Social Justice and Moral Psychology Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Freiman, Christopher Alexander Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 02/10/2021 04:38:51 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195823 1 SOCIAL JUSTICE AND MORAL PSYCHOLOGY by Christopher Alexander Freiman _____________________ Copyright © Christopher Alexander Freiman 2010 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2010 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Christopher Freiman entitled Social Justice and Moral Psychology and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 2/23/10 David Schmidtz _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 2/23/10 Julia Annas _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 2/23/10 Thomas Christiano _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 2/23/10 Gerald Gaus Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. ________________________________________________ Date: 2/23/10 Dissertation Director: David Schmidtz 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: Christopher Alexander Freiman 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank David Schmidtz for his extraordinary dedication as a dissertation director, mentor, and friend. His support, both personally and professionally, has been too immense to adequately detail here. Let me simply say that he has provided inspiration not only for how I write and teach philosophy, but for how I aspire to live as a philosopher. I am also grateful to the other members of my dissertation committee: Julia Annas, Thomas Christiano, and Jerry Gaus. I benefited tremendously from their comments and guidance. It was a pleasure and a privilege to work with them. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my wife, Mary, who persevered with me throughout this entire process. For that, she deserves much more commendation than I can hope to provide here. Lastly, my thanks to everyone at the University of Arizona and elsewhere whom I did not mention, but whose support was critical to the completion of my dissertation. 5 DEDICATION To my parents, for enduring life with an aspiring philosopher for so many years. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………….7 ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………….8 CHAPTER 1: How Deontological Sentiments Can Save Consequentialism From Itself……………………………………………………………………...………………..9 CHAPTER 2: Human Nature and Human Flourishing: A Reassessment……………….39 CHAPTER 3: Macromoral Theory……...………………………………………..……...66 CHAPTER 4: In Defense of Sufficiency…………………….…………………………102 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………126 7 LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1: Language as a Pure Coordination Game……………………………………26 8 ABSTRACT Emerging work in moral psychology challenges our confidence in our moral judgment. Our moral intuitions have been attributed to automatic, emotionally laden processes and are alleged to be accordingly deficient. Intuitive moral judgments apparently neglect some of the most basic concerns of moral decision-making; for example, they purportedly disregard relevant information, fail to balance competing considerations, and ignore social costs and benefits. Some moral psychologists propose an evolutionary explanation, suggesting that our moral sensibilities track matters of adaptive, rather than moral, significance. These findings are disconcerting and might naturally be taken to unsettle our philosophical practice. An empirically-informed moral psychology seems to discredit moral common sense as well as prevailing accounts of method and justification in moral and political philosophy. In turn, it threatens to undermine substantive conceptions of matters such as virtue, rights, and distributive justice. I argue that contemporary moral psychology does not, as is often supposed, necessitate radical revisions to our conception of morality. Recent research does oblige us to reevaluate many of our views in moral and political philosophy; however, I argue that it also gives us the opportunity to supply these views with new and stronger support. 9 CHAPTER 1: How Deontological Sentiments Can Save Consequentialism From Itself Imagine that an anthropologist returns from her study of a previously unknown people and reports the following: • They refuse to kill one person even to avert the death of all involved—including that one person; • They won’t directly push someone to his death to save the lives of five others, but they will push a lever to kill him to save five others; • They punish transgressors because it feels right, even when they expect the punishment to cause far more harm than good—and even when the harm done by the punishment exceeds the harm done by the transgression being punished. The anthropologist’s report might lead us to conclude that these people are at least confused, and perhaps even dangerous. Here’s some bad news. Those people are us . Or so suggests recent research in experimental psychology and the neurosciences. This research indicates that our moral emotions have a distinctively deontological character and they prompt us to make any number of judgments that appear arbitrary or otherwise unjustified, such as those above. Deontological intuitions are allegedly the product of morally-insensitive evolutionary processes—they are affective heuristics adapted to help our ancestors procreate, not to help us grasp the nuances of moral decision-making. Our moral reasoning, in contrast, is characteristically consequentialist and appears attuned to a rich complex of moral considerations. When our moral judgment is cognitive rather than affective, we gather information, balance competing concerns, weigh costs and benefits, and so on. 10 These findings have led moral theorists such as Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Peter Singer, and Joshua Greene to doubt the credentials of our deontological judgments. 1 Indeed, some, whom I call rationalist consequentialists , recommend that we wrest our moral decision-making from the grip of the sentimentalist deontology implicit in our intuitive moral judgment and proceed with consequentialist reasoning. If one accepts the preceding account of moral judgment, the rationalist consequentialist conclusion seems compelling, perhaps even obvious: our moral intuitions are equipped to track matters of adaptive—not moral—significance. We therefore have good reason to deny that sentimentalist deontology furnishes the correct criterion of moral rightness. Moreover, deontological intuitions may well have outlived any practical value they once had as heuristics. Given the radical mismatch between the world to which these intuitions are adapted and the world in which we currently live, it is unsurprising that they now motivate apparently arbitrary and counterproductive behavior. Sentimentalist deontology is thus obsolete as a decision procedure as well. Though we may feel the pull of putative rights and duties, the empirical account of our moral psychology discredits our deontological intuitions. I will argue that this account vindicates our deontological intuitions. What’s more, it vindicates them on consequentialist grounds. The very model of moral judgment that purportedly undermines sentimentalist deontology as a criterion of rightness substantiates 1 See Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Moral Intuitionism Meets Empirical Psychology,” in Metaethics After Moore , edited by Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 339-366, 351-2; Peter Singer, “Ethics and Intuitions,” The Journal of Ethics 9 (2005): 331-52; Joshua Greene, “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul,” in Moral Psychology, Volume 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development , edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 35-80. 11 it as the best available consequentialist decision procedure. If it is consequences that matter, we should embrace primitive emotion and shun consequentialist calculation. My aim, then, is not to reassess the experimental evidence or its interpretation, but rather to explore philosophical questions about its normative