ABSTRACTS
Paul Bloom
BAD MORALITY
Our moral feelings evolved in large part to support cooperation and solve coordination problems, and few doubt that they have made the world a better place. Here I look at how they make things worse. Focusing on empathy, moral outrage, loyalty, and purity, I argue that strong moral feelings often lead to outcomes that we ourselves, on reflection, judge to be awful. Drawing on moral philosophy and moral psychology, I conclude that we often suffer from too much morality.
James Cornwell
BEYOND RIGHT AND WRONG: GROWTH AND SECURITY AS MORAL MOTIVATIONAL PRINCIPLES
Research on moral psychology has traditionally been dominated by theories of moral judgment, rather than the purposes moral goals serve in the motivational life of individuals as they navigate their social worlds. Early ethologists like John Bowlby argued that human beings establish relationships to provide for the distinct needs of growth and security (see Bowlby, 1969, 1973), and morality, given its social-developmental emergence, is also implicated in this process (Mead, 1934). Viewed through the lens of regulatory focus theory (see Higgins & Cornwell, 2016 for a review), I argue that moral rules behave differently depending on whether they are strategically aimed at growth (promotion focus) or security (prevention focus). The aim of this talk is to apply this theoretical framework to how human beings conceptualize morality as a strategic motivational principle for themselves, and present evidence for the growth/security distinction in the conceptualization of moral goals. Specifically, I review existing literature at the intersection of morality and regulatory focus theory, and present novel evidence that different strategic motivational orientations lead to different beliefs about whether moral goals are perceived as conflicting with one another, and how conflicts with other goals are resolved.
Ryan Davis
DO POLITICAL INTUITIONS PROVIDE NORMATIVE EVIDENCE?
Moral philosophers have long relied on intuitions about justice, equality, and political rights – among many other politicized, normative issues. Recent empirical work in political psychology has explored the function of these intuitions for participants in political groups. Empirical findings show that while intuitions favored by philosophers are commonly reported across a range of normatively charged political topics (democracy, social equality, virtuous political participation, etc.), these intuitions are often fragile, motivationally inert, and plausibly explained as signals of in-group membership rather than quasi-perceptual moral seemings. This poses a local, domain-specific debunking challenge for politically charged moral intuitions. Worse, the standard strategies for recovering arbitrarily formed beliefs face significant obstacles in political contexts. Philosophers may be better off discharging political intuitions altogether.
Brendan de Kenessey
DEPRESSION AND THE APPRECIATION OF VALUE
Depression involves a breakdown in the ability to appreciate the good. I pursue the idea that studying this breakdown may teach us something about how to appreciate value well. The empirical evidence suggests that many cases of depression are caused by the belief that an all-important goal is impossible to attain. Thus many depressed people’s evaluative experience is focused on how the actual world compares with the world they desire. Several promising therapies teach patients to reorient their attention away from goal comparison towards a nonjudgmental, appreciative experience of concrete things, such as a raisin’s taste or a loved one’s smile. I leverage these clinical observations into a normative argument, contending that it is a defect for one’s value experience to be overly dependent on the satisfaction of one’s goals. The best way to appreciate the good is to attend not to the comparative value of states of affairs, but to the noncomparative value of concrete, particular things.
Joshua Knobe
CONFLICTING INTUITIONS
Philosophers often disagree about questions in moral philosophy. One possible explanation for this disagreement would be that different philosophers have different intuitions. Perhaps the reason why some philosophers think that the correct answer is A and others think that the correct answer is B is that some philosophers have A intuitions and others have B intuitions. I will provide experimental evidence that speaks against this explanation and in favor of a very different explanation. On this opposing explanation, many philosophers have conflicting intuitions. That is, individual philosophers have both A intuitions and B intuitions. Thus, even those philosophers who say that A is the correct answer also feel an intuition drawing them away from A and towards B. If this latter explanation is right, the claim that philosophers' intuitions are sometimes unreliable should not be construed as an objection to the usual practice of moral philosophy. Many moral philosophers already believe that they themselves have intuitions drawing them away from the positions they take to be correct.
Larisa Heiphetz Solomon
DEVELOPING A SOCIAL SCIENCE OF REDEMPTION
We often find ourselves on the receiving end of someone else's immoral behavior, yet we also often find ways to co-exist with people who have transgressed. This pattern suggests that we do not continuously hold people to account for their worst behaviors. The current work examines how understanding of redemption -- here conceptualized as moral improvement following transgression -- develops and what information might affect judgments of redeemability. Part I of this talk will show that children perceive people who have transgressed as more redeemable than do adults. Part II will probe the causal mechanisms underlying adults' redeemability judgments in greater depth, aiming to answer both a theoretical question (why do adults respond as they do?) and a translational one (what approaches might shift adults' perceptions?). Together, the studies highlighted in this talk indicate that with age, people may become more negative about others' capacity for moral improvement. This work also indicates that punishing transgressions in a way that centers victims and working hard to make one's own wrongdoings right can increase adult observers' perceptions that the transgressor is redeemable. Integrating approaches from social psychology, developmental science, and law, this work clarifies lay theories of morality and considers how empirical data can inform possible interventions.
Roseanna Sommers
CONSENTING BASED ON FALSE BELIEFS
Morally valid consent requires more than mere agreement: canonically, it requires sufficient knowledge, freedom, and competence. How do ordinary people judge the validity of consent in cases in which agreement is obtained via deception? In a series of experimental studies, I find that laypeople reject the standard legal principle that material deception vitiates consent. Still, certain cases of “egregious” deception are perceived as invalidating consent. What explains these folk psychological intuitions? I will propose that there are two distinct ways in which material deception can preclude consent. The first is the familiar theory that consent is valid only if it is granted autonomously. According to this theory, deception functions like coercion and incapacity: it weakens the connection between agents’ will and their actions. But there is a second way in which deception can result in a lack of valid consent. We might imagine that the agent gives valid consent to one act, but an entirely distinct act—to which the agent never agreed—is performed. In such cases, the problem is what the agent agreed to, not how the agent agreed. The content of consent, not the voluntariness of the consent, accounts for deception’s nullifying effect on consent. I will present empirical evidence that laypeople tend to recognize the consent-defeating power of deception when it operates through the content pathway, but not when it operates solely through the voluntariness pathway. With this descriptive picture of “commonsense consent” in view, we can make better sense of various legal doctrines that are difficult to square with the standard liberal account of consent that foregrounds respect for individual liberty.
Yuji Winet
MORAL FOREGROUNDING: RESPONSIBLITY, ROLE, AND THE INSTABILITY OF MORAL JUDGMENT
People do not judge the facts of a moral case from a neutral vantage point, or even a stable one; they make judgments in light of the moral obligations that occupy their attention. The same person may choose differently depending on which moral target a situation makes salient, and thus which obligations are top of mind (e.g., to oneself, a victim, a perpetrator, a group, an institution, the public, future generations, an abstract ideal). We call this moral foregrounding, the process by which a decision context makes certain moral obligations salient and thereby changes which ones people rely on when making decisions. Across five experiments (N ≈ 9,700) using punishment decisions and real-world dilemmas, we show that, holding consequences and available actions fixed, varying which moral target is foregrounded substantially shifts moral choice: punishment rates range across twelve responsibility targets by nearly 40 percentage points, and in everyday dilemmas foregrounding moves choices by roughly 16 points on average. Foregrounding reorganizes rather than merely intensifies moral concern, and people underestimate how much it moves them. We argue that moral cognition is heavily influenced by socio-attentional processes, with implications for the evidential use of intuitions, debunking arguments, and the study of institutional decision making.
Mike Zhao
AGENTS AND OBJECTS
There are two perspectives that we can take on people. From one perspective, people are free agents who are in control of what they do. But from another perspective, people are objects in the world whose behavior is caused by factors beyond their control. These perspectives are mutually exclusive, yet a long philosophical tradition maintains that they are equally correct ways to see people: after all, people are both agents and objects. How are the perspectives of agency and objectivity compatible in one sense but incompatible in another? Drawing on work on causal cognition, I argue that seeing someone agentially involves simulating counterfactual scenarios in which, holding external factors fixed, he had different intentions; in contrast, seeing someone objectively involves simulating counterfactual scenarios in which external factors were different instead.