Philosophers divide on moral ground

WE PICTURE philosophers as people who read and think deeply about the nature of things and publish a distillation of these thoughts. I was therefore intrigued by Joshua Knobe's article in the November 2011 issue of Scientific Americanabout a new breed of philosophers who conduct scientific experiments.

Knobe describes some recent investigations of how the mind works, designed to shed light on major philosophical questions on the nature of free will and the nature of good and evil. The hope is that understanding how people think and feel will give guidance on which philosophical ideas are worth embracing.

Do we really have free will or are our actions determined by forces beyond our control? Knobe asks us to imagine a murder. Is the murderer morally responsible for the terrible act or was the murder just the final step in a sequential series of steps, each step caused by the previous step all the way back to the murderer’s particular genes and particular environment? If this long sequence of inevitable cause and effect shaped the murderer’s mind, is he or she really morally responsible for the murder? Some philosophers conclude that the murderer is morally responsible and others say no.

It is possible that philosophers divide on this question based on which of two forms of human cognition they primarily engage when thinking about the problem. If you are heavily influenced by early emotional response, you may tend to assign responsibility to the murderer. If, however, you assign more time to abstract theoretical reflection, you may tend to conclude that the complex causal chain absolves the murderer of moral responsibility.

Knobe and collaborators designed an experiment to discriminate between these two forms of cognition and see what influence each form had on the assignation of moral responsibility. They invented a fictitious “Universe A” where everything anyone did was entirely determined by a chain of causation stretching into the past. Participants were divided randomly into two groups. One group was asked a question designed to trigger abstract reflection: “In Universe A, is it possible for people to be fully morally responsible for their actions?”

The people in the second group were asked a concrete question designed to elicit an emotional response: “In Universe A, Bill is attracted to his secretary and, in order to be with her, decides to kill his wife and three children. He burns down his house, killing his family in the blazing inferno. Is Bill morally responsible for killing his wife and children?”

Those asked the abstract question tended to say no – you cannot be morally responsible in a deterministic universe. Those who got the concrete question tended to take the opposite view – Bill was responsible for his actions, even in a deterministic universe. It seems that our perplexity and conflict regarding free will derives from tension between abstract theoretical judgments and more concrete emotional responses.

Whether or not morality is relative is another fundamental philosophical question. Is an unambiguous moral truth associated with each moral question, or can different moral truths hold for different people, ie moral relativism? Experimental philosophers have conducted experiments in which subjects were told a story about people who hold opposite views on a moral question. Subjects were asked whether one view had to be wrong or whether there might be no single right position (the relativist position). Subjects were then given a personality test to determine who was more open or closed to experience. The results showed the more open a subject was to experience, the more likely they were to take the relativist position. People seem drawn to relativism to the extent that they can open themselves to other perspectives.

Personally, I feel that we have free will and there is a fundamental right and wrong moral position on many/most issues. I believe that objective moral right and wrong can be identified in most situations but in many cases an element of relativism can also apply.

Knobe emphasises that experiments such as I described will not tell us whether something is right or wrong, but says it can be helpful, or even indispensable, to have an understanding of the cognitive processes that gave rise to philosophical beliefs.

William Reville is an Emeritus Professor in the Biochemistry Department and Public Awareness of Science Officer at UCC understandingscience.ucc.ie