Moral Seeming

Moral Seeming

In moral philosophy we find distinctions between moral language, moral psychology, and moral reality. Interrelations between these areas are explored. Moral psychology tends to dwell on questions about moral motivation—does it consist in moral beliefs, moral desires, or moral sentiments? I wish to add a further topic: what I call moral seeming.[1] There are delicate questions of terminology here: how should we describe this moral seeming? We don’t normally speak of moral seemings (plural), so what noun would better serve our purposes? We might speak of moral impressions or appearances or presentations or perceptions or even sense-data, but for a variety of reasons I prefer sensations; so, I shall employ this (technical) term with the proviso that I mean a special class of psychological events in which something seems a certain way to the subject—as in “It seems to me that X is wrong”. Intuitively, the subject has the subjective feeling that X is wrong—even if he might go on to add, “But I don’t believe X is really wrong”. This is what people are getting at who use the phrase “gut feeling”: it is a kind of pre-reflective automatic response to a moral situation. My suggestion is that such sensations are ubiquitous in moral consciousness: they exist alongside moral judgments or beliefs; they belong to a more primitive level of moral awareness (perhaps young children have only such sensations). These sensations have an epistemic role in moral reasoning, providing reasons to form moral judgments, analogous to sense experience; thus, there is such a thing as moral epistemic phenomenology—moral sensations. The doctrine that these exist could be called “moral sensationalism”. It might be objected that such things don’t exist, because you would never say “It seems to me that murder is wrong”, since that would imply that you aren’t really sure that murder is wrong. But this objection conflates logical implication and conversational implicature. The case is just like saying “It seems to me there is a red bird over there”. I won’t go into this, as the distinction is well known and indisputable. I will take it that the existence of moral seeming (moral sensations) is hard to deny; in any case, I will accept it in what follows. My question concerns the role of such sensations in moral mentation—where they fit in, what they signify, how they relate to moral reality.

Let’s compare moral seeming to modal and grammatical seeming. In each of these areas it is common to speak of “intuitions”—we intuit the truth. For “intuition” the OED gives “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning”. I have no objection to intuitional psychology, but I think the term is slightly misleading in the present context, because it suggests something more intellectualist than the facts require. The word “sensation” captures these facts better—we need to bring out the primitiveness more clearly. Thus, we say that something seems necessary or that a string of words seems grammatical—this is how they strike us, present themselves to the mind. We don’t have a mere “intuition”, as if we are guessing or speculating. In any case, moral seeming is like modal and grammatical seeming—what we might call “first impressions”, correctable in the light of further thought. They are fallible and corrigible. You might have an impression that eating meat is morally permissible but later come to the conclusion that it is not, or that homosexuality is wrong but later come to realize that it is not. Moral consciousness operates on two levels, corresponding to immediate impressions and considered judgments, which do not always march together. Can you see how it mirrors ordinary visual perception and associated beliefs? Once moral seeming is recognized, the similarity to empirical thought becomes evident (though there are clear differences); in particular, there are such things as normative sensations, impressions of value. It starts to seem appropriate to speak of the “moral sense” and of “moral sensibility”.

How far can the analogy be pushed? Can there be moral illusions as there are perceptual illusions? I think there can be: you might be under the moral illusion that homosexual sex is morally wrong, or that masturbation is wrong, or sex before marriage, or atheism, or eating certain foods on certain days. These things seemwrong to you, but in reality, they are not—and they might continue to seem wrong even when you change your moral position on them. There might be moral equivalents to the Muller-Lyer illusion; moral sensation might be “encapsulated”, in Fodor’s term, unalterable by the “central system”.[2] Could there be “moral blindsight”? A person can make true moral judgments but has no moral sensations to go along with them—he just leaps to the judgment and skips the seeming stage. He might be a sensational moral blank but a competent moral judge. He is a sort of Kantian freak—no primitive moral awareness but competent moral rationality. Conversely, someone might be stuck at the childlike sensational level, full of moral impressions but lacking considered moral judgment (aren’t a lot of people like this?). Generally, moral sensation can be shaped and educated, to some degree, like perceptual sensation; but it would be wrong to assimilate moral sensation to moral thought—the distinction always exists. The relation between reason and sensation in the moral case is as complex as it is in the ordinary perceptual case, and strikingly similar.

What is the intentional content of a moral sensation—how does it represent moral reality? In particular, is it absolutist or relativist? For example, does it represent the wrongness of needlessly causing pain as a cultural universal (a moral absolute) or as culturally relative (merely local)? That is, does it seem to you that causing pain is always wrong no matter the state of cultural belief, or does it seem to you that it can be sometimes wrong and sometimes right (or neutral) depending on the culture? This is not a question I have ever seen asked, presumably because the idea of moral seeming has not cropped up before. The answer to it, I believe, is that moral seeming is absolute—even if considered moral judgment is relativist. Accordingly, relativism can be revisionary of ordinary moral seeming: morality seems absolute but in fact it is relative. Moral sensations make an error about the nature of moral reality. Moral phenomenology suggests objectivity and absoluteness, but critical moral philosophy urges moral relativism. Our given moral sensations lead us into error. But in my opinion, this lack of convergence converts into an argument against relativism, because of the difficulty of explaining the alleged error. Without going into this in detail (it is familiar ground), I think that no plausible explanation can be given for why moral impressions are absolute except that moral reality is absolute. The reason moral sensations have the content they have is that moral reality has the nature it has. The imputation of error on that scale is just not credible. Moral impressions are absolutist because moral facts are—content follows truth. It is the same with non-moral impressions, and moral impressions simply conform to a general pattern. If they had a relativist content, we would never be prone to moral absolutism; but we are so prone (rightly in my view), so the odds are that our sensations suggest it. But if they do, then the best explanation of this fact is that moral absolutism is true. Even the convinced moral relativist must accept that we are all absolutist at the most basic level of moral awareness—we sense right and wrong as universal and fixed not as local and variable. It does not seem to people that their moral convictions are merely relative and optional; they have a strong impression of universality, rightly or wrongly. This is so regardless of their reflective philosophical views about morality.

Here is a difficult question: in cases where people have the wrong moral views, are their moral sensations different from their opinions? For example, do slave-holders tacitly sense that slavery is wrong, or meat-eaters tacitly sense that meat-eating is wrong, or capital punishment, or child labor? I think it is possible that they do: they sense it but they disregard the evidence of their senses (their moral sense in this case). For it is hard to see how they could fail to sense it, given the obviousness of the wrong. Granted, there is always self-deception, stupidity, willfulness; but at some level, aren’t people aware that what they are doing is pretty nasty, however much they try to excuse it? Didn’t children in the age of slavery have the distinct feeling that slavey was wrong, especially in its more violent aspects? They have to be indoctrinated out of these natural feelings. If this is true, then moral progress might not be as dramatic as we suppose—perhaps it largely consists in falling back on our natural moral reactions. Or am I being too kind—were people (even children) the absolute moral swine they appear to be back in the bad old days? Did they experience not even a trace of moral concern for those tortured and murdered in front of them? Was there no inner voice whispering, “This is wrong”? I like to think that their primitive moral sense was not as depraved as their actions (and beliefs). The same is true for contemporary atrocities.

Do some things seem worse than other things to our moral sensibility? I rather think so, just as our beliefs distinguish degrees of moral badness. It seems worse to murder than to steal, and stealing seems worse than promise breaking. If so, moral sensations vary in intensity—just like visual and auditory sensations. There could therefore be a kind of psychophysics of moral sensation: the greater the wrong, the stronger the sensation. Visual sensations can vary in brightness, and moral sensations can vary in intensity of condemnation. This seems phenomenologically correct: we can have mild or strong moral reactions to perceived wrongs (“That seems really, terribly, wrong to me!”). Some moral sensations may make as cry out and stamp our feet, while others elicit only a slight shake of the head. Here moral seeming touches moral feeling—the sensation is emotionally imbued. Emotions can vary in intensity too, and they combine with moral impressions to produce a scale of behavioral response. There might even be the analogue of quantitative psychophysical laws in the moral domain: we could scale moral sensations as a function of moral seriousness—the more atrocious the crime, the more intense the subjective response. There could be a new field: “psycho-ethics”—the study of the mathematical relations between ethical reality and ethical psychology. Its first law: moral sensations vary logarithmically with moral wrongness.

It isn’t surprising, from an evolutionary point of view, to find that the human moral faculty has the two-tiered structure I am suggesting. As a social species, becoming sensitive to moral distinctions, we would need a fast-response reflexive system to guide our behavior towards others. This is the system of moral seeming—moral impressions based on initial appearances and employing general rules (“He steal—bad!”). Superimposed on this, we have the slow, holistic system commonly known as moral reason, which takes immediate moral impressions as input and delivers considered moral verdicts as outputs (“We find you guilty of the crime of stealing and sentence you to twenty lashes”). This is the general form of all our thought, all our knowledge, and moral thought is just a special case. I have called the lower-level system “sensation” with some misgivings, given the connotations of that term, intending to point to the psychological role played by the designated mental elements. The idea is to indicate the immediate quasi-sensory nature of the relevant psychological processes—the way they give rise to episodes of seeming. This needs to be added to our overall moral psychology. There is good seeming and bad seeming, right and wrong seeming, as well as associated beliefs, desires, emotions, and acts of will. The moral faculty has many departments and interactions between them. It is quite a bit richer than has commonly been supposed. No doubt it will continue to evolve.[3]

[1] For background on seeming, see my “Seeming” and “A Philosophy of Seeming” on this blog.

[2] See Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind (1983).

[3] It is odd that philosophers (and psychologists) have tended to have oversimplified views of the nature of moral psychology—from simple sentimentalists to simple rationalists. Perhaps this results from a tendency to regard moral psychology as a minor department of the human mind, one that runs on simple principles. Emotivism is the extreme case: moral psychology is nothing but surges of emotion without structure or liaisons. And this in turn might result from an inability to recognize how complex moral reality itself is. We need to recognize that morality is as complex and multifaceted as reality in general—plural, mind-taxing, elusive, inscrutable. It’s hard for the human mind to get itself around morality; it needs all the help it can get.