I'm fairly sure that Tomkow is the smartest person on the internet. His/Her recent post on the Trolley Problem continues his/her tradition of creative and incisive critcism. Tomkow argues that philosophers who want to do experiments in order to "test" for "folk intuitions" about morality have a lot more imaginative work to do. I agree: thought-experiments should not be taken to "demonstrate" or "establish" anything, principally because they articficially abstract away from real-world conditions.
This got me thinking about what exactly we are assuming when we claim to be "testing for" folk intuitions using such scenarios. The standard model appears to assume that when a person checks a "No" box next to the "push the fat man" scenario on a questionnaire, this indicates the presence of a "moral intuition" with definite propositional content. That content is allegedly something like "it is morally wrong to push the fat man".
Standardly, this intuition is logged and checked against other reported intuitions for consistency. Sometimes, the experimenting philosopher concludes that the average person's moral intuitions are hopelessly inconsistent, and usually proceeds to tell some mind-numbingly boring and uncreative story about how evolution made the average person this way.
Yet, when we, as ordinary human beings, give answers to moral problems, are we really reporting this kind of psychological entity? An alternative explanation would go like this: when we report that something is wrong, we are expressing a kind of on-balance emotion, one guided by a huge number of responses, most of which are not available as objects for our conscious reflection.
Crucially, Tomkow suggests that these would be responses to percieved features of the situation. If the situation as described does not say whether these features obtain in the thought-experiment, the subject's "background" mental processes may simply fill in these blanks. Given that our moral intuitions are formed by the real world and not by imagined scenarios, it is overwhelmingly plausible that such a "fill in the blanks" process goes on without our conscious knowledge. In real life, we must make a large number of "background" tacit assumptions about real-world situations in order to function. Since these are tacit, there is no reason to suspect that they are simply switched off when a person thinks about the trolley problem, or about any other ethical thought-experiment.
On this kind of model, there is no such thing as a moral intuition with the content: "it is wrong to X", and, a fortiori, no such thing as inconsistency amongst those alleged intuitions. Furthermore, without reasonably complete knowledge of exactly which tacit, background judgments are being made by subjects, experimenters cannot reliably infer what their subjects think about moral problems. This is because the answers they provide radically underdetermine the content of their background judgments. And surely it is those contributory judgments and feelings that we must be interested in as ethicists. It seems to follow that distributing surveys to subjects is simply not helpful in this arena.
Now, something like this problem occurs in all of the experimental sciences. When a physicist observes a confirming result, she does not know if it is due to the truth of her hypothesis or interference by "background conditions". However, there is a clear difference between the physicist and the experimental philosopher. The physicist posesses an extraordinarily detailed and well-confirmed prior theory about the nature of physical objects, and can use this theory to rule out background conditions in a basically probabilistic manner (see Bayesian Epistemology). The experimental philosopher has no such toolkit. Even the most optimistic appraisal of our current theories of mind could not claim that we posess anything remotely close to theory of mind with the predictive and explanatory power of Einstein's General Relativity.
It follows that the experimental philosopher must make an extraordinary number of largely untestable assumptions about what lead a subject to check a "yes" box or a "no" box. Yet, given that these mental causes are what we are actually interested in, any empirical methodology which must make strong assumptions about their character and content is at the very least unhelpful.
Depth psychology beckons.
This got me thinking about what exactly we are assuming when we claim to be "testing for" folk intuitions using such scenarios. The standard model appears to assume that when a person checks a "No" box next to the "push the fat man" scenario on a questionnaire, this indicates the presence of a "moral intuition" with definite propositional content. That content is allegedly something like "it is morally wrong to push the fat man".
Standardly, this intuition is logged and checked against other reported intuitions for consistency. Sometimes, the experimenting philosopher concludes that the average person's moral intuitions are hopelessly inconsistent, and usually proceeds to tell some mind-numbingly boring and uncreative story about how evolution made the average person this way.
Yet, when we, as ordinary human beings, give answers to moral problems, are we really reporting this kind of psychological entity? An alternative explanation would go like this: when we report that something is wrong, we are expressing a kind of on-balance emotion, one guided by a huge number of responses, most of which are not available as objects for our conscious reflection.
Crucially, Tomkow suggests that these would be responses to percieved features of the situation. If the situation as described does not say whether these features obtain in the thought-experiment, the subject's "background" mental processes may simply fill in these blanks. Given that our moral intuitions are formed by the real world and not by imagined scenarios, it is overwhelmingly plausible that such a "fill in the blanks" process goes on without our conscious knowledge. In real life, we must make a large number of "background" tacit assumptions about real-world situations in order to function. Since these are tacit, there is no reason to suspect that they are simply switched off when a person thinks about the trolley problem, or about any other ethical thought-experiment.
On this kind of model, there is no such thing as a moral intuition with the content: "it is wrong to X", and, a fortiori, no such thing as inconsistency amongst those alleged intuitions. Furthermore, without reasonably complete knowledge of exactly which tacit, background judgments are being made by subjects, experimenters cannot reliably infer what their subjects think about moral problems. This is because the answers they provide radically underdetermine the content of their background judgments. And surely it is those contributory judgments and feelings that we must be interested in as ethicists. It seems to follow that distributing surveys to subjects is simply not helpful in this arena.
Now, something like this problem occurs in all of the experimental sciences. When a physicist observes a confirming result, she does not know if it is due to the truth of her hypothesis or interference by "background conditions". However, there is a clear difference between the physicist and the experimental philosopher. The physicist posesses an extraordinarily detailed and well-confirmed prior theory about the nature of physical objects, and can use this theory to rule out background conditions in a basically probabilistic manner (see Bayesian Epistemology). The experimental philosopher has no such toolkit. Even the most optimistic appraisal of our current theories of mind could not claim that we posess anything remotely close to theory of mind with the predictive and explanatory power of Einstein's General Relativity.
It follows that the experimental philosopher must make an extraordinary number of largely untestable assumptions about what lead a subject to check a "yes" box or a "no" box. Yet, given that these mental causes are what we are actually interested in, any empirical methodology which must make strong assumptions about their character and content is at the very least unhelpful.
Depth psychology beckons.
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