I find the higher level evidence that suggests our moral judgments would tend to be unreliable more persuasive than the many individual examples of judgments apparently being influenced by morally irrelevant factors. By higher level evidence I mean the broadly evolutionary arguments about the adaptive function of moral thinking. Of course, such evolutionary debunking arguments are a topic of ongoing debate (Millhouse, Bush & Moss, 2016).
One reason I find the evidence offered by lots of specific instances of apparent influence by morally irrelevant factors is that there’s reason to expect the literature to be systematically biased towards producing and reporting results showing such influences. Researchers in this area are on the whole collectively trying to generate results showing weird factors influencing moral judgement since these are publishable, whereas results showing moral judgement responding as we’d expect to relevant factors would generally not be (arguably the raison d’être of social psychology is finding strong counter-intuitive influences of social/contextual factors on human action). Even setting aside concerns about the validity of these published results, I would expect this collected direct evidence to therefore give an impression of pervasive rationally irrelevant influences on moral judgement even if our judgments were generally highly reliable.
I think there are some good reasons to think that the ecological validity challenge to these experimental results, which you mention, is pretty strong: related to the Gigerenzer ecological rationaly strategy which you mention, one might think that some of the apparent irrational biases found in the experimental literature are as as result of people’s judgement being highly sensitive to pragmatic factors which would be of relevance in practical contexts, but which are treated as irrational in the context of the experiment. For example, the famous Knobe Effect (showing that moral judgments irrationally influence whether we judge that someone intended to do something or not) seems entirely in terms of the pragmatics (in real world contexts) of saying x intended a good/bad thing. (Adams and Steadman, 2004)
That said, despite my scepticism of these experimental results for establishing that there is pervasive bias in moral judgements (which I think is independently extremely plausible), I do think that more empirical psychological research into EA-relevant judgments would be likely to be high value since, done well, it can highlight potential errors and biases which we would otherwise be aware of (as with more general heuristics and bias research).
I’d have to think and read about this more to move it beyond pure speculation, but I feel a little less sympathetic to the ecological validity response in the domain of moral judgments. It seems plausible to me that the problems that confront our moral faculties today are very dissimilar to those in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness—even more so than with faculties of prudential rationality—and/or that our moral faculties transfer less well to radically new environments.
Many thanks for completing this thorough review.
A few fairly general comments:
I find the higher level evidence that suggests our moral judgments would tend to be unreliable more persuasive than the many individual examples of judgments apparently being influenced by morally irrelevant factors. By higher level evidence I mean the broadly evolutionary arguments about the adaptive function of moral thinking. Of course, such evolutionary debunking arguments are a topic of ongoing debate (Millhouse, Bush & Moss, 2016).
One reason I find the evidence offered by lots of specific instances of apparent influence by morally irrelevant factors is that there’s reason to expect the literature to be systematically biased towards producing and reporting results showing such influences. Researchers in this area are on the whole collectively trying to generate results showing weird factors influencing moral judgement since these are publishable, whereas results showing moral judgement responding as we’d expect to relevant factors would generally not be (arguably the raison d’être of social psychology is finding strong counter-intuitive influences of social/contextual factors on human action). Even setting aside concerns about the validity of these published results, I would expect this collected direct evidence to therefore give an impression of pervasive rationally irrelevant influences on moral judgement even if our judgments were generally highly reliable.
I think there are some good reasons to think that the ecological validity challenge to these experimental results, which you mention, is pretty strong: related to the Gigerenzer ecological rationaly strategy which you mention, one might think that some of the apparent irrational biases found in the experimental literature are as as result of people’s judgement being highly sensitive to pragmatic factors which would be of relevance in practical contexts, but which are treated as irrational in the context of the experiment. For example, the famous Knobe Effect (showing that moral judgments irrationally influence whether we judge that someone intended to do something or not) seems entirely in terms of the pragmatics (in real world contexts) of saying x intended a good/bad thing. (Adams and Steadman, 2004)
That said, despite my scepticism of these experimental results for establishing that there is pervasive bias in moral judgements (which I think is independently extremely plausible), I do think that more empirical psychological research into EA-relevant judgments would be likely to be high value since, done well, it can highlight potential errors and biases which we would otherwise be aware of (as with more general heuristics and bias research).
Yup, I definitely agree with points 1, 2, and 4.
I’d have to think and read about this more to move it beyond pure speculation, but I feel a little less sympathetic to the ecological validity response in the domain of moral judgments. It seems plausible to me that the problems that confront our moral faculties today are very dissimilar to those in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness—even more so than with faculties of prudential rationality—and/or that our moral faculties transfer less well to radically new environments.