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Moral Attributes Are Accessible

Earlier we compared ethical and linguistic intuitons ...

unreflective linguistic judgements

[1] He is a waffling fatberg of lies.

[2]* A waffling fatberg lies of he is.

How are these linguistic intuitions explained? Consider one possibility (which is far from the only one) ...

What do humans compute that enables them to track syntactic attributes?

Standard Answer: the syntactic attributes themselves, irrespective of whether they can articulate truths about them.

‘it is hard to tell what the maxim of an act is structure of a sentence is, what it means for an act to be universalizable or not a sentence to be syntactic or not’

language

linguistic competence involves a special-purpose module

which operates according to linguistic rules

What is a module? This is actually a huge topic in its own right. We might come back to it. For now, see handout.
What are modules? They are ‘the psychological systems whose operations present the world to thought’; they ‘constitute a natural kind’; and there is ‘a cluster of properties that they have in common’ (Fodor, 1983, p. 101): \begin{itemize} \item domain specificity (modules deal with ‘eccentric’ bodies of knowledge) \item limited accessibility (representations in modules are not usually inferentially integrated with knowledge) \item information encapsulation (modules are unaffected by general knowledge or representations in other modules) \item innateness (roughly, the information and operations of a module not straightforwardly consequences of learning; but see Samuels (2004)). \end{itemize}

ethics

‘the mind contains a moral grammar: a complex and possibly domain-specific set of rules [...] this system enables individuals to determine the deontic status of an infinite variety of acts and omissions’

Mikhail, 2007 p. 144

(Mikhail, 2007, p. 144)
You get the idea!
Researchers who consider various analogies between linguistic and ethical abilities include Roedder & Harman (2010), Mikhail (2007), and Dwyer (2009).

Note: a the linguistic analogy

There are many possible points of analogy. (See Roedder & Harman (2010) for a discussion.) Here we are making just one: the idea that there is a distinctive, special-purpose and modular capacity
What evidence might bear on this question.

What evidence might indicate that humans have a language ethics module?

dumbfounding (Dwyer, 2009)

resistance to revisability

structure implicit in moral intuitions (Mikhail, 2014)

Mikhail’s theoretical argument (reconstruction)

Do humans have a language ethics module?

1. ‘adequately specifying the kinds of harm that humans intuitively grasp requires a technical legal vocabulary’

Compare: ‘ concepts like battery, end, means and side effect [...] can [...] predict human moral intuitions in a huge number and variety of cases’ (Mikhail, 2007, p. 149).

Therefore:

2. The abilities underpinning unreflective ethical judgements must involve analysis in accordance with rules.

Mikhail, 2007

For now we are setting this idea up in opposition with the emotions idea. But actually they are not in opposition at all. Compare nonmoral disgust: it too can be based on a complex analysis of a situation.

Trolley

A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people. You can hit a switch that will divert the trolley onto a different set of tracks where it will kill only one.

Is it okay to hit the switch?

Trolley

_Trolley_

A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people. You can hit a switch that will divert the trolley onto a different set of tracks where it will kill only one.

Is it okay to hit the switch?

Transplant

_Transplant_

Five people are going to die but you can save them all by cutting up one healthy person and distributing her organs.

Is it ok to cut her up?

Why do people respond differently?

Mikhail, 2007; 2014: because one involves purposive battery

But crucially this depends on analysing the structure ...

Mikhail, 2007 figure 1d (part)

(read this from bottom to top)
‘the Transplant and Trolley findings can be partly explained in terms of the distinction between battery as a means and battery as a side effect’ (Mikhail, 2007)

Mikhail, 2007 figure 1d

Mikhail, 2014 table 2

Mikhail extends his analysis to many further cases where philosophers or cognitive scientists have identifed an apparently inexplicable contrast.

Mikhail’s theses:

The contrasts make sense from a legal point of view,
so there is no need to suppose incompatible ethical principles are applied.

Our intuitions conform to legal distinctions (purposive battery).

Mikhail’s theoretical argument (reconstruction)

Do humans have a language ethics module?

1. ‘adequately specifying the kinds of harm that humans intuitively grasp requires a technical legal vocabulary’

Compare: ‘ concepts like battery, end, means and side effect [...] can [...] predict human moral intuitions in a huge number and variety of cases’ (Mikhail, 2007, p. 149).

Therefore:

2. The abilities underpinning unreflective ethical judgements must involve analysis in accordance with rules.

Mikhail, 2007

So that was an argument for premise 1.
So this was one argument for the claim ...
The important thing for me isn’t whether you find the argument compelling or not. There’s surely much more to say. It’s that the motivating for it gives us a good question, a puzzle even.

puzzle

Why do patterns in humans’ moral intutions reflect legal principles they are unaware of?

What evidence might bear on this question.

What evidence might indicate that humans have a language ethics module?

dumbfounding

resistance to revisability

structure implicit in moral intuitions

language

linguistic competence involves a special-purpose module

which operates according to linguistic rules

ethics

‘the mind contains a moral grammar: a complex and possibly domain-specific set of rules [...] this system enables individuals to determine the deontic status of an infinite variety of acts and omissions’

Mikhail, 2007 p. 144

(Mikhail, 2007, p. 144)
You get the idea!
On this view, either moral attributes are not inaccessible or else they are not inaccessible in any way that would support the argument for the hypothesis that the Affect Heuristic explains why humans have certain moral intuitions.

Q: What do humans compute that allows their moral intutions to track moral attributes?

A: moral attributes!

Have we shown that moral attributes are accessible?

No: the arguments considered so far are not sufficient to justify accepting this conclusion.

Minor also: it is unclear whether the modularity hypothesis entails accessibility; I don't care because the arguments undermine the canonical case for the Affect Heuristic. (In Fodor (1983)’s characterisation of modularity, limited accessibilty is one of the characteristics of modules.)