Houser, Marc et al - A Dissociation Between Moral Judgments and Justifications

04/20/2007

Mind & Language, Feb, 2007

Though this is a recent paper, it revisits the same studies that have been going on regarding 'trolley cases' where subjects are asked about the morally permissible action given a range of moral scenarios. There are four basic scenarios:

1) Redirect a trolley (bearing down on 5 people) onto a different track that kills one person instead.
2) Push one person in front of the trolley in order to stop it (successfully)
3) Redirect that same trolley so that it kills one person, but gives everyone else enough time to get out of the way
4) Redirect the trolley so that it is stopped by a heavy weight, but in the process of getting to that heavy weight, kills one person in the way.

There was a large number of respondents, due to the internet as the distribution method. The study done here was to examine a case where moral judgments are made without reference to explicit, conscious, reasoned rules. The contrast was drawn between three theories of moral psychology:

1) Cognitive: moral judgments are made with reference to explicit rules that are consciously considered
2) Emotive: moral judgments are made due to unconscious emotional responses to situations and also consciously using an 'intuitive' standard
3) Rule-following but still intuitive: this is the view of the author. He wants it to be the case that we do follow rules that in principle can be made explicit, but we don't necessarily usually have access to these rules when making moral judgments. This is made easier to understand by analogy to the linguistic case, where rules are followed but not necessarily made explicit in order to be followed.

In this study, the third theory was supported against the first by showing that a significant number of respondents adhered to particular moral principles but were unable to provide and coherent explanation for their judgment upon questioning. Furthermore, these judgments were made across all demographic groups identified. In this case the particular moral principle was the Principle of Double Effect, a principle that posits that contingent foreseen harm to another as a side-effect of some (greater) good is preferable to (the same) harm that is necessary to secure the same good.

Here was how the data broke down in response to the question: is it morally permissible to...
1) Yes 85%
2) Yes 12%
3) Yes 56%
4) Yes 72%

Author claims that this data shows that in the context of these cases of moral judgments, there aren't explicit moral principles that the subjects are consciously reasoning about, even though they may be following principles like the principle of double effect. There are two possible objections to the results of this study: a) the subjects weren't given enough time or b) if the subjects were given a set of principles to choose from, they would pick the relevant one. The replies author gives is that a) the subject had plenty of time and b) that these might just be post-hoc rationalizations, not identifying the principles of their reasoning.