Naturalism in Moral Philosophy

Gilbert Harman

Princeton University

November 25, 2008

1

Introduction

1.1

Narrow and Wide Conceptions of Philosophy and Philo-

sophical Method

How you conceive of philosophy and philosophical method may depend on

where you first studied philosophy. While some people may have learned

philosophy as a distinctive subject with a special subject matter and special

methods, I and many other living philosophers learned philosophy as a sub-

ject whose methods and subject matter are continuous with those in other

subjects. This wider conception of philosophy is the more traditional one.

Relatively recent American philosophers who accept the wider concep-

tion of the subject and its method include John Dewey, W.V. Quine, Morton

White, Richard Brandt, Monroe Beardsley, John Ladd, Thomas Kuhn, John

Rawls, Arthur Danto, Noam Chomsky, Donald Davidson, Michael Scriven,

Richard Rorty, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, and many others.

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1

E.g., Richard Brandt, Hopi Ethics: A Theoretical Analysis (Chicago: University of

1

I myself was brought up in the wider methodological tradition. I stud-

ied philosophy with many of the people just mentioned: Brandt, Beardsley,

Scriven, Rawls, Quine, White, Chomsky, and Ladd. When I started teaching

at Princeton, my cohort included Nozick, Nagel and Rorty, among others.

Other similarly inclined philosophers who taught at Princeton in the early

part of my career there included Stuart Hampshire, Walter Kaufmann, Alas-

dair McIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Donald Davidson.

Davidson and I organized conferences bringing linguists and philosophers

together. He was also quite involved with psychologists like Tversky and

Kahneman, trying to get them to accept that there were limits on how

irrational people could be interpreted to be.

I went into philosophy because it allowed me to pursue my own inter-

ests in issues in many fields, especially linguistics, computer science, and

psychology. My earliest publication was in linguistics.

2

Later George Miller

and I started the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory and

an undergraduate program in Cognitive Studies. More recently, I regularly

teach courses with faculty in linguistics, psychology, computer science, and

engineering.

I don’t think I am special. Most of my colleagues at Princeton take a

wider view of philosophy in one or another respect.

Chicago Press, 1954); John Ladd, The Structure of a Moral Code: A Philosophical Anal-
ysis of Ethical Discourse Applied to the Ethics of the Navaho Indians (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1957); Thomas Nagel, “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Con-
sciousness,” Synthese 22 (1971); Robert Nozick, ”Newcomb’s Problem and Two principles
of Choice,” in Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel, ed. Nicholas Rescher, Synthese Library
(Dordrecht, the Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1969).

2

“Generative grammars without transformation rules: a defense of phrase structure,”

Language 39 (1963).

2

1.2

Naturalism

Philosophical naturalism is a special instance of the wider conception of

philosophy, taking the subject matter and methods of philosophy to be con-

tinuous with the subject matters and methods of other disciplines, especially

including the natural sciences. From a naturalistic perspective, productive

philosophers are those who (among other things) produce fruitful more or

less speculative theoretical ideas, with no sharp distinction between such

theorizing by members of philosophy departments and such theorizing by

members of other departments. (In my view, department boundaries are of

interest only to administrators.)

Naturalism also often has an ontological or metaphysical aspect in sup-

posing that the world is the natural world, the world that is studied by the

the natural sciences, the world that is available to methodological natural-

ism. But the main naturalistic theme is methodological.

On this occasion I will discuss certain prospects for naturalism in moral

philosophy. I begin with metaphysical issues of the sort just mentioned, hav-

ing to do with naturalistic reduction in ethics, and then say something about

a few recent naturalistic methodological approaches in moral psychology,

2

Naturalistic Reduction

Naturalistic reduction in ethics attempts to locate the place of value in a

world of (naturalistically conceived) facts.

In one view, goodness and evil and rightness and wrongness are not

features that have a place in the naturalistic world as described by science.

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Naturalists who take this view either abandon ethics altogether or try to

provide a nonfactual account of it.

Alternatively, naturalists might try to identify an act’s being morally

right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust, etc., with certain natural

properties of the act.

The most straightforward naturalistic reductive strategy appeals to the

supervenience of the moral on the natural facts. Any change in what the

agent ought morally to do requires a change in the (natural) facts of the case.

This appears to imply that there is a more or less complex natural relation

between an agent, a possible act, and the agent’s situation (conceived as

a whole possible world) that holds when and only when the agent in that

situation is morally permitted to do that act. The idea then is to identify

the property of being what an agent is morally permitted to do in a given

situation with the property of being a possible act for which this natural

relation holds.

For example, suppose that act utilitarianism provided the correct ac-

count of what an agent is morally permitted to do. Given that supposition,

the supervenience strategy identifies a possible act’s being what an agent

is morally permitted to do in a given situation with its being an act that

maximizes utility in that situation.

More generally, the strategy identifies a possible act’s being what an

agent is morally permitted to do in a given situation with the holding of the

relevant natural relation, whatever it is, which exists between agent, act,

and situation if and only if that the agent is morally permitted to do that

act in that situation.

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It is not a good objection that such an identification fails to capture the

meaning of “morally permitted.” To suppose that water can be identified

with H

2

O is not to say what the word “water” means as used by ordinary

people.

It is true that the moral case raises a methodological issue for naturalism,

since different moral theories disagree with each other. There are competing

versions of utilitarianism, social contract theory, virtue theory, Kantianism,

and many others. Is there a naturalistically acceptable way to resolve these

disputes by testing them against the world as competing scientific theories

can be tested?

Instead of trying to answer this question directly, let us consider three

kinds of naturalistic reduction, associated with theories of normative func-

tionalism, response dependent theories, and social convention theories.

2.1

Normative Functionalism and Virtue Ethics

One kind of virtue ethics

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appeals to a normative functionalism that seeks to

derive normative results from assumptions about functions—about designed

or natural functions, purposes, roles, etc. For example, the most important

function of a clock is to keep time. Whether something is a clock depends

on its function, not on what it is made of or what it looks like, as long as it

can serve to indicate to an observer what the time is.

Furthermore, a clock can be evaluated in terms of its function. So, a

good clock is one that keeps time accurately. That’s what a clock ought to

3

Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001); Rosalind Hursthouse,

On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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do. If it does not do so, something is wrong with it. The features of a good

clock that contribute to its accurate functioning are virtues of the clock.

Bodily organs are also defined by their proper functions. A heart is an

organ whose nature or function is to pump blood steadily. Lungs are organs

that function in breathing. Whether something counts as a heart or lung

is not a matter of its shape or what it is made of, but whether it has the

relevant function. One that actually does so is to that extent a good heart

or lung. A heart that fulfills its function poorly, by irregular pumping, or by

leaking blood, is a bad heart and something is wrong with it. The virtues

of a heart include steady pumping and not leaking.

People who have social roles have associated functions or purposes. A

good teacher is one who teaches well, who enables students to learn. Some-

thing is wrong with a teacher whose students do not learn. Virtues in a

teacher are those characteristics that enable the teacher’s students to learn

as well also they can. A teacher who cannot get students to learn is not a

good example of a teacher, not a real teacher.

It is in the nature of human beings and certain other animate beings

(bees and chimpanzees, for example) that they are social beings. A good

human being has various virtues, like courage and compassion.

A man

lacking courage is not a good example of a man, not a real man.

Various issues arise for views that attempt to derive moral assessments

from functionalism. Do human beings have functions or purposes as part of

their nature as human beings? Is the relevant function or purpose to lead a

good life, or even the best life? Can this function or purpose be characterized

naturalistically? Given competing views of the best life, is there a way of

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testing these views against the world in the way that scientific hypotheses

can be tested?

2.2

Response Dependent Theories and Social Convention

Theories

Another rather different naturalistic approach identifies moral categories in

terms of something about human responses to the consideration of pos-

sibilities, in the way in which colors are sometimes identified in terms of

something about the responses of normal human perceivers.

In this approach, an act’s being wrong might be identified with the dis-

positions of impartial unbiased sympathetic people to feel moral disapproval

of the act on being made vividly aware of the facts of the situation.

David Hume and Adam Smith defend different versions based on different

interpretations of sympathy. Hume has a tuning fork account of sympathy:

Humean sympathy leads someone to vibrate in tune with others and feel

similarly (if less intensely) what others are perceived to be feeling. This

yields a utilitarian result. Since people would rather be happy than unhappy,

they will favor situations in which there is more net happiness.

Smith objects that Hume’s conception of sympathy cannot account for

the fact that unhappy people crave sympathy and feel better when they

receive it. Humean sympathetic vibrations would make an acquaintance of

an unhappy person sympathetically unhappy and then the unhappy person

would vibrate with the acquaintance’s unhappiness, making the originally

unhappy person even more unhappy. Since the sympathy of an acquain-

tance makes an unhappy person less unhappy, Hume is wrong about what

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sympathy is.

Smith observes that ordinary sympathy involves approval. If someone

gets a minor bump and moans and complains, observers who are aware of

the minor pains involved will not sympathize, because they will not approve

of the complainer’s reactions. According to Smith, people want sympathy

because they want approval. Furthermore, in Smith’s view, the relevant sort

of approval tends to be an internalized reflection of community standards.

My desire for the approval of others leads me to imagine how they will

react to me. I imagine being one of them to consider how I would react,

in this way internalizing their standards. This yields a different view of

morality from Hume’s—one in which what counts as right or wrong is more

heavily influenced by the conventional practices of one’s society. Smith’s

theory, while response dependent, sees morality as more of a matter of social

convention than Hume’s does.

It is true that Hume takes social convention to be important for those

aspects of morality having to do with justice: People are disposed to approve

of those conventions that promote the general welfare. But for Smith social

conventions affect approval and disapproval more directly.

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2.3

Worries about Relativism

I think that the most promising naturalistic reductions have relativistic im-

plications. Adam Smith’s is explicitly relativistic, because what captures

one’s sympathy is directly affected by local customs. The point general-

4

I say more about this difference between Hume and Smith in “Moral Agent and

Impartial Spectator,” in Explaining Value, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000.

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izes to other response dependent theories to the extent that the relevant

response, usually approval, is directly influenced by varying customs or per-

sonal values. And functionalist theories may have to suppose that moral

conclusions are relative to one or another competing conception of the best

life, the purpose of life, etc.

Any absolutist (non-relativist) reduction of morality faces the episte-

mological problem of showing how that conception of morality is better

supported than its competitors. The problem is that there are competing

moral frameworks and no obvious way to test them against the world. Com-

pare the dispute between Cardinal Belarmine and Galileo about whether the

earth is at rest. Their dispute assumed that there is such a thing as being

absolutely at rest. The correct resolution of their dispute is that motion

is always relative. This conclusion is grounded in the fact that there is no

empirical difference between competing views about what is at absolute rest.

Similarly, there appears to be no empirical difference that would resolve

fundamental moral differences, which suggests that, from a naturalistic per-

spective, there may be no reason to believe in absolute right and wrong.

5

Some might respond that to believe in moral relativism would be to

accept moral nihilism, at least if one’s initial conception of moral values is

absolutist and not relativistic. But that would be like saying that to believe

in the relativity of motion would be to give up on the idea that things move

or are at rest!

Consider atheists who were brought up to believe that, when they said

5

Gilbert Harman, “Moral Relativism,” in Gilbert Harman and Judith Jarvis Thomson,

Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).

9

that something was wrong, they intended to be saying that it violated God’s

commands. They may have at one time firmly believed that, if God had not

existed,, nothing would have been morally prohibited. But now, having

come to doubt that God exists, they continue to accept the same moral

principles as before (at least as regards nonreligious matters) and instead

have stopped believing that morality is the expression of God’s will. In

the same way, someone who is initially committed to moral absolutism who

later decides that moral relativism is true can still accept (most of) the same

moral principles as before.

2.4

Naturalism as a response to evolutionary debunking

Recent attempts to debunk nonutilitarian moral intuitions appeal to possible

explanations of the intuitions in terms of evolution by natural selection. The

claim is that the relevant moral intuitions result from factors having nothing

to do with their truth, namely tendencies to develop whatever intuitions

might help to get one’s genes into following generations.

While some theorists have argued that such evolutionary explanations

debunk intuitions that conflict with utilitarianism, leaving utilitarianism

unchallenged as the correct normative view,

6

others say that, if the expla-

nations debunk nonutilitarian intuitions, they also debunk intuitions that

appear to support of utilitarianism.

7

Naturalism offers a response to these debunking arguments. Compare a

6

Peter Singer, “Ethics and Intuitions,” The Journal of Ethics (2005); Joshua Greene,

“The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul” in W. Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., Moral Psychology 3: The
Neuroscience of Morality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008

7

Guy Kahane, “Evolution and Debunking Arguments,” Nous, forthcoming.

10

naturalistic response to a corresponding attempt at evolutionary debunking

of color perception. The response is to identify colors as response depen-

dent properties, determined by how we perceive them. If that’s right, an

evolutionary account of how we happen to have the color experience is not

a debunking account. Similarly if what is right or wrong is response de-

pendent in one or another of the ways already considered, an evolutionary

account of moral intuitions is not a debunking account

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.

This is all I am going to say about a possible naturalistic reduction of

morality.

3

Moral Psychology

I now want to consider how certain issues in moral psychology look from a

naturalistic point of view.

Philosophers have at times treated philosophical moral psychology as an

armchair subject based on a priori reflection on meanings and concepts.

9

A naturalistic approach rejects that methodology and takes moral psy-

chology to be an empirical subject that is continuous with scientific psychol-

ogy, requiring a more intersubjective approach.

10

I am going to say something (briefly) about three rather different topics

in moral psychology: linguistics as a guide to moral theory, guilt feelings,

8

Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical

Studies 127 (2006).

9

E.g., David K. Chan, editor, Moral Psychology Today: Essays on Values, Rational

Choice, and the Will (Berlin: Springer, 2008).

10

John Doris and Stephen Stich, “Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches,” The

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL
= http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/moral-psych-emp/.

11

and character traits.

3.1

Linguistic Analogy

Despite great superficial differences between languages, linguistics aims at

a theory of universal grammar. Faced with apparently great differences in

moralities, perhaps moral theory can similarly develop a universal moral

grammar.

3.1.1

Generative grammars

The primary object of study of contemporary linguistics is not language

in the ordinary sense in which English, German, Mohawk, and Chinese

are languages. Any ordinary language in this sense has different dialects

that blend into one another in ways that do not correspond to national or

geographical boundaries. There is a well known saying that a language (in

the ordinary sense) is a dialect with an army and a navy. What counts

as a dialect of French rather than Flemish is a social or political issue,

not an issue in the science of language. It may be that any two speakers

have at least somewhat different dialects, with at least somewhat different

vocabularies. Chomsky and other linguists are concerned with language as

a property of a particular person, assumed to be abstractly specifiable by an

internal grammar, or I-grammar. Indeed, individuals are assumed to have

more than one I-grammar if they are bilingual.

The analogy between language and morality suggests that the primary

object of study for moral theorists, then, might not be the morality of a

group but rather a property of a particular person, abstractly specified by

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something like an internal “moral grammar” or I-morality.

A “generative grammar” of a particular person’s language would specify

the linguistic structure of expressions of that language, indicating the nouns,

verbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc., as well as the phrases of which these are

the “heads,” as when a noun is the head of a noun phrase and a preposition

the head of a prepositional phrase. A generative grammar might specify

important aspects of the meanings of expressions, depending on how the

expressions are structured and possibly indicating the scope of quantifiers

and other such operators. The grammar would also specify aspects of the

pronunciation of expressions and would relate pronunciations of expressions

to possible interpretations, in this way indicating certain sound-meaning

(phonetic-semantic) relationships.

An analogous generative moral grammar would attempt explicitly to

characterize an individual’s moral standards. Just as an I-grammar speci-

fies the structure of a well-formed linguistic sentence by using a specialized

linguistic vocabulary, an I-morality might specify the structure of permissi-

ble and impermissible actions, using a specialized vocabulary. A generative

moral grammar might be an action grammar (or a situation grammar, etc.,

depending on what sorts of things can be morally assessed).

The rules of a generative grammar have a recursive character. These

rules imply that a larger sentence can contain a smaller sentence within it,

which can contain another even smaller sentence, and so on without limit.

Analogously, an act may contain a smaller act within it. A generative I-

morality might imply that it is wrong to encourage someone to do something

that is wrong, a principle that is recursive in the sense that it implies that

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it is wrong to encourage someone to encourage someone to do something

that is wrong, etc. Similarly, the I-morality might imply that it is wrong to

promise to do something that it would be wrong to do.

There is evidence that whether people accept certain seemingly descrip-

tive claims about whether an agent does something intentionally can depend

on whether they accept certain normative claims about side effects of ac-

tions. And whether people judge that a particular person caused a certain

result can depend on whether they judge that the person is morally at

fault for doing what he or she did. For example, whether one judges that

Tom’s omitting to water the plants caused their death can depend in part

on whether one thinks Tom was obligated to water the plants.

That suggests that relevant structural descriptions of the situations or

actions may themselves sometimes involve normative assessments.

In developing a theory of linguistic grammar, Chomsky famously dis-

tinguishes what he calls “competence” from what he calls “performance”.

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By “competence” Chomsky means an individual’s internalized grammar. He

uses the term “performance” to refer to all other factors that may affect the

use of language. In Chomsky’s framework an individual’s linguistic intu-

itions may or may not reflect the individual’s competence, in Chomsky’s

sense.

In moral theory as in linguistics, we can consider whether it makes sense

to postulate a distinction between an individual’s internal morality or moral

“competence” in contrast with various other factors that determine the per-

11

Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, Enlarged Edition (New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1972).

14

son’s intuitions and actions. For linguistics, the corresponding assumption

has been theoretically fruitful and illuminating. With respect to moral the-

ory, the assumption amounts to assuming that there is a distinctive moral

competence or I-morality.

3.1.2

Universals

A child picks up language from its interactions with others; there is no need

for explicit teaching, even though basic linguistic principles have only been

formulated recently and cannot have been explicitly taught to the child, who

therefore seems innately predisposed to acquire an I-grammar satisfying such

principles.

Similarly, a number of moral philosophers have suggested that ordinary

moral intuitions obey certain non-obvious rules. For instance, it may be

that moral intuitions reflect some version of a Principle of Double Effect.

Double Effect: It is worse knowingly to harm one person X in

saving another Y if (a) the harm to X is intended as part of the

means to saving Y than (b) if the harm to X is merely a foreseen

unintended side-effect of the attempt to save Y .

For another example, Thomson

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suggests that some ordinary moral intu-

itions might reflect a principle of the following sort:

Deflection: It is better to save a person X by deflecting a harmful

process onto another person Y than by originating a process that

harms Y.

12

Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” Monist 59

15

These principles are not generally recognized and it is unlikely that they are

explicitly taught to children. If children do acquire moralities containing

such principles, it would seem that they must be somehow predisposed to

do so. If so, we might expect such principles to be found in all natural

moralities that children naturally acquire.

On the other hand, moralities differ about abortion and infanticide,

about euthanasia, about slavery, about the moral status of women, about

the importance of chastity in women and in men, about caste systems, about

cannibalism, about eating meat, about how many wives a man can have at

the same time, about the relative importance of equality versus liberty, the

individual versus the group, about the extent to which one is morally re-

quired to help others, about duties to those outside one or another protected

group, about the importance of religion (and which religion is important),

about the importance of etiquette (and which standards of etiquette), about

the relative importance of personal virtues, and so on.

Linguists have evidence that the child uses its limited experience to set

a relatively small number of parameters and acquire the “core” syntax of

a language. Other “non-core” aspects of syntax, perhaps involving stylistic

variation, are learned as exceptions.

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The linguistic analogy suggests considering whether it is possible to de-

velop a theory of morality involving principles and parameters. Perhaps, all

moralities accept principles of the form: avoid harm to members of group

G, share your resources with members of group F , etc., where G and F are

parameters that vary from one morality to another.

13

Mark Baker, Atoms of Language (New York: Basic Books, 2001.

16

However, we will need to have more explicit generative accounts of a

variety of moralities before being able to think about moral principles and

parameters.

I have described various issues suggested by the analogy between moral-

ity and linguistics. I discussed what might be involved in a generative “moral

grammar” and have discussed what might be involved in a universal moral

grammar that parallels universal linguistic grammar. I believe that the is-

sues suggested by such analogies are worth pursuing.

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3.2

Guilt

I believe that moral theorists have made a number of related mistakes about

guilt—defining morality in terms of nontrivial guilt, identifying having a

moral conscience with susceptibility to nontrivial guilt, and holding that

one cannot be a moral person if one lacks a susceptibility to nontrivial

guilt. (I suspect that these ideas arise from theorists over-generalizing from

their own experience, failing to realize that many quite moral people do not

experience the sort of non-trivial guilt required for these claims.)

What is the required (nontrivial) emotion of guilt? It must at least

include the thought or impression that one is guilty of having done something

wrong. Feelings of guilt trivially involve this. But a cold hearted psychopath

might have such thoughts without experiencing nontrivial feelings of guilt.

More is needed. At least (agent) regret. But a feeling of agent regret

is not enough either. One can regret doing things without feeling guilty in

14

For more discussion see Erica Roedder and Gilbert Harman, “Grammar” (forthcoming

in a volume devoted to Moral Psychology, edited by John Doris) and references given there.

17

any nontrivial sense. In particular, a cold hearted psychopath might regret

having done something morally wrong without suffering from non-trivial

feelings of guilt.

Typically, the theorists I am talking about suppose that nontrivial guilt

feelings involve more or less agonized self-punishment or deep shame. (Deep

shame, of course, is more general than guilt in that one can feel shame for

one’s appearance, accent, parents, or president.)

Some nontrivial feelings of guilt and/or shame may derive from internal-

ized embarrassment at being seen by others to have done something wrong or

for something shameful. Nontrivial guilt feelings might also be or instead be

internalizations of external resentment at others’ wrongdoing, internalized

blame and outrage.

It seems to me that we should reject all of the following proposed con-

nections between morality and such nontrivial guilt feelings: (1) Wrong acts

warrant such nontrivial guilt feelings. (2) Morality can be defined in part in

terms of such nontrivial guilt feelings. (3) It is abnormal not to be suscepti-

ble to such nontrivial guilt feelings for wrongdoing. (4) Susceptibility to such

nontrivial guilt feelings for wrongdoing is necessary for moral motivation.

Here are two reasons to doubt that such nontrivial guilt feelings are

central to morality. First, and most obviously, it is easy to imagine an oth-

erwise moral agent not susceptible to such nontrivial guilt feelings. Second,

some more or less famous moral paragons are not obviously susceptible, for

example, Nietzsche’s overman and Aristotle’s fully virtuous person.

In addition, I believe that I am not susceptible to nontrivial guilt feelings.

I think I am reasonably moral and many others have told me that they also

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do not seem to be susceptible to nontrivial guilt feelings.

It is sometimes thought that there are good empirical psychological rea-

sons to think nontrivial guilt feelings are central to morality, based on studies

of psychopaths, narcissists, and children with certain brain deficits. Hare’s

standard criteria for psychopathology include lack of guilt for wrongdoing.

15

But, to conclude from these studies that nontrivial guilt feelings are central

to morality is to confuse “All As are Bs” with “All Bs are As.” There

are many moral people who are not susceptible to guilt and are not psy-

chopathic, narcissistic, or brain damaged. And psychopaths (for example)

not only lack nontrivial guilt feelings but also (and more importantly) lack

empathy and other sources of moral motivation.

It is also sometimes thought that the anticipation of nontrivial guilt is

needed as a way of indicating that a given act would be wrong. But it is

enough to have the belief or impression that the act would be wrong with

no need for any anticipation of nontrivial guilt feelings.

It may also be that some people are motivated to do the right thing in

order to avoid nontrivial guilt feelings. But not everyone needs this moti-

vation. It can be enough that one cares about others and about doing the

right thing.

It is true that the expression of nontrivial guilt feelings can have the

social function of appeasing people who one has wronged. But a moral

person not susceptible to nontrivial feelings of guilt who does something

wrong can at least honestly express regret and sympathy.

15

R. D. Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among

Us (New York: Pocket Books, 1993).

19

These points imply that it is a mistake to define morality in terms of

nontrivial guilt feelings. It is a mistake to define moral standards as those

standards violation of which warrants nontrivial guilt feelings or to define

one’s individual moral standards as those for which one is susceptible to guilt

for violating. My diagnosis of these common mistakes is that they arise from

introspective moral psychology treated as apriori insight by people subject

to guilt.

To summarize my own views about guilt. First, morality does not require

a susceptibility to nontrivial feelings of guilt. Second, I am inclined to think

it is a defect in an otherwise moral person to be susceptible to nontrivial

guilt feelings.

Third, I think is possible to be brought up so as not to

be susceptible to nontrivial guilt feelings.

And fourth, I think if one is

susceptible to such feelings, it is possible to get oneself not to be susceptible.

Where does the philosophical emphasis on guilt come from? I suggest

it comes from the method of introspection. Some philosophers find a con-

nection with their moral views and guilt feelings, a connection they imagine

holds for everyone. But they do not actually undertake an empirical study

of the extent to which that speculation is true.

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3.3

Character

Finally, let me say something about character traits. People are very hasty

in attributing broad and robust character traits to others, but it seems that

such traits are very rare, if they exist at all. This may cast doubt on versions

16

For further discussion see Gilbert Harman, “Guilt-Free Morality,” to appear in Russ

Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 4 (2009).

20

of virtue ethics that treat virtues as robust character traits.

Social psychologists have discovered that ordinary people have a bias

toward explaining behavior by appeal to robust character or personality

traits while overlooking important situational factors. This bias seems to

be associated with a perceptual tendency to pay more attention to a figure

than to its ground, and there appear to be significant cultural differences in

the extent to which people are subject to this tendency.

Having once attributed a trait to a given person, an observer has a strong

tendency to continue to attribute that trait to the person even in the face

of considerable disconfirming evidence, a tendency psychologists sometimes

call “confirmation bias,” a bias toward noting evidence that is in accord

with one’s hypothesis and disregarding evidence against it.

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Even in a world with no individual differences in robust character traits

or personality traits, people would still strongly believe that there were such

differences. This means that the apparent obviousness of the claim that

people differ in such traits is less evidential than one might think. True, it

may seem “obvious” that some people have different character and person-

ality traits than others. But our finding this fact so obvious is predicted by

our tendency to a “fundamental attribution error” whether or not there are

such differences.

Sometimes a person acts well or badly in a seemingly unusual way. Con-

cerning any such case, there is an issue as to what makes the difference

that leads to such seemingly unusual behavior. When you perceive or learn

17

Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, The Person and the Situation (Philadelphia: Temple

University Press, 1991).

21

about someone you do not know doing such an unusual thing, you have a

strong tendency to attribute the behavior to some good or bad trait of the

person in question. For example, when you learn that a certain seminary

student walked right past someone who seemed to be having a heart attack,

actually stepping right over the person, you tend to think of the student as

incredibly callous, but the student may have just been in a hurry.

In the Milgram experiment, subjects were led by gradual steps to ad-

minister what they thought were very severe electrical shocks to another

person. The gradualness of the process with no obvious place to stop seems

an important part of the explanation why they obeyed a command to shock

the other person in that experiment although they would not have done so

if directly ordered to give the severe shock at the very beginning.

18

What these and many many related experiments show is that aspects

of a particular situation can be important to how a person acts in ways

that ordinary people do not normally appreciate, leading them to attribute

distinctive actions to an agent’s distinctive character rather than to subtle

aspects of the situation. Observers of participants in the Milgram experi-

ments are strongly inclined to blame those participants who did not stop to

help or who provided intense shocks, thinking that the explanation of these

agent’s immoral actions lies in their terrible character. But the observers

are wrong: that cannot be the explanation.

The evidence indicates that people may differ in certain relatively narrow

traits but do not seem to have broad and stable dispositions corresponding

to the sorts of character and personality traits we normally suppose that

18

Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

22

people have.

19

We must distinguish individual acts of honesty or dishonesty, courage or

cowardice, compassion or coldness from the corresponding character traits.

The ordinary conception of a character or personality trait is of a relatively

broad-based disposition to respond in the relevant way with acts of the

corresponding sort.

Aristotelian style virtue ethics shares with folk psychology a commitment

to broad-based character traits of a sort that people do not seem to possess.

Why have so many philosophers taken character based virtue ethics se-

riously? Relying on the method of introspective intuition, it seems obvious

that people have the relevant sorts of character traits. But social psychology

casts doubt on the existence of such traits and explains why philosophers

think they do.

4

Final remarks

To sum up, I have tried to say something about contemporary naturalistic

approaches to morality. I started by describing more traditional issues of

naturalistic reduction. I then discussed three current issues in naturalistic

moral psychology, having to do with the possibility of a linguistic analogy

for moral theory, with the unimportance to moral theory of guilt feelings,

and with the nonexistence of character traits.

19

Ziva Kunda, Social Cognition: Making Sense of People (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1999).

23