Moral Psychology: Gut or Reason? — Ethics 7 (C1)

ETHICS · LESSON 7

Moral Psychology: Gut or Reason?

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

Judge, then justify

Task Alone, write P, N or D for each act, and one sentence explaining your verdict. Then, in pairs, take turns: for each act your partner marked N, ask "But who is harmed?" and see whether the reason survives.

P = permissible N = not permissible D = it depends

1

Clearing out a cupboard, Elena finds her country's old flag. She no longer wants it, so she cuts it into rags and uses them to clean her bathroom. Nobody ever sees.

2

The Okafor family's dog is killed by a car outside their house. They have heard that dog meat tastes good, so they cook it and eat it for dinner. Nobody else knows.

JUDGE, THEN JUSTIFY · CONTINUED

P = permissible N = not permissible D = it depends

3

Mateo promised his dying grandmother that he would visit her grave every week. After she dies, he is busy and never goes. Nobody else knew about the promise.

4

For a bet of two euros, Arjun signs a piece of paper that says "I sell my soul to Leo." Both of them agree that it means nothing.

5

At 3 a.m., on an empty country road with no cars or people for kilometres, Mei walks across against a red pedestrian light.

What Haidt found

In 1993 Jonathan Haidt, Silvia Koller and Maria Dias read stories like the flag and the dog to adults and children in Brazil and the United States, from richer and poorer backgrounds. The stories were built to be offensive but harmless. Students at elite universities mostly treated the acts as matters of convention or taste. Most other groups, especially in Brazil, called them wrong, and wrong everywhere. Social class made a bigger difference than country.

Asked who was harmed, many people agreed that nobody was, yet kept their verdict, or reached for a harm the story had ruled out. Haidt later named this moral dumbfounding: holding firmly to a moral judgement while being unable to give a reason for it.

The finding is debated. Edward Royzman and colleagues (2015) found that many people simply do not believe such stories are harmless; once that is allowed for, dumbfounding almost disappears. Cillian McHugh and colleagues (2017) did find it, but in a minority of responses.

READING

The emotional dog and its rational tail

In a 2001 paper with that title, Haidt challenged the long-dominant view that we reach moral judgements by reasoning. His social intuitionist model reverses the order. A moral intuition, a fast, automatic feeling that something is right or wrong, comes first and usually settles the matter. Moral reasoning typically comes afterwards: it is post hoc, a search for arguments to support a verdict already reached. In Haidt's analogy, reasoning works less like a judge weighing evidence than like a lawyer defending a client.

The model is "social" because reasons do most of their work between people: my arguments rarely change my own mind,

but they can trigger new intuitions in you, and the views of the people around us shape our intuitions directly. Haidt allowed that private reasoning can sometimes override intuition, but held that this is rare. He later pictured reason as a rider on an elephant, mostly explaining where the elephant is already going.

Critics accept that intuitions are fast but deny that reasoning is idle. David Pizarro and Paul Bloom (2003) argued that intuitions are themselves shaped by earlier reasoning, so reason may steer from upstream.

The emotional dog and its rational tail

rare: reasoning changes my own mind

Situation

Intuition

Judgement

Reasoning

(after the fact)

Another person:

Intuition

READING

Moral foundations

Moral Foundations Theory, developed from 2004 by Haidt, Craig Joseph, Jesse Graham and others, proposes a small set of evolved moral foundations: readinesses to feel strongly about certain kinds of situation. Haidt compares them to taste receptors on which every culture builds its own cuisine. The original five are care (against harm), fairness (against cheating), loyalty (against betrayal), authority (against subversion) and sanctity, or purity (against degradation). Liberty (against oppression) was added in 2012 as a candidate sixth.

In US samples, Graham, Haidt and Brian Nosek (2009) found that self-described liberals relied mainly on care and fairness,

while conservatives drew on all five more evenly. A 2023 study of 25 populations by Mohammad Atari and colleagues found loyalty and purity least endorsed in Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies, and more salient in countries such as Egypt and Morocco. It also split fairness into equality and proportionality.

Critics raise three problems. The questionnaire's five-part structure has not fitted the data well in every country (Iurino and Saucier, 2020). Kurt Gray and colleagues argue that all moral judgement is at root about perceived harm. And why these six, and not others?

Foundations self-check

PRIVATE

Task Privately, write a number from 1 to 5 for each statement. Nobody will see your numbers.

1

strongly agree

2

mostly agree

3

on the fence

4

mostly disagree

5

strongly disagree

When I decide whether something is right or wrong, it matters a great deal to me whether…

1

someone was hurt or made to suffer.

4

someone showed disrespect to a parent, teacher or other proper authority.

2

someone was cheated or given less than they deserved.

5

someone did something degrading, even if nobody was harmed.

3

someone let down their family, team or country.

6

someone was bullied or controlled by a person with more power.

Foundations across cultures

Task Choose three or four questions. Talk about the idea and the places you know. Nobody needs to share their own numbers.

STATEMENT

1 care

2 fairness

3 loyalty

4 authority

5 sanctity

6 liberty

1. Which foundation do politicians and adverts where you live appeal to most often?

2. Is sanctity a real moral concern, or disgust dressed up as morality?

3. Can a society hold together when people weigh the foundations very differently?

4. Does the split between equality and proportionality explain any arguments you have heard?

5. Are six foundations enough? What would you add, or remove?

6. Do the foundations describe morality, or only the questionnaire used to measure it?

READING

Two systems in the brain

The trolley problem, from the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson, pairs two cases. In the switch case, a runaway trolley will kill five workers unless you pull a lever that sends it onto a side track, where it will kill one. In the footbridge case, the only way to save the five is to push a large stranger off a bridge into its path. The numbers are the same, yet most people say pulling the lever is permissible and pushing is not.

In 2001 Joshua Greene and colleagues used fMRI to scan people judging such dilemmas. Personal dilemmas, in which you harm someone directly, produced more activity in regions associated with emotion

and social cognition. Impersonal dilemmas, like the switch, produced more activity in regions linked to working memory. People who did approve of personal harm took longer to answer, as if overcoming a reaction.

From this Greene built a dual-process theory: fast emotional responses tend to drive the "don't push" verdicts typical of duty-based ethics, while slower, controlled reasoning drives the cost-benefit verdicts of consequentialism. Patients with damage to an emotion-related area, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, were unusually willing to sacrifice one to save many (Koenigs and colleagues, 2007).

Four lenses meet the gut

Task First, each write P, N or D for pushing. Then, together, write one sentence per lens: what does it say about pushing? Finally, decide which lens best explains your gut reaction, and which best fits your considered view.

P = permissible N = not permissible D = it depends

The footbridge

A runaway trolley will kill five workers. You are on a footbridge above the track, next to a large stranger. The only way to stop the trolley is to push him off: he will die, and the five will live. You are too light to stop it by jumping yourself.

Four lenses meet the gut

Consequences

Duty

Character

Relationships

What will happen?

What rule applies?

What would a good person do?

Who am I to them?

The footbridge

Twist Now one of the five workers is your sister. Does any lens change its answer?

READING

Did it hold up?

The dual-process theory has been tested hard. In 2009 McGuire and colleagues reanalysed the 2001 reaction-time data and found that the key effect came from a few dilemmas, not personal dilemmas in general. Greene accepted this but defended the theory, later refining "personal" into personal force: harm done with your own muscles, as in pushing. A deeper worry came from Guy Kahane and colleagues (2015): people who give "utilitarian" answers to sacrificial dilemmas scored higher on measures of psychopathy and self-interest, and no higher on concern for distant strangers. Perhaps they show a willingness to harm,

not concern for the greater good. Paul Conway and colleagues (2018) dispute that reading.

Disgust has fared worse. Studies around 2005 to 2011 reported that incidental disgust (a bad smell, a dirty desk, a bitter drink) made moral judgements harsher. A 2015 meta-analysis of 50 studies by Justin Landy and Geoffrey Goodwin found the effect was small, and vanished once publication bias was corrected for. Large replications since, one combining eleven studies, found no reliable effect. That disgust accompanies moral judgement is not in doubt; that a stray disgust makes judgement harsher is.

Evidence or bias?

Task Read the short text, then choose three or four questions. Spend most of your time on the one your group disagrees about.

Many philosophers test theories against intuitions, adjusting each against the other until they fit: John Rawls called this reflective equilibrium. Peter Singer (2005) used Greene's work to argue that our resistance to close-up harm may be an evolutionary leftover, owed less weight than reasoning about outcomes. Selim Berker (2009) replied that brain scans cannot settle this: showing that an intuition tracks something morally irrelevant takes a moral argument, and then the neuroscience does no work.

1. If you cannot explain why something is wrong, should you still believe it is?

2. Is a gut reaction almost everyone shares better evidence than one only a few share?

3. Could a moral theory that clashes with nearly everyone's gut still be right?

4. Are the moral intuitions people grow up with where you live a guide, or a habit?

5. Should a failed replication change what we teach, or only how confidently we teach it?

6. Why do so many cultures describe wrongdoing as dirty or rotten?

Private reflection

Task Choose one prompt and write privately. Nobody will read what you write. Sharing afterwards is optional.

Prompt 1

Think of a moral view you hold strongly. Could you defend it to someone who does not share your gut feeling about it? What would you say first?

Prompt 2 (lighter)

Which of today's harmless stories bothered you most? What do you think it was about that story that bothered you?

Back to your verdicts

Task Look again at your five verdicts on "Judge, then justify". Would you change any of them now? Which one are you still sure of, with or without a reason?

1

2

3

4

5

Before Lesson 8

This week, catch your gut in action: notice one moment when you judged something right or wrong before you could say why.

Consequences

Duty

Afterwards, write down the reason you found, and ask yourself honestly whether it came before the verdict or after it.

Next lesson: Life and Death: Medical Ethics. What the four lenses say when the stakes are life itself.

Character

Relationships

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key

FOUR LENSES MEET THE GUT suggested readings; every one of them is open to argument

• Consequences: five lives outweigh one, so push. A careful consequentialist may still hesitate over side effects: a world in which people may be pushed off bridges for the greater good is one in which nobody feels safe. Greene's dual-process theory links this verdict to slow, controlled reasoning.

• Duty: do not push. Pushing uses the stranger merely as a means, against Kant's formula of humanity. The switch case may differ: there the one death is a side effect of diverting the trolley, while on the footbridge the death is the means of saving the five (the doctrine of double effect). Greene links this verdict to the fast emotional response.

• Character: a compassionate, practically wise person may be unable to push, and may be right not to; virtue ethicists also ask what doing it would make of you. Others reply that courage sometimes means doing a terrible thing to prevent a worse one.

• Relationships: the stranger and the five are equally strangers, so this lens says little until the twist. With a sister among the five, many people feel a special duty to save her, which can pull towards pushing; others feel that this makes the push more selfish, not less wrong.

• Which lens explains the gut? Greene's answer is Duty (an emotional reaction later dressed up as a rule); Kahane's work suggests the "push" answer may not reflect Consequences reasoning either. Students who say Character or Relationships are making a real point: the gut may track what kind of person, and whose person, you are.