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Which Moral Scenarios Are Unfamiliar?
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1. Ethical judgements are explained by a dual-process theory, which distinguishes faster from slower processes.
2. Faster processes are unreliable in unfamiliar* situations.
3. Therefore, we should not rely on faster process in unfamiliar* situations.
4. When philosophers rely on not-justified-inferentially premises, they are relying on faster processes.
5. We have reason to suspect that the moral scenarios and principles philosophers consider are unfamiliar situations.
6. Therefore, not-justified-inferentially premises about particular moral scenarios, and debatable principles, cannot be used in ethical arguments where the aim is knowledge.
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?
Mary [...] notices an empty boxcar rolling out of control. [...] anyone it hits will die. [...] If Mary does nothing, the boxcar will hit the five people on the track. If Mary pulls a lever it will release the bottom of the footbridge and [...] one person will fall onto the track, where the boxcar will hit the one person, slow down because of the one person, and not hit the five people farther down the track.
Is it for her to pull the lever?
‘I strongly suspect that the footbridge dilemma is unfamiliar*, a bizarre case in which an act of personal violence against an innocent person is the one and only way to promote a much greater good.’
Greene, 2014 p. 716
unfamiliar* problems = ‘ones with which we have inadequate evolutionary, cultural, or personal experience’
‘I strongly suspect that the chess match is unfamiliar*, a bizarre case in which moving some oddly-shaped wooden figures around a 64 squares in accordance with arcane rules only way to win fame and fortune.’
not Greene, 2014 p. 716
unfamiliar* problems = ‘ones with which we have inadequate evolutionary, cultural, or personal experience’
‘I strongly suspect that the footbridge dilemma is unfamiliar*, a bizarre case in which an act of personal violence against an innocent person is the one and only way to promote a much greater good.’
Greene, 2014 p. 716
unfamiliar* problems = ‘ones with which we have inadequate evolutionary, cultural, or personal experience’
1. Ethical judgements are explained by a dual-process theory, which distinguishes faster from slower processes.
2. Faster processes are unreliable in unfamiliar* situations.
3. Therefore, we should not rely on faster process in unfamiliar* situations.
4. When philosophers rely on not-justified-inferentially premises, they are relying on faster processes.
5. We have reason to suspect that the moral scenarios and principles philosophers consider are unfamiliar situations.
6. Therefore, not-justified-inferentially premises about particular moral scenarios, and debatable principles, cannot be used in ethical arguments where the aim is knowledge.
wicked learning environments
‘When a person’s past experience is both representative of the situation relevant to the decision and supported by much valid feedback, trust the intuition; when it is not, be careful’
(Hogarth, 2010, p. 343).
Mary [...] notices an empty boxcar rolling out of control. [...] anyone it hits will die. [...] If Mary does nothing, the boxcar will hit the five people on the track. If Mary pulls a lever it will release the bottom of the footbridge and [...] one person will fall onto the track, where the boxcar will hit the one person, slow down because of the one person, and not hit the five people farther down the track.
Is it for her to pull the lever?
Could past experience be representative of Footbridge?
Is their experience ‘supported by much valid feedback’?
Safe assumption: no one knows exactly.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that the experience and feedback are quite rich and varied (as Railton, 2014 claims).
Even on the boldest, most optimistic view, there will be moral scenarios bizarre enough that the answers would be no.
Further, insofar as philosophers use moral scenarios to explore edge cases and fine contrasts, they increase the risks of outrunning ‘representative experience’ and ‘valid feedback’.
Can we expect to find limits?
Fast processes are flexible and trainable. (No mention of limits.)
Railton (2014)
In other domains, fast processes show signature limits even in expert adults
- Objects (Kozhevnikov & Hegarty, 2001)
- Minds (Low et al., 2016)
- Number (Feigenson et al., 2004)
This is not an accident: any broadly inferential process must make a trade-off between speed and accuracy.
1. Ethical judgements are explained by a dual-process theory, which distinguishes faster from slower processes.
2. Faster processes are unreliable in unfamiliar* situations.
3. Therefore, we should not rely on faster process in unfamiliar* situations.
4. When philosophers rely on not-justified-inferentially premises, they are relying on faster processes.
5. We have reason to suspect that the moral scenarios and principles philosophers consider are unfamiliar situations.
6. Therefore, not-justified-inferentially premises about particular moral scenarios, and debatable principles, cannot be used in ethical arguments where the aim is knowledge.