Does Moral Action Depend on Reasoning?
Note: In 2010, I received an invitation from the John Templeton
Foundation, whose work focuses on the interface of science and religion, to
contribute to their "Big
Questions" program, which publishes collections of brief essays in
places like the New York Times and The Atlantic. The topic this
time was moral reasoning, which has been much debated among psychologists,
philosophers, and other cognitive scientists.
Here's how the Foundation posed its "Big
Question" for 2010:
In most of the world's philosophical and religious traditions, reason is
considered a key element in helping human beings to discern what is morally
appropriate and right, and thus in guiding our moral behavior. In
recent years, however, a number of researchers in psychology, neuroscience,
and philosophy have made the case that reason does not function in the way
these traditions have supposed.
Some argue, for example, that our moral intuitions and ideas are pre-rational or
non-rational. Others see moral decision-making
primarily as a result of particular environmental or social contexts.
Still others hold that moral belief and action spring from deep-seated
emotional and psychological dispositions about which we have limited or no
self-awareness. Even from many traditional religious points of view,
the role of reason can be problematic, since it suggests that we have an
ability to know moral truths and live moral lives free fro divine guidance.
Where and how are the crucial lines to be drawn in this discussion? To what
extent are people capable of consciously controlling their moral
behavior? Is our capacity for reasoned moral decision-making real or
illusory? Are we as free as we like to think? Does moral action
depend on reasoning?
The Foundation's format requires that essays begin with a flat-footed
answer to the question. It also limited respondents to about 1000
words. The following version is annotated so that the reader will get a
better idea of my arguments.
Link to
edited version, published in the New York Review of Books (May 13,
2010, p. 7) and elsewhere.
Yes, Within Limits
Freedom of the will is real, but that does not mean that we are totally free.
Human experience, thought, and action are constrained by a variety of factors,
including our evolutionary heritage, law and custom, overt social influences,
and a range of more subtle social cues.1
But within those limits, we are free to do what we want, and especially to think
what we want, and we are able to reason our way to moral judgments and action.
Many evolutionary psychologists assert that reasoning in general and moral
reasoning in particular are constrained by cognitive modules that evolved when
we were hunter-gatherers on the East African savannah during the Pleistocene
era. There is no question that patterns of behavior, just like body morphology,
are subject to evolution by natural selection, and it is certainly possible that
some aspects of our mental life have evolved in this way.2
But perhaps the more important legacy of evolution is not a "mental
toolkit" specifically geared to some "environment of early
adaptation" but rather our general intelligence-- an ability to learn and
to solve problems that has enabled our species not just to adapt to new
environments but to adapt our environments to us. Evolution has also given us a
capacity for language, which permits us to conjure, reflect on, and communicate
ideas that have never been thought before. These distinctive traits allowed us
to move out of our primeval environment and to cover the planet, including
permanent human settlements at the Amundson-Scott South Pole Station ("the
last place on earth") and the International Space Station, orbiting some
200 miles in the sky.
Some social psychologists argue that human experience, thought, and action
are overwhelmingly controlled by the situations in which they take place, and
that therefore personal agency has little or no role in explaining behavior,
including moral behavior. On this view, there are no rotten apples, only rotten
barrels. This "doctrine of situationism" has descended to us from the
stimulus-response behaviorism of John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, and it is just
as wrong-headed.
People control their objective situation through their choices and overt
behavior, and they control their subjective situation through their mental
activity-- how they perceive and categorize the situation, what relevant
knowledge they retrieve from memory, and how they solve the problem of what to
do. According to this alternative "doctrine of interactionism," the
person and the situation are interdependent, and the situation is at least as
much a function of the person as the person's behavior is a function of the
situation. The bulk of causal agency remains with the person.3
Some theorists acknowledge that cognitive processes mediate between the
situations that we face and our responses to them, but they assert that our
thoughts are themselves automatically elicited by features of the situation, in
an almost reflexive manner. Because our thoughts and actions occur
automatically, they argue, there is little room for conscious, deliberate
reflection. We are on automatic pilot most of the time, and conscious will is an
illusion.
Such claims for "the automaticity of everyday life" run like a
juggernaut through contemporary social psychology, but upon close examination,
the evidence supporting them is not very good. There is no question that some
aspects of cognition occur automatically. You would never finish reading this
essay, for instance, if you had to deliberately piece together every word from
its letters and every sentence from its words. But in most everyday situations,
once we get beyond the first instant, our experience, thought, and action are
largely the product of conscious rather than unconscious processes.4
A variant on the automaticity argument is that moral judgment is driven by
emotional "gut feelings" and other intuitions, and that the reasons we
give for our actions are largely after-the-fact rationalizations. But it is a
mistake to conflate the intuitive with the emotional. Intuition can be purely
cognitive, and relying on intuition has its own rational justification. It would
be surprising if emotion did not play a role in moral judgment and behavior, but
it remains an open question whether that role is central or peripheral. When
there is no reason to make one choice over another, it is rational to let
emotion be our guide. At least we can feel good about the choice we have made.5
It is easy to contrive thought experiments in which moral reasoning seems to
fail us. Most people agree that it is acceptable to divert a trolley that
threatens to kill five people onto a track where it will kill just one person
instead. On the other hand, most people agree that it is not acceptable
to throw someone off a footbridge, in the path of that same trolley, to save
those same five lives. From a strictly utilitarian perspective, the two outcomes
are the same: five lives saved versus one life lost.
When, in (thankfully) rare circumstances, moral reasoning fails us, we must
rely on our intuitions, emotional responses, or some other basis for action. But
that does not mean that we do not reason about the moral dilemmas that we face
in the ordinary course of everyday living-- or that we reason poorly, or that we
rely excessively on heuristic shortcuts, or that reasoning is infected by a host
of biases and errors. It only means that moral reasoning is more complex and
nuanced than a simple calculation of comparative utilities. Moral reasoning
typically occurs under conditions of uncertainty (another constraint, which
comes with human existence), where there are no easy algorithms to follow. If a
judgment takes place under conditions of certainty, where the application of a
straightforward algorithm will do the job, it is probably not a moral
judgment to begin with.6
If you believe in God, then human rationality is a gift from God, and it
would be a sin not to use it as the basis for moral judgment and behavior. If
you do not believe in God, then human rationality is a gift of evolution, and
not to use it would be a crime against nature.
John Kihlstrom is a professor of psychology at the University of
California, Berkeley and the author of over a hundred scientific articles. He
is the former editor of the journal Psychological Science and the co-author, with Nancy Cantor, of Personality and Social Intelligence.
Notes
1. Here I had mostly in mind Martin
Orne's notion of demand characteristics, which can be defined broadly as
the totality of cues in a situation that contain information about the nature of
that situation, and how the person is expected to behave in that
situation. Return.
2. Ethology, a discipline of biology
founded by Nikko Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz, and Karl von Frisch (who together
received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973) is based on the view
that certain patterns of behavior -- think of food-begging in herring
gulls, imprinting in geese, and the waggle dance of honeybees -- are universal
within a species precisely because they evolved due to natural selection.
There is no reason that natural selection could not have affected the
development of certain "habits of mind", as well. A good example,
initially proposed by Chomsky and by Fodor, are the cognitive modules involved
in language. However, I am deeply skeptical of strong claims by some
evolutionary psychology for the evolution of an extensive set of mental modules,
and especially the claim that any such modules that might exist evolved in the
service of our reproductive capacity. See my "Top 10 Questions to Ask
Your Local Evolutionary Psychologist", in preparation. Return.
3. What I call the Doctrine of
Interactionism has its recent origins in the work of the late Kenneth Bowers
(1973), and its deeper roots in the work of Kurt Lewin (1935, 1951).
Social psychologists often attribute the Doctrine of Situationism to Lewin, but
this is wrong: Lewin was quite clear that, in his view, the person and the
environment were interdependent factors in the cause of behavior. A more
complex version of interactionism is contained in what I call the Doctrine of
Reciprocal Determinism, proposed by Albert Bandura, according to which the
person, the environment, and behavior constitute a complex, dynamic system
characterized by bidirectional causality. See my "The Person
and the Situation in Social Cognition", in preparation. Return.
4. Although, as my 1987
Science paper makes clear, I believe that unconscious mental
structures and processes play a role in experience, thought, and action, I am
skeptical of claims that unconscious, automatic processes dominate our everyday
life. See my essay on "The
Automaticity Juggernaut" (2008). Return.
5. As part of my attempt to develop a
non-Freudian approach to unconscious mental life, my colleagues and I have
proposed a concept of "implicit thought" which may well play a role in
intuition. See my papers, written with Jennifer Dorfman and Victor Shames,
on "Intuition, Incubation, and Insight: Implicit Cognition in Problem-Solving" (1996) and
Intimations of Memory and Thought" (1996). Return.
6. I often suspect that there is a sort of
"People Are Stupid" school within psychology, especially social
psychology, which assumes that people don't think very hard about what they are
doing -- and when they do think, they don't think very well. I
vented this suspicion in a commentary, "Is There
a 'People Are Stupid' School in Social Psychology?". Return.
This page last revised 06/22/2010 02:17:30 PM.
