And this Science Sunday, time for something completely different. I’ve been focusing on neuroscience stuff, but I’ve decided to take a break from this to talk about moral psychology. It feels very odd doing this, because this will seem to bleed over into philosophy, and though I could try to avoid this, I admit I kind of want it to.

On the one hand, moral psychology looks easier to detach from philosophy than other areas of Experimental Philosophy (x-phi if you want to be trendy.) Everyone is aware of moral questions and controversies to a degree that they aren’t aware of controversies about the nature of knowledge, or causation, or subjective sense-experience. On the other hand, the insights of the best philosophers have turned out to be extraordinarily useful to psychologists, just in terms of knowing what to ask.

The greatest example of this is the Trolley Problem: a trolley car (like a miniature train, for those who haven’t been to San Francisco or whichever city it is where they have trolleys) is going down a track to a place where five people are trapped, and will kill them if it gets there. You have the opportunity to flip a switch sending the trolley off onto a different track, where it won’t kill so many as five people, but where it will kill one trapped person. What do you do?

This problem was first explicitly given by the philosopher Philippa Foot, and was intended as a simplified version of something other philosophers had been saying about piloting an airplane to crash in a more inhabited or less inhabited area. It was then picked up and developed at length by yet another philosopher, Judith Jarvis Thompson, who called it an “extraordinarily interesting problem,” mainly because it seems to be a cause where it entirely acceptable to actively kill someone to save other people. In other cases, it seems like this definitely isn’t okay–like you can’t kill someone to harvest their organs, even if doing so saves two lives. With such bits of philosophical insight, psychologists, even neuroscientists, have gone off onto all kinds of exciting investigation and theorization.

How is this even possible? How are philosophers, sitting in their office chairs, without training in psychology and not even really thinking about things from a psychological angle, able to be of help to psychologists? Normally, psychologists are supposed to work with groups of volunteers who don’t really know what’s going on, therefore can’t have their responses skewed by that knowledge, and will have their total responses averaged and statistically analyzed to keep the researcher from seeing things that aren’t there. However, this approach works because some things in human psychology are close enough to being constant that the gut instincts of a person who merely thinks up clever questions can teach us a lot.

Steven Pinker makes this point very well in his book /The Stuff of Thought/. The context is a discussion not of morality, but of grammatical facts which we don’t think much about yet have mastered all the same. For example, we all intuitively know that it’s okay to say “Jared sprayed water on the roses,” “Jared sprayed the roses with water,” and “Tex nailed posters onto the board,” but not “Tex nailed the board with posters.” This is something linguists have actually made a lot of progress on from the office chair. According to Pinker, “in dozens of studies I’ve found that the average ratings from volunteers have always lined up with the original subjective judgments of the linguists.”

Where does this put the relationship between moral psychology and moral philosophy? A key difference between morality and language is that people aren’t inclined to worry and argue about language to the degree that they do these things with morality. Someone who notices and can’t explain the above linguistic quirk isn’t likely to be much bothered by it. Someone who notices a similarly vexing moral problem will be deeply bothered by it and will feel a strong need to either justify or modify their moral views in response. In particular, this means someone who is paid to think, lecture, and write about morality may have very different responses to someone who has a real job.

This isn’t to dis philosophers, though. One of the main things that comes out of quizzing people about morality is how deeply confused they are on the subject. For example, in the introduction to his book /Rethinking Life and Death/, Peter Singer notes the results of a survey of pediatricians finding 40 percent agreed with all of the following statements:

1. Abortion is morally permissible after twenty-four weeks if the fetus is abnormal.
2. There is no moral difference between the abortion of a fetus and the active termination of the life of a newborn infant when both have the same gestational age [that is, the same age dating from conception] and suffer from the same defects.
3.There are no circumstances in which it is morally permissible to take active steps to terminate the life of an infant with severe defects.

As Singer notes, the fact of premature infants makes these three statements logically incompatible.

Another example: one study (which greatly annoyed Richard Chappell) found that most people will claim their moral views on uncontroversial things like robbery and cheating are objective, but will renounce any claim to objectivity on controversial issues like abortion and stem cell research. There are two ways to interpret this study: one, the average person has a highly sophisticated metaethical theory entailing that a moral judgment is objective if and only if it is widely shared by the community, and two, that people are just plain confused about morality. The second rings more plausible.

This should make philosophers feel good about themselves, thinking that ordinary people are plagued by the same sort of confusions about morality that they have about whether Barack Obama is a Muslim, and they need us philosophers to save them from it. However, the debates in philosophy make you wonder how much clarity philosophers really have. For example, in a paper published in the February 2007 edition of /Mind and Language/ Marc Hauser and colleagues reported that two-thirds of respondents to a questionaire on trolley-type problems couldn’t give a coherent rationale for their responses–they either admitted this up front or defended their decisions based on conflicting principles, with the conflict never sorted out. But then, Foot and Thompson disagreed vehemently on what to make of the trolley problem, and in spite of trying to maintain their positions were sometimes forced to admit things that they had initially thought were in fact wrong. My course reader for ethics last spring contained over sixty pages of such material from the two of them spread out over four pages, and it was hardly all they had written. The confusions of the man on the street don’t seem so bad, in comparison.

Like it or not, its easy to see why many biologists are increasingly seeing morality as just another irrational feature of our psychologies, of great scientific interest but not, perhaps, to be taken too seriously.

>>>Note: this post was edited when I managed to locate Marc Hauser’s paper a couple hours after the initial posting. Original was vaguer on that point.<<<