September 2001).
14.
Greene et al., “An fMRI Investigation,” pp. 2106-2107.
15.
T. Wheatley and J. Haidt, “Hypnotically Induced Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More
Severe,” Psychological Science, 16 (2005), pp. 780-784. Cited in Prinz, The Emotional
Construction of Morals, p. 28.
16.
J. Haidt, S. Koller, and M. Dias, “Affect, Culture, and Morality; or, Is it Wrong to Eat
your Dog?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65 (1993), pp. 617-619. Cited
in John Doris and Stephen P. Stitch, “Empirical Perspectives on Ethics,” in Frank
Jackson and Michael Smith, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 140.
17.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Framing Moral Intuitions,” in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong,
ed., Moral Psychology: Volume 2, The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and
Diversity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 52-54.
18.
Thomas C. Schelling, “Economic Reasoning and the Ethics of Policy,” Public Interest,
63 (1981), pp. 37-61. Cited in Appiah, Experiments in Ethics, p. 86.
19.
L. Petrinovich and P. O’Neill, “Influence of Wording and Framing Effects on Moral
Intuitions,” Ethology and Sociobiology, 17 (1996), pp. 149-152. Cited in SinnottArmstrong, “Framing Moral Intuitions,” pp. 58-60.
20.
Doris and Stitch, “Empirical Perspectives on Ethics,” p. 139.
21.
Sinnott-Armstrong, “Framing Moral Intuitions,” p. 62.
22.
See S. Schnall, J. Haidt, and G.L. Clore, “Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment,”
unpublished manuscript, Department of Psychology, University of Virginia. Cited in
Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals, p. 28.
24
23.
Doris and Stitch, “Empirical Perspectives on Ethics,” p. 139.
24.
Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, “An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto,” p. 7.
25.
Sinnott-Armstrong, “Framing Moral Intuitions,” p. 74.
26.
They are criticizing a reflective equilibrium model of the methodology of normative
epistemology. See Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen P. Stitch,
“Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions,” in Knobe and Nichols, eds., Experimental
Philosophy, p. 21, see p. 40.
27.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p.
46.
28.
Rawls, Theory, p. 48.
29.
One might worry that, as formulated, the account commits us to denying non-cognitivist
positions according to which moral judgments are not truth-apt and moral convictions are
not strictly-speaking beliefs. I shall be writing about “moral beliefs” and “propositions,”
and about the issue whether moral “intuitions” and “beliefs” are “true” or “plausible.” I
adopt this usage, however, only for convenience, and because it is sanctioned by ordinary
language. I certainly do not intend here to presuppose that non-cognitivist positions are
false. Many non-cognitivists follow Simon Blackburn in adopting a deflationist account
of the use of “true,” and in following ordinary English in speaking of “moral beliefs” and
“propositions.” See Simon Blackburn, “Anti-Realist Expressivism and Quasi-Realism,”
in David Copp, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), pp. 146-162.
30.
Rawls, Theory, p. 48.
25
31.
Rawls, Theory, pp. 48-49.
32.
Rawls, Theory, pp. 48-51.
33.
Doris and Stitch, “Empirical Perspectives on Ethics,” pp. 129-137.
34.
Rawls, Theory, p. 50.
35.
I thank Jerry Dworkin for helpful discussion of these ideas.
36.
Rawls, Theory, p. 50. For extended discussion of this point, see John Rawls, “The
Independence of Moral Theory,” in Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 286-302.
37.
See Rawls, Theory, p. 51.
38.
Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1998), p. 15.
39.
Kagan, Normative Ethics, p. 13.
40.
I am grateful to Bernard Molyneux for helpful discussion of the idea of an intuition.
41.
Ernest Sosa, “Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Intuition,” in Knobe and
Nichols, eds., Experimental Philosophy p. 233.
42.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Abstract + Concrete = Paradox,” in Knobe and Nichols, eds.,
Experimental Philosophy, p. 209. For a similar account, see Ernest Sosa, “Minimal
Intuition,” in M. DePaul and W. Ramsey, eds., Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of
Intuitions and their Role in Philosophical Inquiry (Lanham, MD.: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1998), pp. 257-269.
43.
Even though I write of moral “propositions” and moral “beliefs,” I do not intend here to
commit myself to the falsity of non-cognitivist positions. I discussed this point in section
4, above.
44.
Rawls, Theory, p. 48.
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45.
Paul Teller objected (in personal correspondence) that there may be no such thing as
“the” scientific method. To avoid this worry, I could instead discuss methodology in
particle physics, for instance, but for simplicity, I will write as if science were a single
discipline with its own method.
46.
For a helpful discussion of the scientific method, see Richard Boyd, “How to be a Moral
Realist,” in Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, ed., Moral Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1988), pp. 188-199.
47.
For Rawls’s arguments on this point, see Rawls, “The Independence of Moral Theory.”
48.
For a defense of the value of achieving the Rawlsian goal – which he describes as the
goal of giving a structural account of our moral view – see Thomas Hurka, “Normative
Ethics: Back to the Future,” in Brian Leiter, ed., The Future for Philosophy (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 246-264.
49.
For example, I think we can detect an uncertainty on this point in Hurka, “Normative
Ethics.”
50.
Rawls discusses these issues in “The Independence of Moral Theory,” pp. 288-290.
51.
Michael DePaul presses this point, in defense of the standard Methodology, in his
“Intuitions in Moral Enquiry,” in Copp, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory.
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