Experimental moral philosophy seeks to understand the mechanisms governing the formation, in peoples’ heads, of moral ideas. But it is with a view to drawing certain conclusions as regards their trustworthiness as means of moral knowledge.
1 It does not merely seek to
describe moral beliefs and to explain their social or psychological
causes. It tries to understand whether the fact of our moral ideas having such-and-such causes does not prevent them from being just.
It is in this sense that experimental moral philosophy is a
philosophical endeavor, and not a purely sociological or psychological one.
At any rate, it is one thing to suppose that the hypotheses of psychologists, ethnographers, sociologists, and specialists in the neurosciences might be of some interest in moral philosophy, but it is quite another to assert that what they say is incontestably true, and that the last word goes to them whatever question has been posed.
Deeply engaged with empirical research though experimental moral philosophy may be, it does not allow it the last word, either from the methodological or from the moral or political point of view.
Its recurrent question is the following one: If, at the origin of our so-called moral judgments, there are always negative judgments like hatred or resentment, purely selfish interests, or
psychological mechanisms that have nothing to do with ethics, such as a preference for one’s own relatives, does this not entirely discredit them as authentically
moral judgments?
2 How could we trust them to tell us what is good or just?
What we know of the judgments of each and every one of us in domains other than ethics does not inspire optimism.
Thus, the way in which a public health program is presented strongly influences our approval or disapproval of it.
Suppose we imagine an epidemic that threatens the lives of six hundred people.
The minister of health proposes two different programs:
1. At worst two hundred people are saved, at best everyone is saved.
2. At worst four hundred people die, at best no one dies.
The people to whom this choice is put tend to reject the second program, even though it is the same as the first.
3In order to account for this phenomenon of apparently irrational resistance, thinkers have invoked the existence of a psychological mechanism that leads us to be disposed to take more risks in order to not lose something than to win the same thing.
4Why would our spontaneous moral judgments not be affected by mechanisms of the same kind?
If this were the case, would it not be irrational to trust them to know what is just or good?
ARE EMOTIONAL REACTIONS NECESSARILY IRRATIONAL?
Posing the question is important. But the answers are not given in advance.
For certain psychologists, the fact that our judgments are affected by emotional factors suffices to render them irrational.
This is how Greene discredits deontological judgments. Brandishing images of the brain obtained by MRI scans, he asserts that the formation of such judgments can be correlated with intense emotional activity.
5 They are therefore irrational.
The claim is debatable. Proving that a belief is correlated with emotions does not give us the right to assert that it is false or irrational. All that we can say, strictly speaking, is that it is difficult to
justify by appealing to this sentiment purely and simply, without further specifications as to its conditions of appearance. But that does not absolutely prevent us from thinking that our emotions can enable us to
know certain properties of the world. It is not absurd to reckon that the fear of a bear running toward you salivating and howling when you have no means of protection directly detects, without going by way of reflection, a real property of this bear, namely, its dangerousness.
One thought experiment, often examined, asks that we envisage our reactions to the sight of
a bunch of louts setting fire to a live cat for their own amusement.6It could serve to establish a parallel between the perception of nonmoral properties such as danger and that of moral properties such as goodness or wickedness. If you experienced anger or disgust when faced with such a sight, it would not be in error. It is, it could be said, because you have detected directly, without going by way of reflection, one of the real properties of this act, namely, its cruelty.
7In short, just as it is legitimate to think that our sensations enable us to know if it is raining or if the weather is fine, we can envisage the possibility that our emotions could enable us to know, in certain favorable conditions, certain properties of the world around us, such as being dangerous or being cruel. The emotions would not necessarily be causes of error. They could be sources of knowledge.
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