The emerging moral psychology
Hume thought that morality was rooted in sentiment, not reason, and modern science appears to be giving him a resounding endorsement on that point. Of course, neither Hume nor moral psychologists believe there is no such thing as moral reasoning — merely that ultimately, this reasoning is based on feelings, and most of the time, we start with a feeling and work our way from the conclusion to the argument. Dan Jones:
It’s hard to argue that people are rationally working their way to moral judgements when they can’t come up with any compelling reasons—or sometimes any reasons at all—for their moral verdicts. Haidt suggests that the judgements are based on intuitive, emotional responses, and that conscious reasoning comes into its own in creating post hoc justifications for our moral stances. Our powers of reason, in this view, operate more like a lawyer hired to defend a client than a disinterested scientist searching for the truth.
Or, as the philosopher Richard Rorty — and he wrote a lot of foolish stuff, but this particular quote isn’t so stupid — wrote:
From a pragmatist’s point of view, the notion of ‘inalienable rights’ is no better and no worse a slogan than that of ‘obedience to the will of God’. Either slogan, when invoked as an unmoved mover, is simply a way of saying that our spade is turned—that we have exhausted our argumentative resources. Talk of the will of God or of the rights of man, like talk of ‘the honour of the family’ or of ‘the fatherland in danger’ are not suitable targets for philosophical analysis and criticism. It is fruitless to look behind them. None of these notions should be analyzed, for they are all ways of saying, ‘Here I stand: I can do no other.’ These are not reasons for action so much as announcements that one has thought the issue through and come to a decision.
Some have even suggested that when people say something is objectively wrong, the “objectively” part is nothing more than a kind of emotional exclamation mark, expressing something like, I really, really do feel this way, and I’m really, really inflexible in my beliefs about this particular matter.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, there’s also Haidt’s article in Science, and his essay in Edge.
