The four moral judgments you make every day
Our brains make snap moral decisions in mere seconds.
- Moral psychology studies how we process moral questions and come to be moral beings.
- A new framework says there are four kinds of moral judgment we all make.
- Understanding how we evaluate moral or immoral actions can help us make better choices.
Moral psychology is the study of how we process moral ideas in our minds, how we become moral creatures, and how our brains handle moral issues. Variations of it date back to Plato and Confucius, and the area is currently enjoying a tremendous amount of attention as thinkers from a variety of fields, including philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, consider the different aspects that go into making moral judgments.
But what is a moral judgment? Is there only one kind of judgment, or do we use different kinds in different situations? Are they all the same at the cognitive level?
A new article by Dr. Bertram F. Malle of Brown University offers a framework for understanding how people make moral judgments and what factors go into those judgments.
You are judgmental
The first type of judgment is dubbed "evaluations." These are the simple evaluations we make of things being good, bad, positive, or negative. We do this for just about everything, including in non-moral situations like when evaluating writing, and our brains are very good at doing it quickly. Some studies suggest that our brains begin to evaluate for goodness or badness within half a second of getting the information. This first pass doesn't have all the data the other kinds of judgments do, but it helps set the stage for more complicated moral judgments.
The second type is "norm judgments." This expansive category involves deciding if some action or thing is allowed, permissible, taboo, or otherwise acceptable. This determination is related to, but not dependent on, how we evaluate something. While evaluations can be done on any thing or action, norm judgments are limited to actions and often to future ones. Less reactive than the other judgments, this one can be applied before any action is taken and is often used to help determine what should be done before anything happens. Often invoking abstract notions of virtue and value, this category can be a bit more deliberative than the others.
The third kind is "wrongness judgments." These combine elements of the previous two to identify intentional violations of norms that are considered egregious. Our brains can do this fairly accurately in less than half a second. In experiments asking test subjects to identify actions as morally wrong or neutral, the accuracy rate neared 90% when given a little more time to do it.
While they are similar, a wrongness judgment is not the same as a norm judgment. Studies asking people to rank actions in terms of permissibility and wrongness find that people will often consider an action to be both wrong and permissible, such as pulling a lever to save five people at the cost of another person's life in the classic trolley problem.
Likewise, these judgments differ from evaluations in that wrongness is an entirely moral trait. While we might evaluate a "dad joke" as "bad," we likely won't consider it "wrong" unless it's sexist, racist, or otherwise egregious.
Last is "blame judgment." If wrongness judgments combine evaluations and norm judgments in a new way, then blame judgments combine all three. This is the most complex of the judgment categories. It includes factors of intentionality and justification -- most people blame somebody for accidentally spilling milk less than they'd blame them for intentionally pouring a gallon on the floor.
Like the other reactive judgments, this one is carried out quickly. Our brains start to place blame in less than two seconds. Blame is not only a social tool; it can help us understand who did what but can also help us regulate our moral behavior in the future.
What use does this have? Can I use this to understand my behavior?
Perhaps most striking is how quickly our brains process moral information. Within less than two seconds of seeing an action with a moral dimension to it, your brain has already made a basic judgment on if it was good or bad, morally wrong or not, and who to blame for it. Importantly, some of these quick decisions will be erroneous because they rely on preexisting biases and limited information.
The four-category framework can also help us understand that every moral situation can be considered from various angles and that holding beliefs on a single issue that are contradictory is entirely natural.
Something can be "bad" and "wrong," like letting a person die by being hit by a trolley car, and also "permissible," since the alternative in most trolley considerations is to let five other people get hit. The person who pulls the lever in the trolley problem might be "blameworthy" in this case, but not in the same way as a person who pushes a man on the tracks to stop the trolley.
How philosophy blends physics with the idea of free will
How does philosophy try to balance having free will with living in a deterministic universe?
- People feel like they have free will but often have trouble understanding how they can have it in a deterministic universe.
- Several models of free will exist which try to incorporate physics into our understanding of our experience.
- Even if physics could rule out free will, there would still be philosophical questions.
Most people with a scientific worldview agree with the idea of causal determinism, the notion that everything is subject to the laws of physics, and anything that happens is the result of these laws acting on how things exist in the world or existed in a prior moment. However, it can be challenging to figure out how this idea meshes with the notion of free will.
After all, if everything else is subject to causal determinism, how can we not be? How can our decisions be somehow exempt? Many people argue that we obviously are also part of a clockwork universe and that physics kills off free will.
But is this saying too much? Can we really treat free will as the subject of physics alone? Today, we'll consider some stances on free will and how they relate to physics alongside some philosophers' ideas on if we can outsource our views on the human experience to science.
Hard Determinism
Some philosophers have taken the argument of casual determinism mentioned above and used it to say that there is no room for free will at all. This stance, called "hard determinism," maintains that all of our actions are causally necessary and dictated by physics in the same way as a billiard ball's movement.
The Baron d'Holbach, a French philosopher, explained the stance:
"In short, the actions of man are never free; they are always the necessary consequence of his temperament, of the received ideas and of the notions, either true or false, which he has formed to himself of happiness; of his opinions, strengthened by example, by education, and by daily experience."
While physics and philosophy have both advanced since the enlightenment era, hard determinism still has supporters.
Indeterminism
As some of you are probably thinking right now, quantum physics, with its uncertainties, probabilities, and general strangeness, might offer a way out of the determinism of classical physics. This idea, sometimes called "indeterminism," occurred to more than a few philosophers too, and variations of it date back to ancient Greece.
This stance holds that not every event has an apparent cause. Some events might be random, for example. Proponents of the perspective suggest that some of our brain functions might have random elements, perhaps caused by the fluctuations seen in quantum mechanics, that cause our choices to not be fully predetermined. Others suggest that only part of our decision-making process is subject to causality, with a portion of it under what amounts to the control of the individual.
There are issues with this stance being used to counter determinism. One of them is that having choices made randomly rather than by strict causation doesn't seem to be the kind of free will people think about. From a physical standpoint, brain activity may involve some quantum mechanics, but not all of it. Many thinkers incorporate indeterminism into parts of their models of free will, but don't fully rely on the idea.
Soft Determinism
Also called "compatibilism," this view agrees with causal determinism but also holds that this is compatible with some kind of free will. This can take on many forms and sometimes operates by varying how "free" that will actually is.
John Stuart Mill argued that causality did mean that people will act in certain ways based on circumstance, character, and desires, but that we have some control over these things. Therefore, we have some capacity to change what we would do in a future situation, even if we are determined to act in a certain way in response to a particular stimulus.
Daniel Dennett goes in another direction, suggesting a two-stage model of decision-making involving some indeterminism. In the first stage of making a decision, the brain produces a series of considerations, not all of which are necessarily subject to determinism, to take into account. What considerations are created and not immediately rejected is subject to some level of indeterminism and agent control, though it could be unconscious. In the second step, these considerations are used to help make a decision based on a more deterministic reasoning process.
In these stances, your decisions are still affected by prior events like the metaphorical billiard balls moving on a table, but you have some control over how the table is laid out. This means you could, given enough time and understanding, have a fair amount of control over how the balls end up moving.
Critics of stances like this often argue that the free will the agent is left with by these decision-making models is hardly any different from what they'd have under a hard deterministic one.
Libertarian Freedom
This is the stance with the premium free will people tend to talk about—the idea that you are in full control of your decisions all the time and that casual determinism doesn't apply to your decision-making process. It is "incompatibilist" in that it maintains that free will is not compatible with a deterministic universe.
People holding this view often take either an "agent-casual" or "event-causal" position. In an agent-casual stance, decision-makers, known as "agents," can make decisions that are not caused by a previous action in the same way that physical events are. They are essentially the "prime movers" of event chains that start with their decisions rather than any external cause.
Event-casual stances maintain that some elements of the decision-making process are physically indeterminate and that at least some of the factors that go into the final choice are shaped by the agent. The most famous living proponent of such a stance is Robert Kane and his "effort of will" model.
In brief, his model supposes an agent can be thought responsible for an action if they helped create the causes that led to it. He argues that people occasionally take "self-forming action" (SFA) that helps shape their character and grant them this responsibility. SFAs happen when the decisions we make would be subject to indeterminism, perhaps a case when two choices are both highly likely- with one being what we want and one being what we think is right, and willpower is needed to cause a choice to be taken.
At that point, unable to quickly choose, we apply willpower to make a decision that influences our overall character. Not only was that decision freely chosen, but any later, potentially more causally-determined actions, we take rely at least somewhat on a character trait that we created through that previous choice. Therefore, we at least partially influenced them.
Critics of this stance include Daniel Dennett, who points out that SFAs could be so rare as to leave some people without any real free will at all.
Can’t we just outsource free will to physics?
No, the question of free will is much larger than if cause and effect exist and apply to our decisions. Even if that one were fully answered, other questions immediately pop up.
Is the agency left to us, if any, after we learn how much of our decision-making is determined by outside factors enough for us to say that we are free? How much moral responsibility do people have under each proposed understanding of free will? Is free will just the ability to choose otherwise, or do we just have to be responsible for the actions we make, even if we are limited to one choice?
Physics can inform the debate over these questions but cannot end it unless it comes up with an equation for what freedom is.
Modern debates outside of philosophy departments tend to ignore the differences in the above stances in a way that tends to reduce everything to determinism. This was highlighted by neuroscientist Bobby Azarian in a recent Twitter thread, where he notes there is often a tendency to conflate hard determinism with naturalism—the idea that natural laws, as opposed to supernatural ones, can explain everything in the universe. .
Lastly, we might wonder if physics is the right department to hand it over to. Daniel Dennett awards evolutionary biology the responsibility for generating consciousness and free will.
He points out that while physics has always been the same for life on Earth, both consciousness and free will seem to have evolved recently and could be an evolutionary advantage of sorts—not being bound to deterministic decision making could be an excellent tool for staying alive. He considers them to be emergent properties we have and considers efforts to reduce us to our parts, which do function deterministically, to be unsound.
How to balance our understanding of causal determinism and our subjective experience of seeming to have free will is a problem philosophers and scientists have been discussing for the better part of two thousand years. It is one they'll likely keep going over for a while. While it isn't time to outsource free will to physics, it is possible to incorporate the findings of modern science into our philosophy.
Of course, we might only do that because we're determined to do so, but that's another problem.
