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Article Excerpt
I. Introduction
It is a commonsense observation that people who judge that they ought not to act in a certain way tend to refrain from acting so, or at least act with some degree of reluctance and feel guilty about doing so. Consequently, it is at least initially plausible that if a person appears to judge one way yet acts otherwise without any kind of inner motivational conflict or weakness of the will, we should refuse to attribute a genuine judgment to her in the first place. If a person claims to believe that eating meat is morally wrong but goes on merrily munching a hamburger whenever she gets the chance, we may well doubt her sincerity, or at least resoluteness. Moreover, the reason why we invest so much in arguing and persuading each other of moral views appears to be precisely that they make a difference to actions and attitudes when sincerely embraced. For example, it is common sense that the vegetarian is not yet satisfied when her friend avows that he will stop eating meat--only when he actually stops or at least puts up a genuine fight with temptation and suffers some form of guilt, will she credit him with genuinely coming around to her side in the moral debate. In short, as many have noted, morality seems to be essentially practical, intimately related to action.
There are several competing explanations for the practicality of moral judgment. Views that posit a noncontingent link between moral judgment and motivation fall under the rubric of moral judgment internalism (henceforth, "internalism" for short). (1) In this debate, talk of "judgment" refers to a psychological state of some sort, whether a belief, a desire, or some other state, not its linguistic expression, an utterance--it would hardly make sense to say that an utterance itself necessarily motivates the speaker, no matter how sincere. (2) Internalism, therefore, claims either that there is a necessary connection between two psychological states, a moral belief and a desire to act, or that there are psychological states that constitute both the judgment and the motivation--for noncognitivists or expressivists, such states are some kind of noncognitive attitudes, for cognitivists a particular kind of motivating beliefs. (3) Historically, internalism has been a major impetus for expressivist theories in metaethics, since it is readily understandable on standard Humean theories of motivation how noncognitive states like higher-order desires or plans can give rise to desires that lead to action. Cognitivists, by contrast, must either develop an alternative account of the dynamics of motivation or argue against internalism. Since views in moral semantics and metaphysics largely hang on whether moral judgments are in the business of representing the world (as cognitivists argue) or not (as expressivists and other noncognitivists maintain), the internalism debate has far-reaching consequences for the rest of metaethics. (4)
How could the truth of the internalist thesis be established? Traditionally, internalists have appealed to conceptual intuitions, noting the kind of considerations I discussed in the previous paragraph: in a wide range of individual cases, competent, careful speakers will not attribute a genuine moral judgment to someone whose motivational economy is not affected by it in at least some of the ways that are distinctive of moral commitment. (I will return soon to the issue of what these motivational effects include.) Further, internalists have presented philosophical explanations of why we have such intuitions. Typically, these explanations appeal to the distinctive function of moral judgment in guiding action. On the basis of such considerations, internalists have argued that the connection between moral judgment and motivation is a matter of a priori conceptual necessity. In modal terms, this amounts to saying that there is no logically possible world in which someone makes a moral judgment without some of the requisite motivational effects, and we can know this without having any more experience than is necessary for coming to possess the concepts involved. (5)
The alternative to moral judgment internalism is known, naturally enough, as moral judgment externalism. Externalism is the thesis that the connection between moral judgment and motivation is contingent and a posteriori. It is not the nature of judgment that explains why we are generally motivated, but the nature of human beings. Most people care, to some degree, about doing the right thing (whatever that turns out to be), so we can expect them to have some degree of motivation to do what they believe to be right. However, externalists argue, it is conceptually possible that people make genuine judgments without having motivation. To show this, it would suffice, in principle, for there to be a single case in which someone makes a genuine moral judgment and lacks the required motivation. Traditionally, externalists have fought internalists on the same ground, appealing to intuitions about phenomena like accidie, in which depression, for example, dulls the usual effect of moral commitments, and amoralists, people who form beliefs about what is right or wrong, but do not care at all about morality and so remain unaffected.
Recently, however, some naturalistically oriented philosophers and psychologists have adopted a different methodological approach to this debate. The intuition-driven approach relies on people's reactions to actual or hypothetical cases, and such reactions are bound to remain contentious and liable to be explained away. But what if we could ascertain the truth or falsity of internalism in a more direct way? What if we could test, scientifically, whether someone makes a moral judgment, and then test, scientifically, whether she lacks the corresponding motivation? After all, unless dualism is true, both the judgment and the motivation are (or are realized in) states of the brain, and we can, at least in principle, scientifically observe what goes on in the brain. In short, internalism seems to imply a hypothesis that is straightforwardly empirically testable, though for the time being we may have to make do with somewhat more unreliable experiments than direct observation of the brain in action. On the basis of this sort of reasoning, Adina Roskies and Alfred Mele have recently offered science-based arguments against internalism, aiming to show that the correlation between moral judgment and motivation is only contingent. (6) Jesse Prinz has countered with an appeal to experimental results that suggest that the areas of the brain that are associated with emotion are active during moral judgments, which, according to him, favors an internalist story. (7) No doubt Roskies and Mele would agree with his view that "[t]his is a case where we can move beyond the typical intuition mongering in philosophy and use empirical findings to help adjudicate an otherwise interminable philosophical debate." (8)
In this paper, my concern is not directly with the truth or falsity of internalism, but rather with the methodology of the internalism debate, and in particular the role that neuroscience and related experimental methods can play in it. I will argue that, appearances to the contrary, findings in either actual or fictional experimental psychology or neuroscience have little relevance to the debate. My main claim is that they do not provide any independent support pro or con internalism. They are not evidence on a par with what I will call commonsense evidence. In interpreting the scientific findings, we are bound to draw on the very same pre-scientific knowledge that we draw on in the traditional internalism debate. As a result, actual or imaginary scientific experiments provide no shortcut in the task of interpreting moral agents. In one way, my thesis is modest: I am merely claiming that scientific data of this nature cannot settle the conceptual debate, since their own interpretation requires already taking a position in that very dispute. In another, however, it is rather bold. It goes against a strong current of methodological naturalism in philosophical moral psychology. In many quarters, challenging the relevance of empirical science is bound to seem retrograde. But however unfashionable, the traditional view of the methodological autonomy of philosophical moral psychology remains well-grounded.
2. Judgment Internalism and Externalism
First we must clarify exactly what the internalist thesis is. It comes in many strengths and varieties. I will call the strongest of them superstrong internalism:
(SSI) If an agent judges that she morally ought to [PHI], she will necessarily (try to) [PHI] unless prevented by some external circumstance.
Here it is claimed that a conceptually necessary connection obtains between moral judgments and action. Only external constraints can stop someone from doing what she thinks she morally ought. Superstrong internalism, though it might have been held by Socrates, according to whom we never intentionally do anything we think wrong, is not a plausible candidate for a conceptual truth, since it leaves no room for the possibility of moral weakness of will or any other sort of intervening internal factor that prevents the agent from acting according to her judgment--in effect, it amounts to claiming that sincere moral convictions are always motivationally stronger than all other possible considerations put together. Yet, as I already noted in the introduction, the phenomenon of moral akrasia seems all too real: on occasion other motives overcome even sincerely held moral judgments. A more realistic form of internalism, which we may label strong internalism, allows for this possibility:
(SI) If an agent judges that she morally ought to [PHI], she will necessarily have some motivation to [PHI].
This leaves open just how strong the motivation associated with moral judgment is--the strength may vary with the type of judgment, circumstances, and agent--and so allows that it may be overridden by other motives. (9) Strong internalism, if true, would explain why there is a reliable connection between moral judgments and motivation by noting that it is conceptual in nature. Though it is weaker than SSI, some who want to defend the conceptual connection feel that it is still too strong and as such vulnerable to counterexamples, such as the ones discussed below; they want to leave room for the possibility of an agent's dissociation from her values to the extent that they fail to engage her motivation at all. (10) Thus, many argue for one or another version of weak internalism:
(WI) If an agent judges that she morally ought to [PHI], then, other things being equal, she will necessarily have some motivation to [PHI].
Though weak, this thesis is still too strong for externalist critics as long as the "other things being equal" clause is cashed out in nontrivial terms, so that it does...
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