Moral Theory Meets Cognitive Science How the Cognitive Sciences Can Transform Traditional Debates

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Moral Theory Meets Cognitive Science How the
Cognitive Sciences Can Transform Traditional
Debates

• Stephen Stich
• Dept. of Philosophy
• Center for Cognitive Science
• Rutgers University
• sstich_at_ruccs.rutgers.edu

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Lecture 4Stephen StichDaniel KellyJoshua Knobe

• Debunking Moral Intuition
• A Hodgepodge of Multipurpose Kludges

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Lecture 4Stephen StichJoshua Knobe Daniel
Kelly

• Debunking Moral Intuition
• A Hodgepodge of Multipurpose Kludges

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Introduction

• Philosophers and more recently cognitive
  scientists have offered many accounts of the
  psychological mechanisms processes underlying
  intuitive moral judgment
• Moral philosophers have always insisted that
  sometimes the outputs of those processes
  peoples moral intuitions are not to be
  trusted
• though they disagree about when skepticism is
  warranted

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Introduction

• Our goal in this talk is to sketch a newly
  emerging perspective on the mechanisms underlying
  moral intuition
• and to explore its implications for the hotly
  debated issue of whether and when intuitions
  should be relied on

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Introduction

• Philosophers have typically assumed that those
  mechanisms were well designed for something
• But we now have reasons to think that many of
  theses mechanisms are not well designed for
  ANYTHING

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Introduction

• Moral Psychology is a Kludge
• A hodgepodge of multipurpose kludges!

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Introduction

• Before explaining and defending this claim it
  will be useful to consider some of the reasons
  that philosophers both classic contemporary
  have offered for discounting moral intuitions

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Philosophical Background

• When should we be skeptical about moral
  intuitions?
• The Moral Sense Ideal Observer traditions
• Reflective Equilibrium
• Evolutionary arguments debunking intuition

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Philosophical Background

• The Moral Sense Ideal Observer traditions
• Ideal observer theorists maintain that our moral
  intuitions are correct (or justified) when made
  under ideal conditions
• When conditions are not ideal e.g. when we have
  false beliefs about relevant non-moral matters,
  or we are irrational our intuitions are not to
  be trusted

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Philosophical Background

• The Moral Sense Ideal Observer traditions
• For Hutcheson an important precursor of this
  tradition moral judgments are the product of a
  moral sense implanted in us by the Author of
  Nature
• Thus it can be relied upon when doing its job
  properly
• But, like other senses, it can mislead when
  conditions are unfavorable

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Philosophical Background

• Reflective Equilibrium
• Rawls Decision Procedure for Ethics
• (1951)
• Narrow Reflective Equilibrium
• Bring intuitions about
• particular cases
• moral principles
• into accord
• To do this, sometimes an intuition about a
  particular case must be rejected

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Philosophical Background

• Wide Reflective Equilibrium
• Bring intuitions about
• particular cases
• moral principles
• into accord with the rest of our beliefs
• including beliefs about scientific matters,
  history, politics even metaphysics semantics
• Even more of our intuitions about particular
  cases will have to be rejected

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Philosophical Background

• Evolutionary arguments debunking intuition
• Perhaps the most influential writer in this
  tradition is Peter Singer

Updated in Ethics Intuition (2005)
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Philosophical Background

• In The Expanding Circle, Singer focuses on
  nepotistic intuitions which maintain that, in
  various domains, we ought to value the welfare of
  our kin and tribesmen more than the welfare of
  people outside these circles
• The psychological processes leading to judgments
  of this sort were adaptive in ancestral
  environments (and perhaps they still are)
• But once we see why we have these nepotistic
  tribal intuitions, Singer suggests, we can also
  see that there is no good reason to use them in a
  decision procedure for ethics

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Philosophical Background

• In Ethics and Intuition (2005) Singer develops
  the argument by focusing on the sort of trolley
  problems that have loomed large in recent
  philosophical and empirical studies

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Philosophical Background

• Singer (following Greene) maintains that the
  neuroscientific evidence suggests that intuitions
  about the footbridge case are the result of our
  emotional reaction to cases in which harm is
  caused by the sort of interaction that would have
  occurred in ancestral environments

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Philosophical Background

• The salient feature that explains our different
  intuitive judgments concerning the two cases is
  that the footbridge case is the kind of situation
  that was likely to arise during the eons of time
  over which we were evolving whereas the standard
  trolley case describes a way of bringing about
  someones death that has only been possible in
  the past century or two. But what is the moral
  salience of the fact that I have killed someone
  in a way that was possible a million years ago,
  rather than in a way that became possible only
  two hundred years ago? I would answer none.

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Philosophical Background

• At a more general level this casts serious
  doubt on the method of reflective equilibrium.
  There is little point in constructing a moral
  theory designed to match considered moral
  judgments that themselves stem from our evolved
  responses to the situations in which we and our
  ancestors lived during the period of our
  evolution as social mammals, primates, and
  finally, human beings. We should, with our
  current powers of reasoning and our rapidly
  changing circumstances, be able to do better than
  that. (348)
• What I am saying, in brief, is this. Advances in
  our understanding of ethics undermine some
  conceptions of doing ethics . Those conceptions
  of ethics tend to be too respectful of our
  intuitions. Our better understanding of ethics
  gives us grounds for being less respectful of
  them. (349)

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Philosophical Background

• We agree with Singers skepticism about intuition
• But we also think his skepticism is
• not radical enough!

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Philosophical Background

• Assumptions that Singer and the friends of
  intuition share
• The psychological system underlying our moral
  intuitions is well designed
• Thus there is some point to or reason for the
  intuitive moral judgments people make when the
  system is working properly
• Though Singer (unlike the friends of intuition)
  insists that the function the system is designed
  for is of dubious moral importance, and thus that
  the intuitions are not to be taken seriously

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Philosophical Background

• We believe that the engine of moral intuition is
  not well designed at all
• Far from being the sort of elegant machine
  celebrated in the writings of some evolutionary
  psychologists, we think that it is a kludge
• a cluster of mechanisms cobbled together rather
  awkwardly from bits of mental machinery most of
  which were designed for functions that have
  noting to do with morality

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Philosophical Background

• To use a term that may be more common in Paris,
  we maintain that the engine of moral intuition is
  the result of bricolage

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Philosophical Background

• This explains many of the quirks of moral
  intuition
• And provides yet another reason to be skeptical
  of their use in moral deliberation

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Overview of the Rest of the Talk
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Overview of the Rest of the Talk

• Two examples of the kludginess of the
  mechanisms underlying moral intuition
• Dan Kellys work on Moral Disgust
• Joshua Knobes work on intentionality judgments
  unconscious moral judgments
• From kludginess to skepticism

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Kelly on Disgust

• Kelly has constructed a rich, nuanced,
  empirically supported account of the
  psychological mechanisms underlying the uniquely
  human disgust system and how that system evolved
• In this talk Ill only have time to for a brief
  sketch of two central themes

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Kelly on Disgust

• The Entanglement Thesis
• Disgust is itself a kludge a uniquely human
  emotion produced by the merger of two distinct
  systems
• The Co-Optation Thesis
• After the merger, disgust was co-opted by
• the norm system
• the ethnic boundary system
• which were central elements in the emergence
  of human ultra-sociality

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Kelly on Disgust

• Kelly assembles a vast array of evidence for
  these theses, drawn from
• neuroscience
• social psychology
• cognitive psychology
• developmental psychology
• evolutionary psychology
• gene-culture co-evolution theory
• As usual, the devil is in the details
• So I join Paul Rozin in urging that you read the
  work as it appears in print

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis

• Disgust exhibits a puzzling array of
• elicitors
• which evoke an equally puzzling cluster of
• responses

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis

• Elicitors include
• Foods dog meat, grubs, insects

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis

• Elicitors include
• Foods dog meat, grubs, insects
• Substances associated with the body feces,
  vomit, spit
• Organic decay
• People and objects associated with illness a
  shirt once worn by a person with leprosy
• Sexual practices necrophilia, incest
• Some moral transgressions transgressors rape,
  torture, child molestation
• Members of low status outgroups untouchables,
  Jews

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis
Some elicitors are pan-cultural

• Elicitors include
• Foods dog meat, grubs, insects
• Substances associated with the body feces,
  vomit, spit
• Organic decay
• People and objects associated with illness a
  shirt once worn by a person with leprosy
• Sexual practices necrophilia, incest
• Some moral transgressions transgressors rape,
  torture, child molestation
• Members of low status outgroups untouchables,
  Jews

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis
Others are culturally local (or idiosyncratic)

• Elicitors include
• Foods dog meat, grubs, insects
• Substances associated with the body feces,
  vomit, spit
• Organic decay
• People and objects associated with illness a
  shirt once worn by a person with leprosy
• Sexual practices necrophilia, incest
• Some moral transgressions transgressors rape,
  torture, child molestation
• Members of low status outgroups untouchables,
  Jews

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis

• The disgust response includes
• Gape face (occasionally accompanied by retching)
• Feeling of nausea
• Sense oral incorporation
• Quick withdrawal
• A more sustained cognitive sense of
  offensiveness
• A more sustained cognitive sense of
  contamination

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis

• How are all of these connected?
• The Entanglement Thesis maintains that the human
  emotion of disgust is the result of the fusion of
  two distinct mechanisms
• each of which has homologous counterparts in
  other species
• though they have combined only in humans

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis

• One mechanism (the poison avoidance mechanism)
  is directly linked to digestion
• It evolved to regulate food intake and protect
  the gut against ingested substances that are
  poisonous or otherwise harmful
• It was designed to expel substances entering the
  gastro-intestinal system via the mouth
• And to acquire new elicitors very quickly
• As John Garcia famously demonstrated, ingested
  substances that induce gut-based distress often
  generate acquired aversions

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis

• The other mechanism (the parasite avoidance
  mechanism)
• Evolved to protect against infection from
  pathogens and parasites, by avoiding them
• Not specific to ingestion, but serves to guard
  against coming into close physical proximity with
  infectious agents
• This involves avoiding not only visible pathogens
  and parasites, but also places, substances and
  other organisms that might be harboring them

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis
These elements of the disgust response
are traceable to the poison avoidance system

• The disgust response includes
• Gape face (occasionally accompanied by retching)
• Feeling of nausea
• Sense oral incorporation
• Quick withdrawal
• A more sustained cognitive sense of
  offensiveness
• A more sustained cognitive sense of
  contamination

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis
and these are traceable to the parasite
avoidance poison system

• The disgust response includes
• Gape face (occasionally accompanied by retching)
• Feeling of nausea
• Sense oral incorporation
• Quick withdrawal
• A more sustained cognitive sense of
  offensiveness
• A more sustained cognitive sense of
  contamination

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis
These elicitors are traceable to the poison
avoidance system

• Elicitors include
• Foods dog meat, grubs, insects
• Substances associated with the body feces,
  vomit, spit
• Organic decay
• People and objects associated with illness a
  shirt once worn by a person with leprosy
• Sexual practices necrophilia, incest
• Some moral transgressions transgressors rape,
  torture, child molestation
• Members of low status outgroups untouchables,
  Jews

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis
and these are traceable to the parasite
avoidance system

• Elicitors include
• Foods dog meat, grubs, insects
• Substances associated with the body feces,
  vomit, spit
• Organic decay
• People and objects associated with illness a
  shirt once worn by a person with leprosy
• Sexual practices necrophilia, incest
• Some moral transgressions transgressors rape,
  torture, child molestation
• Members of low status outgroups untouchables,
  Jews

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis

• One bit of evidence supporting the Entanglement
  Thesis is that different components of that
  response are on different developmental schedules
• Distaste gape are present within the first year
  of life
• Contamination sensitivity emerges significantly
  later
• Once the full system in in place, the components
  of the response are produced together they form
  a nomological cluster
• Any elicitor of disgust will reliably produce all
  or most of those clustered components

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Kelly on Disgust The Entanglement Thesis

• A puzzle
• Why should the sight of a festering sore or a
  person with leprosy evoke a gape face and a
  feeling of nausea?
• The solution Disgust is a kludge!
• But it is kludge with features that could be
  readily co-opted and put to other uses as humans
  began living in larger groups and human
  ultrasociality emerged

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis
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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• The Gape Face as a Signal
• As group size increased, there was an increasing
  need for a perspicuous signal warning of
  dangerous foods and risk of infectious disease
• In humans, the face and facial expressions
  provide a rich source of such social information
• The gape face, which clearly has roots in the
  facial motions that accompany retching, was
  co-opted as a signal, warning others not just
  against toxic foods, but also against the
  presence of parasites and contagious pathogens

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• Co-Optation by the Norm System
• As group size increased, there was increased need
  for complex social coordination
• The norm system whose structure we considered
  briefly in the 2nd Lecture played an important
  role in facilitating this co-ordination
• And the disgust system had features that made it
  an obvious candidate to be co-opted by the norm
  system as it evolved

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• The SS model suggests that compliance motivation
  punitive motivation are linked to the emotion
  system

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis
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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• But psychological neurological evidence
  indicates that there are several separate emotion
  systems the disgust system being one of them

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis
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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• Disgust is a natural candidate to provide both
  compliance punitive motivation for norms that
  involve intrinsically disgusting matters, like
  the disposal of corpses bodily wastes, and
  other activities that are antecedently salient to
  the disgust system, like eating practices
• Compliance is motivated by making norm violating
  behavior disgusting thus aversive
• Punitive motivation is provided because the
  violator is considered dirty and contaminated and
  is avoided or shunned

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis
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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• The norm system is thus a kludge built with
  kludgy parts
• Not surprisingly, this can lead to some very
  quirky and disturbing behavior
• Several recent studies have focused on the fact
  that the disgust system can be triggered by many
  things that have nothing to do with norms
• but even when triggered by these non-moral items,
  the disgust system can have dramatic and
  persistent influence on a persons judgments
  about moral issues

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis
other emotion triggers
Acquisition Mechanism
Execution Mechanism
beliefs
norm data base r1---------- r2----------
r3---------- rn----------
infer contents of normative rules
identify norm implicating behavior
DISGUST
judgment
other emotions
Rule-related reasoning capacity
Proximal Cues in Environment
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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• Wheatley Haidt have shown that when
  participants are hypnotically induced to feel a
  brief pang of disgust when they encounter the
  work often and then presented with the
  following scenario
• Dan is a student council representative at
  his school. This semester he is in charge of
  scheduling discussions about academic issues. He
  often picks topics that appeal to both professors
  and students in order to stimulate discussion.
• many judge that Dan is doing something wrong!

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• Schnall et al. have shown participants make more
  severe moral judgments when the judgments are
  made in a disgusting office
• greasy pizza boxes
• sticky chair
• a dried up smoothie
• a chewed up pen

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• Other studies have focused on prima facie
  irrational downstream consequences of the disgust
  system being triggered in moral deliberation

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis
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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• The Lady Macbeth Effect
• Zhong Liljenquist have shown that recalling an
  unethical deed increased the desire for products
  related to cleansing, like antiseptic wipes
• And that cleaning ones hands after describing a
  past unethical deed reduced moral emotions like
  guilt shame
• and also reduced the likelihood that
  participants would volunteer to help a desperate
  graduate student!

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• The Lady Macbeth Effect
• Schnall et al. (unpublished) compared judgments
  about moral severity in two groups of
  participants
• One group had just used an alcohol-based
  cleansing gel on their hands
• The other group had just used an ordinary,
  non-cleansing hand cream
• The moral judgments of those using the cleansing
  gel were significantly less severe!

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• Ethnic Boundary Markers
• Boyd Richerson their students have argued
  that another crucial step in the development of
  human ultra-sociality was the emergence of
  mechanisms which allow people to recognize
  members of their own tribe or ethnie
• This is important because in-group members share
  beliefs norms that facilitate coordination

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• Since different cuisines eating practices are
  one of the more visible correlates of ethnie
  membership, and since disgust is heavily involved
  in regulating food intake, disgust was a natural
  candidate to be co-opted by the emerging system
  of ethnic identification
• Eating practices of out-groups and other readily
  detectable signs of out-group membership came to
  evoke disgust
• And disgust came to provided a significant part
  of the motivation to avoid out-group members

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Kelly on Disgust The Co-Optation Thesis

• Though the evolutionary function of the ethnic
  boundary marker system was to facilitate
  cooperation by keeping groups apart, the kludgy
  solution to this problem has some unfortunate
  consequences
• Out-group members are not simply avoided, they
  are also considered offensive contaminating
• People who embrace different norms are often felt
  to be disgusting and sub-human!

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Kludge Meets Kass
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Kludge Meets Kass

• Leon Kass, M.D., Ph.D.
• Conservative bio-ethicist
• Chairman of the U. S. A. President's Council on
  Bioethics from 2002 to 2005

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Kludge Meets Kass

• In his book, Life, Liberty the Defense of
  Dignity (2002), there is a chapter called The
  Wisdom of Repugnance
• Kass maintains that
• "in crucial cases...repugnance is the emotional
  expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power
  fully to articulate it.
• In this age in which everything is held to be
  permissible so long as it is freely done, and in
  which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments
  of our autonomous rational will, repugnance may
  be the only voice left that speaks up to defend
  the core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls
  that have forgotten how to shudder."

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Kludge Meets Kass

• The claims play a central role in Kass critique
  of human cloning
• Others have adopted the idea to argue against
  abortion, pornography same-sex marriage

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Kludge Meets Kass

• Some philosophers, most notably Martha Nussbaum,
  have challenged Kass, arguing that disgust should
  be discounted in moral legal deliberation
  because (roughly) it reminds us of our animal
  origins

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Kludge Meets Kass

• I think Kellys work offers a far more
• plausible
• powerful
• critique

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Kludge Meets Kass

• There is no reason to think there is
• wisdom in repugnance
• because
• Disgust is a Kludge
• and the psychological system that bases moral
  judgments on disgust is a
• Kludge twice over!

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Kludge Meets Kass

• Anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda often invoked the
  imagery and language of disgust, purity,
  contamination dehumanization very flagrantly

A poster advertising the film The Eternal
Jew Hitler described the Jew as a maggot in a
festering abscess, hidden away inside the clean
and healthy body of the nation
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Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• My second example draws some elegant and exciting
  work by Joshua Knobe which demonstrates the way
  in which unconscious moral judgments judgments
  which an agent may explicitly reject can
  nonetheless have significant impact on a range of
  morally relevant intuitions

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Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• In his new book, Kluge, Gary Marcus argues that
  more recently evolved, computationally slow and
  consciously accessible mental processes System
  2 Processes in the currently fashionable jargon
  were grafted onto older (System 1)
  psychological systems designed for quite
  different purposes
• The resulting kludgy architecture accounts for
  many of the quirks and shortcomings that
  contemporary cognitive science has discovered

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Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• I think that Knobes work provides an important
  disquieting illustration of this phenomenon in
  the moral domain

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Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• The story begins with the side effect effect
  (aka the Knobe effect) one of best known and
  most surprising finding in the emerging field of
  experimental philosophy
• Knobe (2003) reports an experiment in which
  participants were presented with a pair of almost
  identical vignettes

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Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action
The vice-president of a company went to the
chairman of the board and said, We are thinking
of starting a new program. It will help us
increase profits, but it will also harm help
the environment. The chairman of the board
answered, I dont care at all about harming
helping the environment. I just want to make as
much profit as I can. Lets start the new
program. They started the new program. Sure
enough, the environment was harmed helped.
78
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• In the harm case, participants were asked how
  much blame the chairman deserved (on a scale from
  0 6) and whether he intentionally harmed the
  environment
• In the help case, participants were asked how
  much praise the chairman deserved (on a scale
  from 0 6) and whether he intentionally helped
  the environment
• In the harm case, 82 said the chairman brought
  about the side-effect intentionally
• In the help case, 77 said the chairman did not
  bring about the side-effect intentionally

79
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• Knobes initial hypothesis was that peoples
  moral assessment of the side-effect plays a
  substantial role in determining whether they are
  willing to say that the side-effect was brought
  about intentionally
• A judgment that the side-effect is morally bad
  makes it more likely that it will be judged to be
  intentional
• Though this seems incompatible with the
  widespread idea that judgments of intentionality
  are judgments about a purely factual matter, it
  does have an obvious rationale since judgments
  about whether an action is intentional play a
  central role in determining whether an agent
  deserves praise or blame

80
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• Subsequent research showed that, if the
  hypothesis is understood as a claim about the
  effect of moral judgments that people consciously
  make, this hypothesis is mistaken
• The problem emerges clearly in study Knobe ran in
  collaboration with David Pizarro Paul Bloom

81
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• Liberal university students were given
  Knobe-style vignettes in which an advertising
  executive approves an ad campaign which has the
  side-effect of
• encouraging interracial sex
• or placing gardenias in ones office

82
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• None of the participants judged that inter-racial
  sex (or placing gardenias) is morally wrong
• But participants were much more inclined to say
  that the executive intentionally encouraged
  interracial sex
• Explicit moral judgments cannot explain the
  difference in judgments about the intention-ality
  of the side-effects

83
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• However, (following Pizarro Bloom) Knobe has
  recently proposed that perhaps participants were
  making non-conscious normative judgments that the
  behavior in question violates a norm that is made
  salient by the question or situation, even if it
  is a norm that they explicitly reject

84
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• The picture Knobe now proposes looks like this
• In reaching a conscious moral judgment, we
  can consider a variety of different moral norms,
  weigh these norms against each other, perhaps
  even determine that some of the norms are
  themselves unjustified.

85
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• Non-conscious moral judgments are formed through
  a much simpler (system-1 style) process
• They are formed extremely quickly and therefore
  involve very shallow processing
• In generating a non-conscious moral judgment, the
  only norms we consider are the ones that first
  come to mind. We do not search for additional
  norms we do not weigh norms against each other
  we do not ask whether any of the norms might
  themselves be unjustified.

86
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• Instead, we simply determine whether the behavior
  in question violates any of the norms in the very
  limited set we are considering
• If it does, we classify it as a transgression. It
  is this judgment as to whether or not the
  behavior is a transgression that then influences
  our intuitions about intentional action.

87
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• The theory predicts that the most salient norms
  evoked by a given case will be the ones used to
  in making intentionality judgments, even if
  subsequent reflection leads the agent to think
  that there is nothing wrong with violating the
  norm or that doing so would be a very good
  thing.
• Here is a vignette that Knobe has recently used
  to test this idea

88
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• In Nazi Germany, there was a law called the
  racial identification law. The purpose of the
  law was to help identify people of certain races
  so that they could be rounded up and sent to
  concentration camps. Shortly after this law was
  passed, the CEO of a small corporation decided to
  make certain organizational changes. The
  Vice-President of the corporation said By
  making those changes, youll definitely be
  increasing our profits. But youll also be
  violating fulfilling the requirements of the
  racial identification law. The CEO said Look,
  I know that Ill be violating fulfilling the
  requirements of the law, but I dont care one bit
  about that. All I care about is making as much
  profit as I can. Lets make those organizational
  changes! As soon as the CEO gave this order, the
  corporation began making the organizational
  changes.
• 81 of subjects in the violate condition said
  that he violated the requirements intentionally
  30 of subjects in the fulfill condition said
  that he fulfilled the requirements intentionally.

89
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• Knobes theory is certainly not the last word on
  how intentionality judgments are generated
• His work has inspired dozens of other researchers
• there are many studies I have not mentioned
• and many others are underway

90
Knobe on Norms and Intentional Action

• However, IF Knobes theory is on the right track,
  then intentionality judgments are a product of a
  kludgy architecture which can be influenced by
  norms and judgments which the agent
• is not aware of, and
• does not endorse
• This raises serious questions about the use of
  those judgments in further moral deliberation, or
  in the law

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From Kludginess to Skepticism

• Both Kellys Knobes work support the
  hypothesis that motivates this talk
• The psychological mechanism underlying moral
  intuition is
• A Hodgepodge of Multipurpose Kludges

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From Kludginess to Skepticism

• Suppose thats right. What should we conclude
  about moral intuition?
• The answer is NOT that all moral intuition should
  be rejected
• nor even that intuitions that are closely tied to
  kludgy features of the mind should be rejected
• For, as Shaun Nichols has argued, some of the
  most admirable features of the cultural evolution
  of norms including the increased scope and
  acceptance of norms prohibiting physical harm
  are the products of kludgy design

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From Kludginess to Skepticism

• Rather, I suggest, the right conclusion to draw
  is that ALL moral intuitions should be viewed
  with a healthy dose of skepticism
• The mechanisms that give rise to them may not
  have been well designed to do anything
• So we should be skeptical about moral intuitions
  for roughly the same reason that we should be
  skeptical of the output of a kludgy piece of
  computer software

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From Kludginess to Skepticism

• Compare and Contrast
• The friends of intuition (e.g. moral sense
  theorists) think the system producing them is
  well designed for morally admirable goals
• though it can sometimes misfire when conditions
  are unfavorable
• Previous enemies of intuition (e.g. Singer) think
  the system producing them has been well designed
  for morally problematic goals
• We believe that the system producing them is a
  kludge much of it has not been well designed at
  all!

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From Kludginess to Skepticism

• But if we should be skeptical about all
  intuition, how can we go about making moral
  decisions?
• Thats a BIG question a HARD one.
• Perhaps Ill be able to suggest an answer

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From Kludginess to Skepticism

• the next time I come to Paris