BONNIE'S NOTES

Chapter | The Quest for the Boundaries of Morality

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Stich, S. (2018). The Quest for the Boundaries of Morality. In The Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology. Routledge.

Summary

Abstract

Starting in the 1950s, philosophers devoted an enormous amount of effort to the project of distinguishing moral judgments from other sorts of normative judgments. The first half of this chapter describes these attempts and offers an account of why they failed. It then describes how psychologists interested in characterizing “the moral domain” took up substantially the same task, which had largely been abandoned by philosophers. The second half of the chapter argues that psychologists have also failed in their attempts to define distinctively moral cognition and concludes with the suggestion that there is no well-motivated way of dividing our normative judgments into those that are moral in nature and those that are not. .

Atomic notes

Key terms

  • The Philosophers’ Project: the goal, as the author attributes to “contemporary moral philosophers”, of distinguishing moral judgements and principles from non-moral judgements and principles; includes determining whether religious, aesthetic, etiquette, prudential, legal, etc. rules are also moral rules.
  • The “classical theory of concepts”: the view that concepts can be analyzed by providing necessary and sufficient conditions; empirical and philosophical work from the past half-century has shown this to be false for most ordinary concepts.
  • Philosophical intuitions: after Goldman (2007); non-inferential, immediate judgments about the truth values of certain propositions, typically conceptual situations and thought experiments.
  • The Psychologists’ Project: the goal of identifying essential features of moral judgments as a “natural kind” of psychology, after Putnam (1975).

Reading notes

The philosophers’ project (1952–1990)

  • Proposed formal characteristics of moral judgments:
    • Universalizable: “the rule applies to everyone to whom the predicate applies, no matter where they might be or when they might live” (6).
    • Prescriptive: the ‘action-guiding force [of moral rules] derives from the fact that they entail imperatives: my acceptance of the principle ‘One ought to do X’ commits me to accepting the imperative ‘Let me do X’; and my acceptance of the imperative commits me in turn to doing X in the appropriate circumstances”’ (7).
    • Categorical: “‘what persons ought to do sets requirements for them that they cannot rightly evade by consulting their own self-interested desires or variable opinions, ideals, or institutional practices’” (7).
  • The descriptive-elucidatory project—direct conceptual analysis of the term “morality”—fails due to the dependence of moral judgment on individual judgment and cultural context: “If, as this work suggests, different people and different groups have different concepts of morality, then the goal of the descriptive-elucidatory project is underspecified in an important way. That goal, as we’ve seen, is to capture “our” concept of morality, the concept of morality that “we” actually use. But who are “we” – secular people, Jews, Mormons, Muslims or Hindus? Chinese or Westerners? … Without convincing answers the descriptive-elucidatory project, when no longer committed to the classical theory of concepts, may be a fascinating exercise in cognitive anthropology, but it is hard to see why it is of any philosophical interest.”

The psychologists’ project (1970–present)

Turiel’s account of moral judgment

  • Background/motivation: motivated by the belief that moral cognition is (i) distinct from other forms of cognition and (ii) contra Piaget and Kohlberg, emerges early in development, Turiel designed a behavior experiment that would determine when a participant was making a moral judgment.
  • Theoretical contributions: Inspired by the philosophical literature, Turiel identifies moral judgments by three characteristics—two formal, one sensitive to content. The author calls this the UIH response pattern:
    • (U) Universalizability: “Moral prescriptions are universally applicable in that they apply to everyone in similar circumstances (Turiel, 1983, 36; italics in the original)”;
    • (I) Authority independence: “Judgments of moral obligation are categorical in that what persons ought to do sets requirements for them that they cannot rightly evade by consulting their own self-interested desires or variable opinions, ideals, or institutional practices. (Gewirth, 1978, 24, quoted in Turiel 1983, 35)”;
    • (H) Justification by appeal to harm, justice, or rights: “if an experimental participant has made a genuinely moral judgment and is asked to explain why the behavior in question is wrong, she will typically appeal to the harm that has been done, or to injustice or the violation of someone’s rights.”
  • Methods: In Turiel’s moral/conventional task paradigm, a transgression is described and participants are asked questions to determine (i) whether they think it is wrong, (ii) how they would justify that judgment, (iii) whether their judgment is authority independent, and (iv) whether they would universalize that judgment.
  • Results: Turiel showed that children give the UIH response pattern to vignettes describing what they believed would typically be construed as moral transgressions by adults, and the opposite (~UIH) response pattern to vignettes describing transgressions of conventional norms.
  • Conclusion: Turiel concluded that (i) children can make moral judgments at an early age, rather than merely conceptualizing morality in terms of punishment and (ii) children can grasp the difference between moral and conventional rules.

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