Ivar Allan Rodriguez Hannikainen

247 Pages·2014·2.05 MB·English

EVALUATIVE FOCUS:
A DUAL-PROCESS VIEW OF MORAL JUDGMENT

Ivar Allan Rodriguez Hannikainen

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Philosophy
University of Sheffield
February 2014

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Abstract
In this dissertation, I aim to develop an empirical account of moral judgment. Chapter 1
lays some philosophical and methodological groundwork. Next, in Chapters 2 and 3, I
review and critically discuss past literature on moral judgment. In recent decades,
automaticity research has led to the view that our social judgments are conducted
automatically, and uncontrolled by conscious reasoning. In Chapter 2, I push back
against this view, arguing that moral judgments are readily shaped by reasoning
processes. Next, in Chapter 3, I differentiate a few empirical claims about the
relationship between affective processes and moral judgment, and I arbitrate between
them. I then aim to characterize the psychological processes that cause these affective
responses, arguing for the involvement of a sensory and motor simulation of the
behavior. This exercise gives rise to new empirical hypotheses, which are then tested in
Chapters 4 and 5. In Chapter 4, I present a collaborative, empirical study that examines
the aversions to harmful and disgusting behavior. Our results suggest that – across both
purity and harm –condemnation of immoral behavior arises principally from a personal
aversion to performing the target action, which shapes third-party judgments through
the partly unconscious simulation of the agent‘s perspective. In Chapter 5, I present
some analyses that examine the broader influence of evaluative focus on moral and
political attitudes. Finally, Chapter 6 argues that the proposed psychological account of
moral judgment is consistent with evidence from a wider range of disciplines, from
neuroscience and animal cognition, to evolutionary theory and sociology of religion.

Word count: 55,397

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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I am grateful to the University of Sheffield for their generous
financial support throughout my doctoral studies. I am equally grateful to Stephen
Laurence and Fiery Cushman for their invaluable mentorship and support. I would also
like to especially mention Ryan Miller for a fruitful collaboration, and James Lenman
for his thoughtful comments on previous drafts.
I have been lucky to take part in three exceptional research environments: the
Philosophy Department at Sheffield, the Moral Cognition Lab at Harvard, and the Moral
Psychology Research Lab at Brown. Each of these has afforded me countless valuable
discussions. I will name a few whose feedback has been particularly instructive:
Bernardo Aguilera, Dan Bartels, Alek Chakroff, Ryan Doran, James Dungan, Josh
Greene, Jon Haidt, Josh Rottman, and Liane Young.
Finally, I should also thank Regan Bernhard, Kyle Dillon, and Bay McCulloch
for their assistance in conducting the experimental research reported in Chapters 4 and
5, and my family and friends whose relentless encouragement and support I could not
have done without.

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Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1
1.1. Descriptive philosophy and naturalism .................................................................. 1
1.2. The psychology of moral judgment ....................................................................... 5
1.3. Naturalizing moral judgment ............................................................................... 10
1.4. Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 13
Chapter 2. Dual process theories and the role of reasoning in moral judgment ..................... 17
2.1. Introduction .......................................................................................................... 17
2.2. Haidt‘s social intuitionist model .......................................................................... 20
2.3. Greene‘s dual process theory ............................................................................... 22
2.4. The role of controlled processing ......................................................................... 23
2.5. Is welfare calculus affectively motivated? ........................................................... 39
2.6. Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 47
Chapter 3. Mental simulation and the spontaneous evaluation of moral events .................... 48
3.1. Introduction .......................................................................................................... 48
3.2. Characterizing the relationship of affect to moral judgment ............................... 49
3.3. Further back in the causal chain ........................................................................... 60
3.4. Simulation hypothesis: an alternative account? ................................................... 74
3.5. Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 79
Chapter 4. Testing the hypothesis of simulated aversion ....................................................... 81
4.1. Introduction .......................................................................................................... 81
4.2. Are agent and victim simulation tractable in moral judgment? ........................... 85
4.3. Experiment 1: Does the condemnation of purity rely on simulated aversion? .... 93
4.4. Experiment 2: Does the condemnation of harm rely on simulated aversion?...... 98
4.5. Discussion .......................................................................................................... 103
4.6. Perspective induction via narration .................................................................... 106
4.7. Experiment 3: Does perspective-taking influence condemnation of purity
violations? ................................................................................................................. 107
4.8. Experiment 4: Does perspective-taking influence condemnation of harm? ...... 110
4.9. Discussion .......................................................................................................... 115
4.10. General Discussion........................................................................................... 116
Chapter 5. The influence of evaluative focus on moral and political attitudes .................... 120
5.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................ 120
5.2. Analysis 1: Focus- versus content-based accounts of moral disagreement. ...... 129
5.3. Analysis 2: Demographic predictors of evaluative focus. ................................. 133
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5.4. Analysis 3: The influence of cognitive style on moral evaluation. .................... 136
5.5. Analysis 4: Evaluative foci predict patterns of moral foundations. ................... 141
5.6. Analysis 5: Building a model of politics, moral foundations and evaluative foci.
................................................................................................................................... 146
5.7. General discussion ............................................................................................. 149
Chapter 6. The theory of evaluative focus in perspective. ................................................... 154
6.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................ 154
6.2. Neuropsychology ............................................................................................... 158
6.3. Developmental acquisition of aversions to actions ............................................ 160
6.4. Innate predisposition: the case of incest ............................................................ 164
6.5. Aversions in practice: Behavioral choice and reinforcement learning models .. 167
6.6. Evaluative simulation in action .......................................................................... 173
6.7. Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 184
References .............................................................................................................................. 187
Appendices ............................................................................................................................. 208
Appendix A ............................................................................................................... 208
Appendix B ............................................................................................................... 209
Appendix C ............................................................................................................... 213
Appendix D ............................................................................................................... 220
Appendix E ............................................................................................................... 232
Supplementary Analyses ........................................................................................................ 233

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Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1. Descriptive philosophy and naturalism
Moral philosophers have typically sought to answer questions about how it is we
should live ethically-speaking: What are our duties and responsibilities towards others?
How might we determine what the right thing to do is? These efforts have yielded a
variety of normative ethical theories, such as virtue ethics (Aristotle, 1991), deontology
(Kant, 1785/1964), and utilitarianism (Mill, 1863), each of which provides its own
guidelines for differentiating morally right conduct from morally wrong conduct.
Alongside this normative ethical aim, a parallel enterprise has focused on
understanding the status of morality more broadly as an object of study. Is morality a
kind of science, and so a matter of discovering objective facts about the moral truth? If
so, what kind of facts are moral facts, and how do we ordinarily acquire knowledge
about them? Did morality evolve as a natural phenomenon, or is it a cultural invention?
What does it mean to say that something is ―morally right/wrong‖? Since Plato, these
sorts of descriptive questions have occupied philosophers who aimed to understand the
place of moral phenomena within the natural and social world.
Hume famously pronounced these to be two fundamentally distinct projects in
moral philosophy, and warned us that (descriptive) ―observations concerning human
affair‖ could not by themselves entail any claims about the (normative) moral truth:
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always
remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of
reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning
human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the
usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that
is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible;
but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not,
expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be
observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for
what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction
from others, which are entirely different from it (Hume, 1739, 335).
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Ever since, many moral philosophers have echoed the idea that knowledge of all
the relevant descriptive facts cannot by itself entail any normative conclusions. We may
know all the facts about the natural laws that ensure that a particular course of action,
e.g., swinging a hammer at an old lady, gives rise to some needless pain. And yet, to
ground the normative claim that ―one ought not to swing the hammer‖, we need an
additional assumption, along the lines of (N1) one ought not cause needless pain to
others. We may try to derive this latter claim from natural facts, but this is difficult to
do also. For instance, we may try to derive N1 from certain descriptive facts like (F1)
causing needless pain tends to decrease the welfare of society, or (F2) rational people
typically reject norms that allow inflicting needless pain. However, this step merely
creates new normative assumptions in each case, i.e., that (N1‘) one ought not decrease
the welfare of society and (N2‘) one ought to do whatever it is rational to accept in
one’s system of norms. So ultimately, with some exceptions (see Searle, 1964),
philosophers have been convinced that normative standards like (N1‘) and (N2‘) cannot
derive from a descriptive understanding of the relevant facts alone. This insight,
credited to Hume, is summarized by the mantra ―you cannot derive an ought from an
is‖, and has established an impervious divide between normative and descriptive
projects in ethics. My dissertation will fall squarely on the descriptive side, and I will
heed Hume‘s advice to make no claims about what we ought to do on the basis of this
work.
1.1.1. Naturalist metaphysics
How to proceed with a descriptive project depends critically on one‘s
metaphysical views. In the following paragraphs I will put forth my own metaphysical
assumptions, which in philosophical circles are known as naturalistic (Papineau, 1993;
Sellars, 1956). It is useful to distinguish the ontological from the methodological
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