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In Search of Greene's Argument

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2018

NORBERT PAULO Open the ORCID record for NORBERT PAULO [Opens in a new window]
NORBERT PAULO*
Affiliation:
University of Graz and University of Salzburgnorbert.paulo@uni-graz.at
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Abstract

The moral psychologist Joshua Greene has proposed a number of arguments for the normative significance of empirical research and for the unreliability of deontological intuitions. For these arguments, much hinges on the combination of various components of Greene's research – namely the dual-process theory of moral judgement, ‘personalness’ as a factor in moral decision-making, and his functional understanding of deontology and consequentialism. Incorporating these components, I reconstruct three distinct arguments and show that the Personalness Argument for the claim that empirical research can advance normative ethics and the Combined Argument against deontology are both sound and interesting in themselves. They do not, however, cast doubt on traditional deontology or reserve a specific role for neuroscience. The Indirect Route argument overcomes some of the other arguments’ limitations. It is, however, invalid. I conclude by pointing out the broader philosophical relevance of Greene's arguments as shedding light on second-order morality.

Type
Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 38 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

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8 Greene, ‘The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul’, p. 43; critically Kahane and Shackel, ‘Methodological Issues in the Neuroscience of Moral Judgement’, Kamm, ‘Neuroscience and Moral Reasoning’, Mihailov, ‘Is Deontology a Moral Confabulation?’.

9 Greene et al., ‘An FMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment’.

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14 Sinnott-Armstrong, ‘Framing Moral Intuitions’, p. 47.

15 Greene, ‘The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul’, p. 39.

16 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, pp. 699–700, emphasizes this divergence. Kamm, ‘Neuroscience and Moral Reasoning’; Mihailov, ‘Is Deontology a Moral Confabulation?’; Dancy, ‘Intuition and Emotion’ and other commentators fail to take Greene's distinction between the functional and the traditional philosophical understandings of deontology and consequentialism into account.

17 Greene, ‘The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul’, p. 37.

18 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, pp. 699–700.

19 Greene, ‘The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul’, pp. 69f.

20 Berker, ‘The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience’, p. 321.

21 Greene, ‘Notes on “The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience” by Selim Berker’, p. 12.

22 I should emphasize that I use ‘neuroscience’ here and in the whole article in a narrow sense, as utilizing high-level technologies such as MRI, fMRI, SPECT, PET, DTI, DOT or KO for neuroscientific inquiry and thereby excluding pencil-and-paper studies. The latter would arguably be included in a wider understanding, such as the one stated in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, where neuroscience is defined as ‘a branch (as neurophysiology) of the life sciences that deals with the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, or molecular biology of nerves and nervous tissue and especially with their relation to behavior and learning’. I suspect that Berker and Greene also have a narrower understanding in mind, see Berker, ‘The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience’, pp. 293–5; Greene, ‘Notes on “The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience” by Selim Berker’, pp. 7-8. Also, the main work in neuroscience seems to include high-level technologies, cf. Poldrack, Russell A. and Farah, Martha J., ‘Progress and Challenges in Probing the Human Brain’, Nature 526 (2015), pp. 371–9CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

23 Berker, ‘The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience’, p. 325.

24 Greene, ‘Notes on “The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience” by Selim Berker’, p. 13; Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, p. 716.

25 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, pp. 709-10; for a discussion of Greene's earlier distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’ see his Greene, Joshua D., ‘Reply to Mikhail and Timmons’, Moral Psychology, ed. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp. 105–17Google Scholar.

26 Greene, ‘Notes on “The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience” by Selim Berker’, p. 16.

27 Since Greene does not offer such support, the Argument from Morally Irrelevant Factors, as stated above, is far too wide in scope and its conclusions thus not warranted. It is thus not a sound argument against deontology.

28 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, p. 713.

29 Greene, ‘Notes on “The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience” by Selim Berker’, p. 12.

30 Greene also tried to build a new argument against deontology on the Indirect Route Argument as discussed in section VI, cf. Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, sec. VI; Lott, ‘Moral Implications from Cognitive (Neuro)Science?’. However, since the latter argument is not sound, this attempt is doomed to fail and will not be discussed here.

31 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, pp. 698–9.

32 For the latest collection of supportive research from neuroscience, as well as from other sciences, see Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, pp. 700–6; for a critical discussion of this evidence, see Chelsea Helion and Kevin N. Ochsner, ‘The Role of Emotion Regulation in Moral Judgment’, Neuroethics (2016), pp. 1–12, doi:10.1007/s12152-016-9261-z.

33 Although he never explicitly makes this argument, I believe that this formulation accurately represents the ideas in Greene, ‘Notes on “The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience” by Selim Berker’; Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’.

34 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point.

35 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, pp. 699-700 and 714-15; Kumar, Victor and Campbell, Richmond, ‘On the Normative Significance of Experimental Moral Psychology’, Philosophical Psychology 25.3 (2012), pp. 311–30, at 313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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40 I do not include Appiah's further demand that the moral question has to be decided under pressure of time. Most philosophers and legions of philosophy students studying and writing about Trolleyology have had plenty of time to decide in favour of one option or another.

41 Compare Lott, ‘Moral Implications from Cognitive (Neuro)Science?’, p. 243.

42 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’.

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47 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, p. 714.

48 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, p. 714.

49 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, p. 715.

50 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, p. 715.

51 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, p. 715.

52 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, p. 715.

53 Greene, Joshua D., Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them (New York, 2013), pt. IIGoogle Scholar.

54 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, pp. 696–7.

55 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, p. 715.

56 E.g. Greene, ‘The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul’, p. 72.

57 Greene, ‘The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul’, p. 71.

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59 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, p. 713.

60 Railton, Peter, ‘The Affective Dog and its Rational Tale: Intuition and Attunement’, Ethics 124.4 (2014), pp. 813–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Railton, Peter, ‘Moral Learning: Conceptual Foundations and Normative Relevance’, Cognition 167 (2017), pp. 172–90CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Kumar, Victor, ‘Moral Vindications’, Cognition 167 (2017), pp. 124–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richmond Campbell, ‘Learning from Moral Inconsistency’, Cognition (2017); Sauer, Hanno, Moral Judgments as Educated Intuitions (Cambridge, MA, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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62 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, p. 700, emphasis added.

63 Lott, ‘Moral Implications from Cognitive (Neuro)Science?’, p. 244.

64 Greene, ‘Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality’, p. 721.

65 Lott, ‘Moral Implications from Cognitive (Neuro)Science?’, p. 252.

66 Note that this point is different from the criticism Lott anticipates, namely that deontologists are inevitably bound to rely on their automatic settings, i.e. that all their reflections on normative reasons just rehash intuitions subject to debunking. This is a blunt overstatement of what Greene called the ‘psychological essence of deontology’. And Lott is correct to argue that ‘nothing in the empirical data shows this. . . . Thus we have no reason to think that the results of reflective reasoning will be limited to what comes from automatic settings’ (‘Moral Implications from Cognitive (Neuro)Science?’, p. 256).

67 Lott, ‘Moral Implications from Cognitive (Neuro)Science?’, p. 242.

68 Cf. Sauer, Hanno, Debunking Arguments in Ethics (New York, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World, p. 13.

70 Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World, p. 28.

71 For helpful comments and discussion, many thanks to Robert Audi, Johannes Brandl, Bettina Bussmann, Christoph Bublitz, Tom Douglas, Joao Fabiano, Christopher Gauker, Guy Kahane, Neil Levy, Fergus Peace, Thomas Pölzler, Thomas Schramme, Nicholas Shackel, Joshua Shepherd, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal. Thanks also to an anonymous reviewer for Analysis who provided very constructive feedback on a much earlier version of this article.