Do you have an account of surface level versus deep intuitions? How can you tell them apart? And do you think other ethicists just don’t know the difference? If so, why not? If not, what’s the explanation for the dominance of common sense theorizing then?
I don't have a precise analysis. But, roughly speaking, by "surface level" I mean concerned with ordinary everyday judgments (e.g. which acts are right or wrong; or, in the perceptual case, what features we perceive and where they are located), whereas the "deep" level addresses questions that are less often asked, but may in some sense *underlie* (or even explain) the surface level.
I expect others will have no trouble telling these apart once prompted (and given examples of what I have in mind). But most ethicists don't think much about what I identify as the most relevant "deeper" questions -- questions about preferability, and the link between what we ought to prefer and what we ought to do. They tend to be very focused on the surface level--the "narrow reflective equilibrium" of systematizing their intuitive deontic verdicts. So it takes some prompting to get them to shift to the "wide reflective equilibrium" of bringing that whole system of deontic verdicts into coherence with plausible judgments about objective preferability, etc.
Most ethicists haven't given much serious thought to consequentialism. They aren't aware of the deeper respects in which it is intuitive. They misconceive of the dispute as between "intuitive" non-consequentialism and "theoretically simple" consequentialism, which makes it easy to dismiss the latter. So a major focus of my work is trying to draw attention to the respects in which consequentialism is actually deeply intuitive.
This article is fun and the argument is clever! But I think that commonsense moralists should think that some superficial intuitions can be given up, though the deeper one's shouldn't. I think they'd claim that intuitions about organ harvesting, for example, are deeper and more rigorous than more abstract higher-level intuitions about what matters.
I guess that's one example of the sort of question I was trying to ask a while back on your post: Are intuitions about cases really the same species of thing as "higher-level intuitions" about principles (or about what matters)?
And how do the epistemic properties of these things compare?
First, if you're not a moral realist you might believe that morality is just summarizing our moral intuitions. It may turn out that there is a an underlying structure that does a very good job of compressing all the data of our moral intuitions, but there need not be. And even if so, you'd be justified in regarding the intuitions as primary: the structure is just a convenient summary. This is completely compatible with a belief that there is an external world that does indeed have a non trivial underlying structure.
And if you are a divine command sort of person, you might believe that God granted us our moral intuitions directly, in a way that he didn't grant us infallible senses or physical intuition.
The second of these is (IMO, though I suspect it's actually pretty popular) kind of silly, but I think both illustrate that it's possible, and maybe even justifiable to have different opinions on both the existence of an underlying structure, and its relationship to our intuitions, with respect to morality and physics.
My guess is that many commonsense moralists are a bit of a mix of the two types I discuss above: if I think of where my impulse up being a commonsense moralist comes from, I'd say something like, our moral intuitions are just (biologically and or culturally) evolved responses to help us live in social groups; there's no reason to believe there's that much of a deeper structure, and if there is, there's no guarantee that it tracks with the sorts of things we think of our moral theory as doing (helping us live together).
Our intuitions are evolved to do the things we want them to do; any theory underlying them is either illusory, or might not do what we want to it to do, so better to trust the intuitions. At best, we should think systematically in cases where we don't have strong intuitions, or where our intuitions conflict.
I don't exactly believe the above, but I have some sympathy with it. Like, I have a systematic bent, and I think our intuitions are messy and conflicting enough that we are basically obliged to do a hefty amount of systematic moral thinking anyway, but there's also a part of me that thinks that systematizing morality is a bit like systematizing aesthetic preferences--if someone tells me that the only systematic theory of my taste in movies means that I shouldn't like some movie that I do in fact like, I'd tell them...well, something rude that I won't type out. My actual likes are primary, any attempt to make them coherent is just data compression that has no normative force.
Yeah, I'm assuming moral realism here. I wouldn't expect commonsense moralists to have much patience for an anti-realist Nazi who claims *their* "actual likes are primary". Commonsense morality is pretty clear that actual likes can be wrong!
The stuff about "evolved responses to help us live in social groups" sounds much more amenable to my kind of instrumentalist error theory about the "morality system". Yeah, it might well be useful, but that's no reason to imbue it with fundamental normative significance. You can just endorse it as a useful fiction, and then reflect separately about what more plausibly *ultimately* matters.
I think a common sense moral realist might have two responses to the Nazi:
1. Those may be preferences, but they're not moral intuitions. Obviously there's no way to evaluate this, but probably even the hardest of hardcore Nazis still has the moral intuitions that gassing people is wrong. And, relatedly
2. There is a sense in which Nazi ideology goes wrong by trying to build a system that overrides common sense morality. I'm imagining that IQ bell curve meme with the dumb guy saying "murdering Jews is wrong", an earnest midwit Nazi saying "No! Can't you see your sentimentality is just weakness that allows our racial enemies to outcompete us, preventing us from achieving the glorious Aryan future of humanity!?", and the high-IQ Jedi echoing the dumb guy.
Relatedly, I think if you expand "allowing us to live together in groups" out a bit, you might find that is more or less what matters.
If our moral intuitions evolved to help us make space for us to each flourish compatibly, I think that's a pretty good reason to pay them a lot of heed! I feel like characterizing this as "useful fiction" is accurate but a little unfair.
I think an analogy is that a common sense moralist is like an engineer, and you're like a...I dunno, a category theorist or something. I think this results in a little bit of talking past each other; if some hyperpure mathematician dismissed a numerical approximation used by an engineer as a "useful fiction", they'd be missing the point. The engineer is only concerned with questions of usefulness, so unless the category theorist has an alternative way of computing the integral, they have nothing to offer.
It's not necessarily that the engineer is working with some strange foundation of mathematics in which this approximation is actually the correct answer, and so trying to figure out what axiom system makes their calculation make sense is just talking past them--engineers don't need non-standard analysis to make their calculations analytically valid, they need computation methods!
And, on morality, I'm inclined to side with the engineer: the most important questions in morality are _not_ about what actually matters, they're about how we should act. To put it another way, _figuring out_ what matters is only instrumental to _achieving_ what matters.
I suspect a lot of common sense moralists think that we can do the latter with very little of the former, using the methods of common sense morality. In order to convince them of the value of the later, I think you should want to demonstrate that they're wrong about that... Whereas focusing on all the ways they have weird theories about what matters is just going to be taking past them.
I think a lot of that is fair, except that engineering -- including "moral engineering" -- is plainly an empirical task, and so not one that philosophers have any relevant expertise for engaging in. Whereas the commonsense moralists I know all seem to think that they are doing (a priori) philosophy!
Yeah, I think there's a few things here: sometimes just a confusion about what level people are arguing at. Though, FWIW, I think there is less of a distinction between the empirical and theoretical side (it's one of the main reasons I'd take your side against my inner common sense moralist!)
Probably they think that pushy consequentialist are throwing around philosophical ideas that will not be practically useful, but might be _mistaken_ as practically useful, and so they feel the need to push back on the theoretical level.
And conversely, I think that every useful calculation tool began its life as an extremely cutting edge theoretical development, and so too with moral philosophy... There are, to paraphrase Keynes, plenty of things that have filtered down to common sense morality that were once very non-trivial theoretical arguments!
So I think the debate should be waged at all levels...I just think people should do a better job keeping track of what level the argument is actually happening, to prevent misunderstanding.
I think if you want to have more productive engagements with common sense moralists, and deontologists, and so forth, rather than engage with them on the theoretical level, it might be better to start by pointing out the reasons to engage with the theoretical level in the first place: all the places our intuitions contradict, or different people have different intuitions, or framing effects can change our intuitions. To handle these cases, we need to do _something_ beyond just appealing to intuition
Could you clarify what a “commonsense” approach to morality is? I’m a bit puzzled as to what is meant by “commonsense” in this context and how one determines which moral view is or isn’t commonsense.
Like, the standard approach to ethics (epitomized by the "trolleyologists" Foot, Thomson, etc.), that draws primarily on deontic intuitions about specific cases -- this act seems permissible, this one not -- rather than more theoretical considerations or non-deontic intuitions (e.g. about what general features of situations seem most important or worth caring about).
Gotcha, thanks. I'm puzzled why this is called a "commonsense" approach. I would have thought that the contents of commonsense thinking, if it’s intended to reflect how most ordinary people are disposed to think, is an empirical question.
I’m not raising this as an objection to anything you’ve said; we’re often stuck working with established terms for views even if those aren’t the terms we’d have chosen. But a lot of the ways things are framed seems a bit strange to me, as though the philosophers in question are presuming that they can generalize from the way they’re disposed to think to the way everyone else is, or, if not everyone, them some unspecified and nebulous "commonsense" population...in which case it remains unclear to me what this means or why it's called "commonsense."
For instance, in the case of trolley problems, it's not clear to me whose intuitions we're appealing to. I never had deontic intuitions in response to trolley cases in the first place. I think it'd be a bit strange to exclude those with my intuitions (or lack thereof) from consideration.
"Whereas commonsense moralists insist on a theory that accommodates everyday moral verdicts (no matter how baseless or incoherent these turn out to be)." No they don't.
I'm always puzzled when people just assert a brute disagreement. How is that a good use of anyone's time? But if you're interested in actually engaging with the arguments in question, feel free to do so under this post:
I'm always puzzled when people uncharitably assert things that just aren't true. I can't think of a single ethicist, nor even a single ethics paper, wherein the author takes their job to be to find some theory that will vindicate all common sense moral verdicts, regardless of how baseless or incoherent they might be. The job is always one of reflective equilibrium, putting higher premium on common sense and a lower premium on theoretical simplicity (vs the consequentialist who, more or less, puts the premiums the other way around). Prime example: Thomson who argues that it's impermissible to divert the trolley in the standard trolley case (despite common sense screaming otherwise)!
I don't put any weight on simplicity. If you want to understand my view, read the linked posts.
> "I can't think of a single ethicist, nor even a single ethics paper, wherein the author takes their job to be to find some theory that will vindicate all common sense moral verdicts"
Your puzzlement stems from misreading. There was no universal quantifier ("all") in my claim, unlike your mischaracterization; I'm instead talking about our differing attitudes towards commonsense deontic verdicts *taken as a whole*. Of course, I agree that deontologists may reject one deontic intuition to better accommodate others. I'm instead talking about the common lack of concern for whether the distinctions they end up appealing to have a principled basis (as, e.g., tracking a causal feature that it *makes sense to care about* more than one cares about whether others live or die), whether they're coherent with other self-evident principles (linking normative preference and action), etc. Again, this is all explained at length in the linked posts.
I do try to engage with your posts because you do say lots of interesting things and it does help me better understand the consequentialist, even though I disagree with most everything, but I wish you wouldn't be so dismissive of your opponents. You say "I'm instead talking about the common lack of concern for whether the distinctions they end up appealing to have a principled basis." Just to stick with Thomson, she says in various places that a certain distinction can't be thought to carry any moral weight (e.g. she says of one of Kamm's views “What difference could it be thought to make that a person deflects the trolley by putting a shield around the five instead of by throwing a switch?" She thinks no difference and this rejects the view). So it's just plain false to say that non-consequentialists lack a common concern for the basis of the distinctions they draw. They are concerned. What you actually disagree with is the things they take to make a principled difference (e.g. what I actually did today vs what merely happened today—which isn't hardly a crazy thing to care when it comes to a morality of action, even if it's ultimately mistaken).
And, I should add, Thomson argues for that conclusion because there's no way (in her opinion) of making the permissibility of diverting consistent with the impermissibility of pushing the fat man; and so something has to go.
Do you have an account of surface level versus deep intuitions? How can you tell them apart? And do you think other ethicists just don’t know the difference? If so, why not? If not, what’s the explanation for the dominance of common sense theorizing then?
I don't have a precise analysis. But, roughly speaking, by "surface level" I mean concerned with ordinary everyday judgments (e.g. which acts are right or wrong; or, in the perceptual case, what features we perceive and where they are located), whereas the "deep" level addresses questions that are less often asked, but may in some sense *underlie* (or even explain) the surface level.
I expect others will have no trouble telling these apart once prompted (and given examples of what I have in mind). But most ethicists don't think much about what I identify as the most relevant "deeper" questions -- questions about preferability, and the link between what we ought to prefer and what we ought to do. They tend to be very focused on the surface level--the "narrow reflective equilibrium" of systematizing their intuitive deontic verdicts. So it takes some prompting to get them to shift to the "wide reflective equilibrium" of bringing that whole system of deontic verdicts into coherence with plausible judgments about objective preferability, etc.
Most ethicists haven't given much serious thought to consequentialism. They aren't aware of the deeper respects in which it is intuitive. They misconceive of the dispute as between "intuitive" non-consequentialism and "theoretically simple" consequentialism, which makes it easy to dismiss the latter. So a major focus of my work is trying to draw attention to the respects in which consequentialism is actually deeply intuitive.
I outline my primary research project here:
https://rychappell.substack.com/p/bleeding-heart-consequentialism
This article is fun and the argument is clever! But I think that commonsense moralists should think that some superficial intuitions can be given up, though the deeper one's shouldn't. I think they'd claim that intuitions about organ harvesting, for example, are deeper and more rigorous than more abstract higher-level intuitions about what matters.
I guess that's one example of the sort of question I was trying to ask a while back on your post: Are intuitions about cases really the same species of thing as "higher-level intuitions" about principles (or about what matters)?
And how do the epistemic properties of these things compare?
A few thoughts on this:
First, if you're not a moral realist you might believe that morality is just summarizing our moral intuitions. It may turn out that there is a an underlying structure that does a very good job of compressing all the data of our moral intuitions, but there need not be. And even if so, you'd be justified in regarding the intuitions as primary: the structure is just a convenient summary. This is completely compatible with a belief that there is an external world that does indeed have a non trivial underlying structure.
And if you are a divine command sort of person, you might believe that God granted us our moral intuitions directly, in a way that he didn't grant us infallible senses or physical intuition.
The second of these is (IMO, though I suspect it's actually pretty popular) kind of silly, but I think both illustrate that it's possible, and maybe even justifiable to have different opinions on both the existence of an underlying structure, and its relationship to our intuitions, with respect to morality and physics.
My guess is that many commonsense moralists are a bit of a mix of the two types I discuss above: if I think of where my impulse up being a commonsense moralist comes from, I'd say something like, our moral intuitions are just (biologically and or culturally) evolved responses to help us live in social groups; there's no reason to believe there's that much of a deeper structure, and if there is, there's no guarantee that it tracks with the sorts of things we think of our moral theory as doing (helping us live together).
Our intuitions are evolved to do the things we want them to do; any theory underlying them is either illusory, or might not do what we want to it to do, so better to trust the intuitions. At best, we should think systematically in cases where we don't have strong intuitions, or where our intuitions conflict.
I don't exactly believe the above, but I have some sympathy with it. Like, I have a systematic bent, and I think our intuitions are messy and conflicting enough that we are basically obliged to do a hefty amount of systematic moral thinking anyway, but there's also a part of me that thinks that systematizing morality is a bit like systematizing aesthetic preferences--if someone tells me that the only systematic theory of my taste in movies means that I shouldn't like some movie that I do in fact like, I'd tell them...well, something rude that I won't type out. My actual likes are primary, any attempt to make them coherent is just data compression that has no normative force.
Yeah, I'm assuming moral realism here. I wouldn't expect commonsense moralists to have much patience for an anti-realist Nazi who claims *their* "actual likes are primary". Commonsense morality is pretty clear that actual likes can be wrong!
The stuff about "evolved responses to help us live in social groups" sounds much more amenable to my kind of instrumentalist error theory about the "morality system". Yeah, it might well be useful, but that's no reason to imbue it with fundamental normative significance. You can just endorse it as a useful fiction, and then reflect separately about what more plausibly *ultimately* matters.
I think a common sense moral realist might have two responses to the Nazi:
1. Those may be preferences, but they're not moral intuitions. Obviously there's no way to evaluate this, but probably even the hardest of hardcore Nazis still has the moral intuitions that gassing people is wrong. And, relatedly
2. There is a sense in which Nazi ideology goes wrong by trying to build a system that overrides common sense morality. I'm imagining that IQ bell curve meme with the dumb guy saying "murdering Jews is wrong", an earnest midwit Nazi saying "No! Can't you see your sentimentality is just weakness that allows our racial enemies to outcompete us, preventing us from achieving the glorious Aryan future of humanity!?", and the high-IQ Jedi echoing the dumb guy.
Relatedly, I think if you expand "allowing us to live together in groups" out a bit, you might find that is more or less what matters.
If our moral intuitions evolved to help us make space for us to each flourish compatibly, I think that's a pretty good reason to pay them a lot of heed! I feel like characterizing this as "useful fiction" is accurate but a little unfair.
I think an analogy is that a common sense moralist is like an engineer, and you're like a...I dunno, a category theorist or something. I think this results in a little bit of talking past each other; if some hyperpure mathematician dismissed a numerical approximation used by an engineer as a "useful fiction", they'd be missing the point. The engineer is only concerned with questions of usefulness, so unless the category theorist has an alternative way of computing the integral, they have nothing to offer.
It's not necessarily that the engineer is working with some strange foundation of mathematics in which this approximation is actually the correct answer, and so trying to figure out what axiom system makes their calculation make sense is just talking past them--engineers don't need non-standard analysis to make their calculations analytically valid, they need computation methods!
And, on morality, I'm inclined to side with the engineer: the most important questions in morality are _not_ about what actually matters, they're about how we should act. To put it another way, _figuring out_ what matters is only instrumental to _achieving_ what matters.
I suspect a lot of common sense moralists think that we can do the latter with very little of the former, using the methods of common sense morality. In order to convince them of the value of the later, I think you should want to demonstrate that they're wrong about that... Whereas focusing on all the ways they have weird theories about what matters is just going to be taking past them.
I think a lot of that is fair, except that engineering -- including "moral engineering" -- is plainly an empirical task, and so not one that philosophers have any relevant expertise for engaging in. Whereas the commonsense moralists I know all seem to think that they are doing (a priori) philosophy!
Yeah, I think there's a few things here: sometimes just a confusion about what level people are arguing at. Though, FWIW, I think there is less of a distinction between the empirical and theoretical side (it's one of the main reasons I'd take your side against my inner common sense moralist!)
Probably they think that pushy consequentialist are throwing around philosophical ideas that will not be practically useful, but might be _mistaken_ as practically useful, and so they feel the need to push back on the theoretical level.
And conversely, I think that every useful calculation tool began its life as an extremely cutting edge theoretical development, and so too with moral philosophy... There are, to paraphrase Keynes, plenty of things that have filtered down to common sense morality that were once very non-trivial theoretical arguments!
So I think the debate should be waged at all levels...I just think people should do a better job keeping track of what level the argument is actually happening, to prevent misunderstanding.
I think if you want to have more productive engagements with common sense moralists, and deontologists, and so forth, rather than engage with them on the theoretical level, it might be better to start by pointing out the reasons to engage with the theoretical level in the first place: all the places our intuitions contradict, or different people have different intuitions, or framing effects can change our intuitions. To handle these cases, we need to do _something_ beyond just appealing to intuition
Could you clarify what a “commonsense” approach to morality is? I’m a bit puzzled as to what is meant by “commonsense” in this context and how one determines which moral view is or isn’t commonsense.
Like, the standard approach to ethics (epitomized by the "trolleyologists" Foot, Thomson, etc.), that draws primarily on deontic intuitions about specific cases -- this act seems permissible, this one not -- rather than more theoretical considerations or non-deontic intuitions (e.g. about what general features of situations seem most important or worth caring about).
Gotcha, thanks. I'm puzzled why this is called a "commonsense" approach. I would have thought that the contents of commonsense thinking, if it’s intended to reflect how most ordinary people are disposed to think, is an empirical question.
I’m not raising this as an objection to anything you’ve said; we’re often stuck working with established terms for views even if those aren’t the terms we’d have chosen. But a lot of the ways things are framed seems a bit strange to me, as though the philosophers in question are presuming that they can generalize from the way they’re disposed to think to the way everyone else is, or, if not everyone, them some unspecified and nebulous "commonsense" population...in which case it remains unclear to me what this means or why it's called "commonsense."
For instance, in the case of trolley problems, it's not clear to me whose intuitions we're appealing to. I never had deontic intuitions in response to trolley cases in the first place. I think it'd be a bit strange to exclude those with my intuitions (or lack thereof) from consideration.
"Whereas commonsense moralists insist on a theory that accommodates everyday moral verdicts (no matter how baseless or incoherent these turn out to be)." No they don't.
I'm always puzzled when people just assert a brute disagreement. How is that a good use of anyone's time? But if you're interested in actually engaging with the arguments in question, feel free to do so under this post:
https://rychappell.substack.com/p/the-normativity-objection-to-deontology
Just want to say that I disagree that you're always puzzled when people just assert a brute disagreement.
:-p
Just want to say that I disagree with :-p.
I'm always puzzled when people uncharitably assert things that just aren't true. I can't think of a single ethicist, nor even a single ethics paper, wherein the author takes their job to be to find some theory that will vindicate all common sense moral verdicts, regardless of how baseless or incoherent they might be. The job is always one of reflective equilibrium, putting higher premium on common sense and a lower premium on theoretical simplicity (vs the consequentialist who, more or less, puts the premiums the other way around). Prime example: Thomson who argues that it's impermissible to divert the trolley in the standard trolley case (despite common sense screaming otherwise)!
I don't put any weight on simplicity. If you want to understand my view, read the linked posts.
> "I can't think of a single ethicist, nor even a single ethics paper, wherein the author takes their job to be to find some theory that will vindicate all common sense moral verdicts"
Your puzzlement stems from misreading. There was no universal quantifier ("all") in my claim, unlike your mischaracterization; I'm instead talking about our differing attitudes towards commonsense deontic verdicts *taken as a whole*. Of course, I agree that deontologists may reject one deontic intuition to better accommodate others. I'm instead talking about the common lack of concern for whether the distinctions they end up appealing to have a principled basis (as, e.g., tracking a causal feature that it *makes sense to care about* more than one cares about whether others live or die), whether they're coherent with other self-evident principles (linking normative preference and action), etc. Again, this is all explained at length in the linked posts.
I do try to engage with your posts because you do say lots of interesting things and it does help me better understand the consequentialist, even though I disagree with most everything, but I wish you wouldn't be so dismissive of your opponents. You say "I'm instead talking about the common lack of concern for whether the distinctions they end up appealing to have a principled basis." Just to stick with Thomson, she says in various places that a certain distinction can't be thought to carry any moral weight (e.g. she says of one of Kamm's views “What difference could it be thought to make that a person deflects the trolley by putting a shield around the five instead of by throwing a switch?" She thinks no difference and this rejects the view). So it's just plain false to say that non-consequentialists lack a common concern for the basis of the distinctions they draw. They are concerned. What you actually disagree with is the things they take to make a principled difference (e.g. what I actually did today vs what merely happened today—which isn't hardly a crazy thing to care when it comes to a morality of action, even if it's ultimately mistaken).
And, I should add, Thomson argues for that conclusion because there's no way (in her opinion) of making the permissibility of diverting consistent with the impermissibility of pushing the fat man; and so something has to go.