David Sackris (Arapahoe Community College) & Rasmus Rosenberg Laren (University of Toronto at Mississauga), "Are there 'Moral' Judgments?"
European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 2023
By David Sackris and Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen
In Steven Spielberg’s epic World War II movie, Saving Private Ryan, there is a scene where a US platoon argues about what to do with a captured German combatant, who the Americans have coldly instructed to dig his own grave, tortuously prolonging his fate of immanent execution. However, as the Nazi soldier is desperately pleading for his life, the leader of the US platoon, Captain John Miller (played by Tom Hanks), makes the surprising decision to spare the poor man’s life. Miller blindfolds the German and instructs him to walk a thousand paces into the woods.
Many people would describe Captain Miller’s decision to spare the German’s life as one resulting from a so-called “moral judgment”. It is a type of judgment that seemingly deviates substantially from other types of judgments that Miller could have made. For instance, deciding to execute the soldier could be based on the judgment that there is a high chance the German might once again pick up arms and fight for the Third Reich (which, ironically, is what happens later in the film).
For centuries, philosophers, psychologists, and the proverbial person on the street have tended to share this assumption, that there is something distinctive about moral judgments; something that clearly separates them from other types of judgements that humans make throughout their lives.
In philosophy, we see this commitment in debates that have, both historically, and contemporaneously, motivated researchers: are moral judgments necessarily motivating? Are moral judgments true in the same way as other judgments? Are moral judgments the result of cognitive faculties or non-cognitive (emotional) faculties? What specific areas of the brain are involved in specifically moral judgments?
In a series of papers, we have questioned this fundamental assumption that moral judgment is a distinct kind of judgment, that in turn merits its own distinctive research program.
In our most recent paper “Are there ‘moral’ judgments?”, we begin by noting that not many philosophers have sought to explicitly define what makes a moral judgment distinctive; instead, they usually just assume that it is. In this paper we survey some of the explicit attempts to define moral judgments and demonstrate that they appear to have obvious shortcomings, even under minimalistic definitional requirements:
For example, we demonstrate that when adhering to the classical Aristotelian definitional schema A is a B that Cs, mainstream definitions of moral judgment fare poorly. Under this schema, a moral judgment must be defined as a distinctive kind of judgment that has certain necessary features that distinguish it from other judgment types. In this way, we should be able to complete the following sentence: A moral judgment is a judgment that _____.
We show that not only have philosophers been unable to satisfactorily complete the Aristotelian definitional schema, but we also argue that there is good reason to think that we will be unable to do so in the future. One thing we believe to be holding back a completion of the definitional scheme is that it is unclear how we would define the genus (judgment) under which we are attempting to place a species (moral judgment). Without a clear idea of what a judgment is, it is hard to see how we can aim to successfully define subtypes such as moral judgments.
In our other recent article, “The Disunity of Moral Judgment: Evidence and Implications”, we explore the implications of abandoning a position on which moral judgment constitutes a distinctive kind. For example, we argue that giving up on moral judgment as a distinctive kind dissolves the internalist/externalist debate in moral philosophy:
Internalists believes that a “real” moral judgment must necessarily motivate the person making the judgment to act; externalists believe that a person may make a moral judgment without necessarily being motivated to act. We argue that rejecting moral judgment as a distinctive kind dissolves this debate. The very existence of the debate depends on conflicting intuitions about so-called moral judgments, and these intuitions have divided participants to the debate into the two camps, internalists and externalists. We don’t have to distinguish between “real” moral judgments and moral judgments in name only if we give up the idea that moral judgments must always have some necessary feature; that is, both driving intuitions could be correct. We contend that moral judgments are no different from other judgments—it seems that many judgments (what to eat; what to wear) can be made either passionately or dispassionately (depending on the context), so why should moral judgment be any different?
At this point we believe that there is a good deal of evidence against the position on which moral judgment is a distinctive kind. Tentatively accepting this conclusion could lead to progress in philosophy: e.g., it would also dissolve the debate in which some philosophers maintain that moral judgments are always based in emotion and others maintain that they are always based on reason. Could it be that in some cases our moral judgments are primarily the result of our emotions in other cases they are primarily the result of rational calculation? We believe the context in which a judgment is made has more to tell us about its properties than the content it is about. We believe philosophers, psychologists and cognitivists would be better served by exploring judgment more generally.