Waldron, Jeremy - Right and Wrong: Psychologists vs Philosophers

10/16/2009

New York Review of Books Vol 56 No 15 Oct 8, 2009

This is a review of Appiah's "Experiments in Ethics", which is cast as an attempt to take seriously the challenge to ethics coming from the psychologists. Author is critical of Appiah's seemingly facile attempt to grapple with the problems. He claims that Appiah alternates between taking the psychologists' "case against character" or the "psychologits' challenge" too seriously, or then not seriously enough.

Appiah seems to take the psychologists' challenge seriously at first, when he cites numerous studies that apparently show that the so-called virtues of charity or honesty aren't cross-situational, and are frequently influenced by small, seemingly insignificant changes in the situation. E.g. a person is more likely to be helpful to a stranger if he has previously found a spare dime in a telephone booth. The challenge to virtue ethics is that good character traits aren't as entrenched as we'd like to think, or that we frequently misidentify good characters. But author replies that another way to read much of this work is that it is irrelevant to virtue ethics-- many of the experiments are trivial. And in the more meaningful ones, people did show virtues like charity (e.g. the Milgram experiments). Author charges that Appiah doesn't mount a reply in this vein, instead moving to include additional virtues more suitable to being a full-fledged social human (humor, originality, love) or focusing on laws, institutions, and social construction of culture to give people the opportunity to do good in the most favorable circumstances.

The next move in the pschologists' challenge is the challenge to intuition, the 'spontaneous unreflected judgment'. Much work has been done in this field to show them to be flawed and unreliable. Author pushes Appiah: 'flawed' compared to what? Considered moral judgment? Where is that independent source of judgment? How do we talk about considered moral judgments without propping them up with intuitions and without adding some other psychological flaw or taint? This was the work that the reviewer wanted Appiah to do, and which he charges Appiah did not. One current and important challenge comes from a variety of 'trolley' problems that talks about having to sacrifice one person in order to save 5. People's intuitions are very messy when asked about what they would or should do in a multitude of situations. Yet author argues that we need to expand the studies and maybe take away another lesson: people can be prone to optical illusions; why can't they also be prone to moral illusions? We work through optical illusions by measuring, by using other standards, by changing our vantage-point. Why not do the same if we want to get the moral judgments right? Author argues that this reply assumes the same issue that author was asking for earlier-- an independent source of moral judgment.

Author reports that Appiah returns, at the end of the book, to a familiar argument that our considered moral judgments are perfectly safe, a let-down for the author who thought Appiah was taking the pscyhologists' challenge more seriously. Author praises the book for being exploratory, but criticizes it for not being serious enough.