Week 2 - Moral Reasoning vs. Intuition

Haidt on Moral Reasoning in Moral Judgement

1. 2 cognitive processes @ work and reasoning has been overemphasized

2. Tendency towards motivated reasoning

3. Reasoning constructs post hoc justifications, but we assume it is objective reasoning

4. Moral intuition (emotion) is more predictive of moral judgement than is moral reasoning

What Haidt does to moral reasoning in his approach

He doesn't wholly discount it, but heavily reduces its influences

Haidt on Moral Reasoning in Moral Judgement

1. 2 cognitive processes @ work and reasoning has been overemphasized

2. Tendency towards motivated reasoning

3. Reasoning constructs post hoc justifications, but we assume it is objective reasoning

4. Moral intuition (emotion) is more predictive of moral judgement than is moral reasoning

What Haidt does to moral reasoning in his approach

He doesn't wholly discount it, but heavily reduces its influences

Haidt's most famous metaphor

His most famous metaphor is "The Dog and It's Rational Tail"

Rationalist model of the dog and its rational tail

Suggests the rational tail was wagging the dog...

Moral Dumbfounding

Coined by Haidt

- When people stubbornly maintain a moral judgement, even when they cannot provide rational reasons to support their judgements

Role of disgust in moral judgement

- It is an exaptation

- Disgust primes lead people to make harsher moral judgements

Disgust Sensitivity

Predicts moral judgement

- Varies across individuals

- related to social conservatism

What disgust can be triggered by

Can be triggered by a variety of perceived moral violations

- Often, but not only, related to purity and "crimes against nature"

What is disgust is rooted in

- Rooted in evolutionary processes but developed into the symbolic

- Rozin: "this is the body and soul of emotion"

Social Intuitionist Model of Morality

Person A has intuitive feeling → Person A makes moral judgement → Person A makes post hoc reasoning for judgement → Person A socially influences person B's intuition → judgment → reasoning → PErson A intuition

Less frequent links:

- Person A reasoning influences A's judgement

- Person A reasoning influences A's intuition

Schweder's 3 Ethics

1. Community

2. Autonomy (includes justice)

3. Divinity

Rozin's CAD Model

Posited that certain emotions are associated with certain moral values

Where MFT was developed from

Developed from Rozin's CAD Model

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT)

Different types of moral violations elicit different emotions that drive people's moral intuitions

Disgust → Purity

Compassion → Harm/Care

Anger → Fairness

Rage → Authority (new addition)

Resentment → Loyalty (new)

Basic emotions outlined by Echman

1. Happiness

2. Sadness

3. Fear

4. Disgust

5. Anger

6 Surprise

Characteristics of Anger

Characterized by a distinctive facial expression, high heart rate, and heightened skin temperature

Cause of anger

Usually caused by a judgement of transgression (to self or others)

What anger motivates

Motivates one towards aggression and retributive punishment

What anger producing events were most highly associated with

1. Shaver et al - situations violating a sense of fairness

2. Mikula et al. - most highly associated with unfairness (followed by disgust, sadness, fear, guilt, and shame)

3. De Waal - Monkeys show this response to injustice/fairness violations)

What anger tends to be

It tends to be retributive

- Prefer endings where transgressor suffered in parallel ways to injustice they caused

Relationship between happiness and prosocial behaviour

There is a bidirectional relationship between this and prosocial behaviour

- Feeling this can make us behave more prosocially

- Behaving more prosocially can ake us this

Elevation

The feeling elicited by witnessing another person perform a good deed

What feelings of elevation predict

This specifically predicts the amount of helping (Schall et al)

The Doctrine of Double Effect

By St. Thomas Aquinas

- An action having forseen but unavoidable harmful effects is justifiable if the following are true...

1. The nature of the act is itself good (or at least morally neutral)

2. The agent intends the good effect and does not (directly) intend the bad effect

3. The good effect outweighs the bad effect (& agent minimizes the harm)

What intuition is driving decisions about the Trolley Problem?

Intentions are driving this, not actions