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Speaker: Richard Holton, Professor of Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
On November 8th, 2007, Professor Richard Holton, Professor of Philosophy at MIT, delivered a lecture entitled "What Does Empirical Research on Moral Intuitions Tell us About Morality". The lecture was delivered to a large and disciplinarily diverse audience.
Holton began by discussing two possible meta-ethical models and their implications for the value of empirical research on moral intuitions: 1) ethics is like mathematics; 2) ethics is like linguistics. Both moral philosophy and mathematics entail reflection about a prior subject matter that is difficult to think about. The fact of its difficulty suggests that one is unlikely to find much of interest in examining how the average person on the street thinks about ethics or mathematics. Perhaps such an investigation would yield some data about what sorts of mistakes are common, but it seems absurd to think that an empirical psychological examination of tendencies in mathematical reasoning is a useful means for increasing our stock of mathematical knowledge. If ethics is like mathematics, then an examination of common moral intuitions will perhaps reveal common mistakes in ethical reasoning, but will not yield new or better solutions to ethical problems. So the philosophy department is neither threatened nor benefited by the research that goes on in the psychology department.
Ethics as analogous to linguistics: the idea of a moral grammar is not new in moral philosophy. It has recently been taken up as an object of empirical research by psychologists who use experimental work to uncover what they believe to be a hard-wired nativist component in moral reasoning. On this account, certain elements of moral reasoning are dictated by this structure; others are parameterized. In the case of linguistics the modularized behavior of language is the very subject of linguistics: English is what English speakers take it to be. This stands in contrast to mathematics, where mathematical truths are not derived from the behaviors of human beings.
Ethics, Holton argued, is not strictly analogous to either of these; rather, it is a little of each. Ethics is not like linguistics because the analogy fails to capture the sort of reasoning that goes on when thinking through a moral problem and excludes moral progress. Reasoning through a problem is not like trying to make grammatical sense of a sentence; the more you think about syntax, the less sense it makes. The opposite situation holds in ethics, which, in this respect, is more like mathematics. In mathematics, the more problems one engages, the greater one's grasp of the underlying axioms and the better one's facility in employing those axioms in reasoning. Despite these similarities, the mathematical model is not altogether plausible. To make this point, Professor Holton displayed an image of the Pioneer 10 plaque, intended to be a message to any intelligent alien life that might encounter the craft. It depicts various mathematical data describing earths cosmic location and two nude human figures, the male with 'hand raised in a gesture of goodwill.' Holton argued that the mathematical data would be intelligible to any intelligent non-human life form, the "gesture of goodwill" likely not. This raises the question of whether ethics can be described independent from ethical beings (i.e. humans)and their specific behaviors. Linguistics certainly cannot: it is clearly Protagorean. Is ethics?
Professor Holton suggested a refined Protagorean account – a response dependent account – was a good beginning for a notion of ethics. Protagorean concepts are those whose extension is set by human responses. So F is response dependent if it is a priori true that: x is F if x elicits response R from subjects S in conditions C. Further refinement specifies R as competent observers and S as standard conditions. Holton argued that this formulation easily gives us a Protagorean view of linguistics: grammatical sense is what makes sense to competent observers under the right conditions. Applied to ethics, one would want to specify what constitutes a competent observer and the right conditions: one must develop a kind of ideal observer theory. This is where empirical research comes in. By examining many observers under a variety of conditions, psychological research can verify for moral philosophers that features of ethics are response dependent, and tell them which features.
Holton noted that response dependence in linguistics can be quite complex: people's self-reporting of linguistic behaviors may not be accurate. Their explicit judgments about whether a sentence is grammatical may not correspond to their actual linguistic behavior. Moral philosophy faces similar complexities in disentangling judgments about rightness, reporting how one would act under given circumstances and observed action under both hypothetical and real conditions. Empirical research could help disentangle these and identify common tendencies, biases, and mistakes in the way people commonly judge and act under these particular conditions. Furthermore, verbal reporting of responses may not tell the full story. Modes of empirical examination which look to other sorts of responses, e.g. skin conductance, fMRI, etc., might lend insights into competing accounts, e.g. between sentimentalists and cognitivists.
Holton concluded with a set of observations about the significance of empirical research specifically for response dependent accounts of ethics. The plausibility of a given account can only be determined after the empirical work helps to untangle some of the complexity in our moral reactions and the variables are better understood. The basic equations in the Response Dependence literature are not a priori and, therefore, the relevant variables can only be identified through empirical work. If the empirical conclusions push us toward building theories around reactions other than judgments and participants rather than observers, the distinction between meta-ethical and the normative may begin to break down. Finally, empirical work may help to sharpen how moral philosophers think about the motivational force of moral judgments.
In the lively discussion that followed, one concern in particular was voiced repeatedly: through empirical research might tell us something about how people tend to think or behave under a given set of morally complex conditions, what can it tell us about how they should behave. Professor Holton responded that at the very minimum empirical research can help moral philosophers identify and navigate around frequently made mistakes or biases in judgment that might undermine philosophical refection. With some knowledge of these, moral philosophers might choose to structure hypotheticals differently. But he also argued that, though he is as yet unsure what conclusions to draw about the proper relationship between moral philosophy and empirical research, he believes it is possible that empirical work will have more to contribute to moral philosophy than merely revealing common mistakes. Before we can say what these contributions might be, he suggested, we will have to wait to see what the researchers turn up.