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The Problems of Moral Psychology University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2019 The Problems Of Moral Psychology Thomas Noah University of Pennsylvania Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Noah, Thomas, "The Problems Of Moral Psychology" (2019). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3556. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3556 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3556 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Problems Of Moral Psychology Abstract This dissertation is a collection of three essays centered around outstanding fundamental problems in the field of moral psychology. These fundamental problems concern both metaphysical and methodological disagreements – namely, what is the subject-matter of moral psychology? And what are the methods for the investigation of that subject-matter? The first chapter examines the problem of marking the domain of moral psychology by isolating its subject-matter and the various methodologies for investigating it. By building from a minimal core of shared agreement, researchers should be able to classify different branches of moral psychology by both subject-matter and method of investigation while being quietist about the correct methodology. This is turn allows for the construction of a taxonomy of moral psychological approaches that allows researchers to efficiently locate the direct source of disagreements. The second chapter examines Lawrence Kohlberg’s research program and identifies a particular assumption that guides that program while blocking further progress in the field. That assumption concerns the relation between normative theorizing and descriptive categorization, such that the explanations for why one moral theory is superior to another mirrors stages of moral development. By abandoning this assumption and other assumptions in its local vicinity, researchers could make progress without being bogged down in first-order normative disagreement. The third chapter looks to a recent debate concerning whether neuroscience is normatively significant. Against a standard interpretation of the debate in Anglophone philosophy that the argument for the normative insignificance of neuroscience is sound, I argue that the critique is only partly successful and not for the reasons commonly recognized. Rather than object to the program of demonstrating the normative significance of neuroscience on normative grounds, we ought to object to the program on descriptive grounds. Each chapter proceeds through arguments rooted in philosophical analysis and reflections on findings in the social and natural sciences – in particular, history, psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Philosophy First Advisor Cristina . Bicchieri Keywords Disagreement, Interdisciplinarity, Methodology, Moral Psychology, Normativity, Philosophy Subject Categories Philosophy This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3556 THE PROBLEMS OF MORAL PSYCHOLOGY Thomas Noah A DISSERTATION in Philosophy Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 Supervisor of Dissertation ______________ Errol Lord Associate Professor of Philosophy Graduate Group Chairperson _________________ Errol Lord, Associate Professor of Philosophy Dissertation Committee Cristina Bicchieri, S. J. Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics Adrienne Martin, Akshata Murty ’02 and Rishi Sunak Associate Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Economics and George R. Roberts Fellow THE PROBLEMS OF MORAL PSYCHOLOGY COPYRIGHT 2019 Thomas Eugene Noah This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Dedication page To Deloris, Glenda, Barbara, Glenda Jean, and Courtney iii ACKNOWLEDGMENT This collection of essays is the result of many years of co-deliberating with some of the finest philosophers and individuals I have been able to work with. I thank my adviser Cristina Bicchieri for her continued support. Much of the work in the following essays comes out of work that I originally created for courses that she taught on empirical moral psychology, including a Penn- Rutgers-Princeton course co-taught with Stephen Stich and Gilbert Harman. She has been a constant source of inspiration for her attention to the intersections of empirical sciences with philosophical theories of behavior and human action, as well as her rigor and no-nonsense approach to philosophy. If not for her, I would not have received the training in neuroscience that made the third essay possible. And the opportunities she provided to me to work with UNICEF and other NGOs on social change proved important in broadening my understanding of the stakes of characterizing the domain of moral thought and behavior. We worked together over many years on my projects, hers, and joint projects. She was a very good adviser and is my friend. I thank the members of my dissertation committee – Adrienne Martin and Errol Lord. They each have an acute sense of the moral stakes involved in the essays that follow, regardless of any differences I perceive between the philosophical traditions I understand them to work within. They are each remarkably good philosophers and mentors. The essays thinking about the domain of moral psychology and the inheritance from Kohlberg were partly inspired by thinking through the implications of some of the lessons I learned from Adrienne in both a prior iv metaethics class and through our personal interactions before she departed from the University of Pennsylvania. Even after leaving, she has always been generous and intellectually rigorous in our interactions and displayed a deep understanding of exactly the sorts of issues I attempt to unpack (even when my understanding was considerably less than). Errol has been of immeasurable help to me in many ways. In particular, the third essay – concerning the relation between normative ethical theorizing, neuroscience, and psychology – developed the most through private meetings and extensive commentary from him. Errol was also instrumental in helping me to secure a spot at a National Endowment of the Humanities summer institute on moral psychology and moral education that helped me crystalize many of the issues of concern to me. Errol has been a model philosopher for his temperament and ability to see not only the arguments but also the rhetorical and dialectical spaces available to me. I regret that I did not work more closely with him throughout. I thank Andrew McAninch, who served on my preliminary candidacy committee and who was quite valuable working out the dialectic and rhetorical strategy employed in the first chapter. The original inspiration for this line of inquiry traces back to my time as an Ethical, Social, and Political Philosophy major at University of Massachusetts Boston. My undergraduate advisers Larry Blum and Lisa Rivera had a tremendous impact on my education, philosophical orientation, and work. I learned from each in their own ways how to attend to arguments and the spaces between arguments. But most importantly I learned that philosophy must attend v to real-world issues of normative significance. I hope that this collection of essays in some way honors their legacies, however imperfectly. I continued to learn more about the nature of normative ethics while studying at Texas Tech University prior to coming to Penn. There, Danny Nathan, Howard Curzer, and Walt Schaller were especially vital to my development. I thank each of them for offering courses and counseling that allowed me to greater understand the varieties of ethical theories and their interactions with choice and behavior. Many other philosophers have been important in my intellectual development, even if I did not work with them in a strictly mentoring relationship. From interactions and classes with them, though, I did learn a great deal about how to think through arguments and how to exemplify many epistemic virtues of what I consider to be good philosophy (although, admittedly, I often fail in this regard as well). At UMass Boston, Larry Kaye, Adam Beresford, and Yumiko Inukai were especially important to my intellectual development. At Texas Tech, Francesca di Poppa, Ed Averill and Jeremy Schwartz taught me a great deal. And at Penn, my final philosophical home, Gary Hatfield, Paul Guyer, Liz Camp, Susan Sauve Meyer, Michael Weisberg, Scott Weinstein, KC Tan, and Dan Singer have all served as various models for good philosophy in their own unique ways. In particular, I must thank Gary for running my first year proseminar on the history of analytic philosophy. I have partly absorbed his kind of “Drebenated” approach to philosophy, along with a certain kind of historical sense and reasonable skepticism. vi Two other philosophers at Penn have been very important to me: Samuel Freeman and Lisa Mirrachi. I took some coursework with Samuel, and it (of course) was both on Rawls and very good – with a sensitive attending to arguments, history, good sense, and the variety of positions available in the conceptual space. And I was able
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