In my last post, I discussed criticisms of Jonathan Haidt's Social Intuitionist Model (SIM) of moral judgment. Haidt sees Pizarro and Bloom as making two important claims: (a) Fast and automatic moral intuitions are shaped and informed by prior reasoning, and (b) people actively engage in reasoning when faced with real world moral dilemmas.
Haidt begins his response to these claims by making two clarifications. First, as he sees it, intuitionism allows for a great deal of malleability and responsiveness to new information and circumstances. So although it's true that moral judgments can be altered as a result of differences in cognitive appraisal, this is consistent with the SIM. Differences in belief as a result of reappraisal will lead to the activation of different intuitions. This is unremarkable. If I believe someone is a Nazi, I will likely be unfriendly with them. If I find out they were forced at gunpoint to become a Nazi, my attitudes will likely change. More importantly, however, there's a wealth of empirical research that suggests that people don't spontaneously engage in the kinds of reappraisals that Pizarro and Bloom say are so important. When people do engage in these reappraisals, it's most often the result of social interaction, a key prediction of the SIM.
Second, Haidt fully admits that people may occasionally engage in deep moral reflection, though these occasions are few and far between. As noted in the previous post, people may selectively craft their situation so as to experience (or not experience) certain emotions or intuitions. Haidt again doubts how often this happens. One of Haidt's prescient questions reveals the improbability of this occurrence: "Does it ever happen that a person has a gut feeling of a liberal but a second-order desire to become a conservative? If so, the person could set out on a several-year program of befriending nice, articulate, and attractive conservatives." That this picture is ridiculous is evidence in favor of Haidt's model of moral judgment.
Haidt ends by remarking on the scope of moral reasoning. Pizarro and Bloom contend that moral judgments in everyday life are uniquely deliberative. Laboratory studies don't capture these kinds of judgments because those made in the lab are detached from any real consequences. In real life, they say, people make tough decisions about how to treat people equitably or about abortion. Haidt doesn't disagree that people may be intensely conflicted by these decisions, but he doubts that the people involved actively search for arguments on both sides, weigh the strength of the arguments, and act on the logical entailments of those arguments. Instead, Haidt characterizes these internal conflicts as conflicts between competing intuitions. A woman thinking about having an abortion doesn't read Judith Jarvis Thomson or Don Marquis. Instead, she thinks about her future life, about her social commitments to the father and to her parents, and about the life of her child. Each of these intuitions tug on her emotions. The ultimate outcome is the result of the strongest intuitions experienced.
Equally important, Haidt doubts that these tough decisions happen all that often. He asks the reader to take a mental tally of how often in the past year they've agonized over a moral issue and to compare that to all the times the reader has made a moral judgment after reading a newspaper, participating in gossip, or driving on roads surrounded by drivers less competent than oneself. Further, even in cases that introspectively appear to be the result of deliberative reasoning, we should be cautious not to deceive ourselves. Other research has demonstrated that we have a tendency to make up plausible post hoc rationalizations to justify our decisions.
So, despite a fair bit of criticism, the SIM remains consistent with what we observe in the lab and in real life. People's moral judgments appear to be best characterized as being driven by intuitions and emotions. Reasoned deliberation is the press secretary, the lawyer, the yes-man that justifies judgments that have already been made. It's only in rare circumstances that reason plays anything more than a supporting role in the judgment of morality.
Haidt, J. (2003). The emotional dog does learn new tricks: A reply to Pizarro and Bloom (2003).
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