Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive (Neuro)Science Matters for Ethics

%H\RQG3RLQWDQG6KRRW0RUDOLW\:K\&RJQLWLYH1HXUR6FLHQFH0DWWHUVIRU(WKLFV$XWKRUV-RVKXD'*UHHQH6RXUFH(WKLFV9RO1R-XO\SS3XEOLVKHGE\7KH8QLYHUVLW\RI&KLFDJR3UHVV6WDEOH85/http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/675875 .$FFHVVHGYour use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .
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Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality:Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScienceMatters for Ethics*Joshua D. GreeneIn this article I explain why cognitive scienceðincluding some neuroscienceÞmat-ters for normative ethics. First, I describe the dual-process theory of moral judg-ment and brieﬂy summarize the evidence supporting it. Next I describe relatedexperimental research examining inﬂuences on intuitive moral judgment. I thendescribe two ways in which research along these lines can have implications forethics. I argue that a deeper understanding of moral psychology favors certainforms of consequentialism over other classes of normative moral theory. I closewith some brief remarks concerning the bright future of ethics as an interdisci-plinary enterprise.The cognitive science of ethics is booming, thanks in no small part tophilosophers.1Nevertheless, many philosophers wonder whether this, orany, empirical research could have implications for foundational ques-tions in normative ethics. In this article I will explain why cognitive sciencematters for ethics. More speciﬁcally, I will defend the following thesis:Science can advance ethics by revealing the hidden inner workingsof our moral judgments, especially the ones we make intuitively.Once those inner workings are revealed we may have less conﬁ-* Many thanks to John Mikhail, Henry Richardson, and other participants in thesymposium on Experiment and Intuition in Ethics held at Georgetown University, April2011. Thanks to James Weinstein and other participants at the Origins of Morality Con-ference, Arizona State University, November, 2010. Thanks to Tommaso Bruni, John Doris,Steven Frankland, Geoff Holtzman, Dylan Murray, and Joe Paxton for comments on thismanuscript.1. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, ed.,Moral Psychology, 3 vols.ðCambridge, MA: MIT Press,2007Þ; J. M. Doris, ed.,The Moral Psychology HandbookðOxford: Oxford University Press, 2010Þ.695Ethics124 ( July 2014): 695–726©2 0 1 4b yT h eU n i v e r s i t yo fC h i c a g o .A l lr i g h t sr e s e r v e d .0 0 1 4 - 1 7 0 4 / 2 0 1 4 / 1 2 4 0 4 - 0 0 0 3 $ 1 0 . 0 0
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dence in some of our judgments and the ethical theories that areðexplicitly or implicitlyÞbased on them.In Section I, I will describe our brains asdual-processsystems and in-troduce thecamera analogy, the organizing metaphor of this essay and acentral idea in my book.2In Section II, I will describe and present evi-dence for the dual-process theory of moral judgment. In Section III, Iwill describe related experimental research examining inﬂuences on ourmoral intuitions. In Sections IV and V, I’ll describe two routes by whichcognitive science can have implications for ethics, and with no illicit is/ought border crossings. I call these routesdirectandindirect. In Section VI,I’ll explain why a deeper understanding of moral psychology favors cer-tain forms of consequentialism. I will then close with a few words aboutthe bright future of ethics as an interdisciplinary enterprise.I. THE DUAL-PROCESS BRAINI own a digital SLR camera that, like many others, operates in two com-plementary modes. First, it has a variety of point-and-shoot automaticsettings that are optimized for typical photographic situationsð“portrait,”“action,” “landscape,” etc.Þ. I use these most of the time. Occasionally, Iget ambitious and put the camera in manual mode, which allows me toadjust all of the camera’s settings by hand.This dual-mode design exempliﬁes an elegant solution to a ubiqui-tous design problem, namely, the trade-off betweenefﬁciencyandﬂexi-bility. The automatic settings are highly efﬁcient, but not very ﬂexible,and the reverse is true of the manual mode. Put them together, however,and you get the best of both worlds, provided that you know when to useeach mode.The human brain has the same general design.3First, we humans havea variety of automatic settings—reﬂexes and intuitions that guide our be-havior, many of which are emotional. We may be conscious of such emo-tional responses, but we are generally not conscious of the processes thattrigger them. We rely on our automatic settings most of the time, and theygenerally serve us well.4Our brains also have a manual mode. It is a general-purpose rea-soning system, specialized for enabling behaviors that serve longðerÞ-term goals, that is, goals that are not automatically activated by current2. Joshua Greene,Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and ThemðNewYork: Penguin Press, 2013Þ.3. See, e.g., Daniel Kahneman, “A Perspective on Judgment and Choice: MappingBounded Rationality,”American Psychologist58ð2003Þ: 697–720.4. See, e.g., John A. Bargh and Tanya L. Chartrand, “The Unbearable Automaticity ofBeing,”American Psychologist54ð1999Þ: 462–79.696Ethics July 2014
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environmental stimuli or endogenous somatic states.5The operations ofthis system are typically conscious, experienced as voluntary, and oftenexperienced as effortful. Our manual mode allows us to formulate be-havioral plans based on detailed and explicit knowledge of the situationswe face, along with explicit general knowledge about the world and howit works. Manual mode allows us to guide our behavior using explicitrules and to think explicitly about how the world works. In short, manualmode thinking is the kind of thinking that we think of as “thinking.”6The way our brains handle the efﬁciency/ﬂexibility tradeoff is nicelyillustrated by our navigation of the familiar tension betweennowandlater.We have automatic settings that urge us to consume or acquire valuableresources, such as calorie-rich food and money, whenever they are avail-able. This is very efﬁcient because it is generally adaptive to acquire valu-able resources. At the same time, we humans have the capacity to thinkexplicitly about whether our long-term goals are served by immediateconsumption/acquisition, along with the capacity to regulate our behav-ior accordingly. In other words, we can delay gratiﬁcation, choosing, forexample, a slimmer waistline in three months over chocolate cake rightnow. This is a dual-process phenomenon. If, for example, our manualmode capacity is occupied by a distracting memory task, our automaticsettings gain the advantage, and we are more likely to choose chocolatecake over fruit salad.7Recent brain imaging studies reveal the underlying neural dynamics.8Brain regions such as the ventral striatum and the ventromedial prefrontal5. See, e.g., Earl K. Miller and Jonathan D. Cohen, “An Integrative Theory of Pre-frontal Cortex Function,”Annual Revivew of Neuroscience24ð2001Þ: 167–202.6. One might ask, what, exactly, is “dual” in dual-process theories? Is it types of pro-cessing? Types of cognitive systems? Different brain regions? Different kinds of outputs?The answer is “all of the above,” but the core difference, in my view, concerns the type ofprocessing. As Turing taught us, dual-process psychology can be implemented or simulatedon a computer using a single processing system occupying a single physical location andusing one set of computational principlesðat low levels, at leastÞ. But, as it happens, that’snot how it generally works in the brain. Instead, distinct neural systems typically engage indistinct types of processing in distinct locations. Likewise, cognitive outputs typically reﬂectthe kinds of processing that that produced them. As a result, a brain injury can alter be-havior because it causes damage to a particular location, which houses a particular cog-nitive system, which processes information in a particular way, and which therefore tendsto push behavior in a particular direction. Of course, not all dual-process dissociations areso clean, but sometimes they are. See Michael Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry, and George R.Mangun,Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind, 3rd ed.ðNew York: Norton, 2008Þ.7. Baba Shiv and Alexander Fedorikhin, “Spontaneous versus Controlled Inﬂuencesof Stimulus-Based Affect on Choice Behavior,”Organizational Behavior and Human DecisionProcesses87ð2002Þ: 342–70.8. Samuel M. McClure, David I. Laibson, George Loewenstein, and Jonathan D. Co-hen, “Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards,”Science306ð2004Þ: 503–7.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics697
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cortexðVMPFCÞproduce the automatic response favoringnowand enablethis response to inﬂuence behavior. Other brain regions, most notably thedorsolateral prefrontal cortexðDLPFCÞ, enable the controlled responsethat sometimes favorslater, depending on the situational details. We seethe dual-process brain at work in other domains, for example, in the cog-nitive control of negative reactions to members of racial out-groups andsad scenes.9In these cases among others, the amygdala, an ancient mam-malian brain structure with direct connections to the VMPFC, plays a crit-ical role in automatic responding, while the DLPFC plays a central role incoordinating manual mode thinking and responding.Before moving on, it’s worth highlighting three ways in which thecamera analogy may mislead. First, while a camera must be in one modeor another, the waking human brain’s automatic settings are always on.Second, a camera’s dual modes can function independently of each other,but in animals there is an asymmetrical dependence. One can have auto-matic settings without a manual mode, as in most animals, but not thereverse. Finally, automatic settings need not be “innate” or “hardwired.”They can be acquired or modiﬁed through cultural learningðas in prej-udicial responses to racial out-groupsÞand through individual experi-encesðas in classical conditioningÞ.II. DUAL-PROCESS MORALITYThe Dual-Process Theory of Moral JudgmentAccording to the dual-process theory of moral judgmentðhenceforth“dual-process theory”Þ,10moral psychology looks much like the rest ofjudgment and decision making. Moral judgment is inﬂuenced by bothautomatic emotional responsesðautomatic settingsÞand controlled, con-scious reasoningðmanual modeÞ. Moreover, these processes are enabledby the usual cast of neural characters in their characteristic roles. These9. William A. Cunningham, Marcia K. Johnson, Carol L. Raye, J. Chris Gatenby, JohnC. Gore, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Separable Neural Components in the Processing ofBlack and White Faces,”Psychological Science15ð2004Þ: 806–13; Kevin N. Ochsner, Silvia A.Bunge, James J. Gross, and John D. E. Gabrieli, “Rethinking Feelings: An fMRI Study of theCognitive Regulation of Emotion,”Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience14ð2002Þ: 1215–29.10. Joshua D. Greene, R. Brian Sommerville, Leigh E. Nystrom, John M. Darley, andJonathan D. Cohen, “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judg-ment,”Science293ð2001Þ: 2105–8; Joshua D. Greene, Leigh E. Nystrom, Andrew D. Engell,John M. Darley, and Jonathan D. Cohen, “The Neural Bases of Cognitive Conﬂict andControl in Moral Judgment,”Neuron44ð2004Þ: 389–400; Joshua D. Greene, Sylvia A.Morelli, Kelly Lowenberg, Leigh E. Nystrom, and Jonathan D. Cohen, “Cognitive LoadSelectively Interferes with Utilitarian Moral Judgment,”Cognition107ð2008Þ: 1144–54;Joshua Greene, “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul,” inMoral Psychology, vol. 3,The Neurosci-ence of Morality: Emotion, Disease, and Development, ed. Walter Sinnott-ArmstrongðCambridge,MA: MIT Press, 2007Þ:3 5–79.698Ethics July 2014
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tenets of the dual-process theory should be relatively unsurprising anduncontroversial. The more interesting, and correspondingly controver-sial, tenet of the dual-process theory is this:The Central Tension Principle:C h a r a c t e r i s t i c a l l yd e o n t o l o g i c a lj u d g -ments are preferentially supported by automatic emotional responses,while characteristically consequentialist judgments are preferentiallysupported by conscious reasoning and allied processes of cognitivecontrol.The name of this principle reﬂects a more general idea, which is that thecentral tension in ethics between deontology and consequentialism is amanifestation of the central tension in cognitive design between efﬁ-ciency and ﬂexibility.Some terminological clariﬁcation is in order. My use of “deonto-logical” and “consequentialist” is not entirely consistent with standardphilosophical usage, necessitating my use of the technical qualiﬁer“characteristically.” This has been a source of some confusion.11I deﬁne“characteristically deontological” judgments as ones that are naturallyjustiﬁed in deontological termsðin terms of rights, duties, etc.Þand thatare more difﬁcult to justify in consequentialist terms, such as judgmentsagainst killing one person to save ﬁve others. I deﬁne “characteristicallyconsequentialist” judgments as ones that are naturally justiﬁed in con-sequentialist termsði.e., by impartial cost-beneﬁt reasoningÞand that aremore difﬁcult to justify in deontological terms because they conﬂict withour sense of people’s rights, duties, and so on. Approving of killing oneto save ﬁve is a characteristically consequentialist judgment.ðNote thatI will sometimes drop the qualiﬁer “characteristically” in the interest ofbrevity, using instead an asterisk½*/C138to indicate that the qualiﬁer stillapplies.ÞTwo further points about these terms: First, they imply nothing apriori about the psychology behind a given judgment, and thereforenothing about the judge’sreasons. Such psychological facts are to be as-certained empirically. Second, making “characteristically consequential-ist” and “characteristically deontological” judgments requires no explicitor implicit commitment to consequentialist or deontological theories.11. Several authors disregard the “characteristically” qualiﬁerðGreene, “Secret Joke ofKant’s Soul”Þ, insisting that the judgments I call “consequentialist” mustðaÞreﬂect a fullcommitment to consequentialismandðbÞbe inconsistent with alternative normative the-ories; Guy Kahane and Nicholas Shackel, “Methodological Issues in the Neuroscience ofMoral Judgment,”Mind and Language25ð2010Þ: 561–82; Frances M. Kamm, “Neuroscienceand Moral Reasoning: A Note on Recent Research,”Philosophy and Public Affairs37ð2009Þ:330–45.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics699
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For example, card-carrying deontologists, and people who carry no the-oretical cards, can make characteristically consequentialist judgments.Mutatis mutandis for consequentialists.My nonstandard use of these terms will strike some as perverse, butthere is a method to this madness. The dual-process theory aims to char-acterize the moral-philosophical tendencies of distinct cognitive systems.12This endeavor is complicated by the fact that these systems do not corre-spond precisely to distinct ethical schools as designated by contemporaryethicists. This is largely because sophisticated consequentialist and de-ontological theories are designed to capture the outputs of multiple cog-nitive systemsðcf. “climbing the mountain from different sides”Þ.13Nev-ertheless, if I’m right, the psychologicalessenceof deontology lies withthe automatic settings and the psychologicalessenceof consequential-ism lies with manual mode. To articulate and test this idea we need tomodify both our vocabulary and corresponding concepts. To get sophis-ticated about moral psychology we musttemporarilyget unsophisticatedabout philosophical terminology. Please bear with me.EvidenceThe dual-process theory was inspired by the Trolley Problem, with whichI assume most readers are familiar.14For present purposes, the two keydilemmas are theswitchðalso known asbystanderÞandfootbridgecases.Very brieﬂy for the uninitiated: In theswitchcase, one can hit a switchthat will turn a runaway trolley away from ﬁve people and onto one. Inthefootbridgecase one can push one person off a footbridge and into thepath of a runaway trolley, saving ﬁve further down the track. People tendto give characteristically consequentialist responses to theswitchcaseð“Yes, it’s permissible to hit the switch to save more lives”Þand charac-teristically deontological responses to thefootbridgecaseð“No, it’s im-permissible to push to save more lives”Þ.Our ﬁrst neuroimaging experiment compared “personal” moral di-lemmas such as thefootbridgedilemma to “impersonal” moral dilemmassuch as theswitchdilemma.15Our hypothesis, based on the dual-processtheory, was that the former would preferentially engage brain regions as-sociated with emotion, while the latter would preferentially engage brain12. Here I’m referring to the Central Tension Principle and the more general ideathat different moral philosophies may be supported to different extents by the outputs ofdifferent cognitive systems.13. Derek Parﬁt,On What MattersðNew York: Oxford University Press, 2011Þ.14. Phillipa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,”Oxford Review5ð1967Þ:5–15; Judith Jarvis Thomson, “The Trolley Problem,”Yale LawJournal94ð1985Þ: 1395–1415.15. Greene et al., “Investigation of Emotional Engagement.”700Ethics July 2014
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regions associated with controlled cognition. This is indeed what wefound. The “personal” dilemmas elicited relatively greater activity in alarge swath of the medial prefrontal cortex, including parts of the VMPFC,and a subsequent analysis with more data showed the same effect in theamygdala.16Similar effects were observed in other brain regions previ-ously associated with emotion. In contrast, the “impersonal” dilemmaselicited relatively greater activity in the DLPFC and allied brain regions.Such results were speciﬁcally predicted by the dual-process theory andthus lend it some support.17Now, over a decade later, the dual-process theory is supported by alarge and diverse body of evidence. We’ll begin with evidence concern-ing the role of emotional intuition in characteristically deontologicaljudgment—or, alternatively, characteristically nonconsequentialist judg-ment.ðUnless otherwise speciﬁed, the results below are based onðordriven byÞresponses to one or more “high-conﬂict” personal dilemmas.Þ18Patients with frontotemporal dementia, which typically in-volves emotional blunting, are about three times as likely as16. Greene et al., “Neural Bases.”17. There has been much confusion about what this experiment shows and what it wasintended to show. It was designed to test the dual-process theory, though not the CentralTension Principle speciﬁcally. Some critics have conﬂated the dual-process theory with thetheory implicit in the 2001 personal/impersonal distinction; see Joshua D. Greene, “Dual-Process Morality and the Personal/Impersonal Distinction: A Reply to Mcguire, Langdon,Coltheart, and Mackenzie,”Journal of Experimental Social Psychology45ð2009Þ: 581–84.Others have assumed that the 2001 experiment was intended to test the speciﬁc version ofthe personal/impersonal distinction that it used, and then faulted it for failing to do soadequately; see Kamm, “Neuroscience and Moral Reasoning”; Selim Berker, “The Nor-mative Insigniﬁcance of Neuroscience,”Philosophy and Public Affairs37ð2009Þ: 293–329;and also John Mikhail, “Emotion, Neuroscience, and Law: A Comment on Darwin andGreene,”Emotion Review3ð2011Þ: 293–95. The testing and reﬁning of the personal/im-personal distinction was accomplished by later experiments, discussed in Section III;Joshua D. Greene, Fiery A. Cushman, Lisa E. Stewart, Kelly Lowenberg, Leigh E. Nystrom,and Jonathan D. Cohen, “Pushing Moral Buttons: The Interaction between Personal Forceand Intention in Moral Judgment,”Cognition111ð2009Þ: 364–71.The looseness of the personal/impersonal comparison in the 2001 experiment did notprevent it from supporting the dual process theory, but it did impose limitations. Sub-sequent studies have overcome these limitations byðaÞfocusing primarily or exclusively on“personal” dilemmas similar tofootbridge, andðbÞexamining factors that cause or correlatewith people’sjudgments, rather than effects of different stimuliðpersonal vs. impersonalÞ.These studies typically use one or more “impersonal” dilemmas, but only to establish thespecificity of the main result, generated using one or more “personal” dilemmas.Some have wondered why the 2001 experiment asked subjects to classify actions as“appropriate” or “inappropriate.” This was done to keep the response prompt constantacross moral and nonmoral trials. Subjects were explicitly instructed to judge based onmoral considerations where applicable.18. Michael Koenigs, Liane Young, Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Fiery A. Cushman,Marc D. Hauser, and Antonio Damasio, “Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex Increases Util-itarian Moral Judgements,”Nature446ð2007Þ: 908–11.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics701
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control subjects to give consequentialist* responses to the foot-bridge case.19Patients with damage to the VMPFC are about ﬁve times aslikely as others to give consequentialist* responses.20Ar e -search team in Italy produced similar results.21A follow-upstudy shows that consequentialst* judgments are associatedwith absent skin-conductance responsesðSCRs, which indicateaffective arousalÞin VMPFC patients and reduced SCRs inhealthy subjects.22VMPFC patients give more consequentialist* responses to di-lemmas in which familial duties are pitted against consequen-tialist* considerationsðe.g., turning a trolley onto one’s sister tosave othersÞ.23People who exhibit greater physiological reactivityðconstrictionof peripheral blood vesselsÞto performing a stressful arithmetictask give less consequentialist* responses.24Low-anxiety psychopathsðknown for their social-emotional def-icitsÞare more likely than healthy people to give consequen-tialist* responses.2519. Mario F. Mendez, Eric Anderson, and Jill S. Shapira, “An Investigation of MoralJudgment in Frontotemporal Dementia,”Cognitive and Behavioral Neurolology18ð2005Þ:193–97.20. Koenigs et al., “Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex.” Guy Kahane and NicholasShackelð“Do Abnormal Responses Show Utilitarian Bias?”Nature452½2008/C138: E5; authorreply, E5–E6Þcriticized the Koenigs et al. study for employing dilemmas in which theutilitarian judgment is not, according to Kahane and Shackel and other philosopherssurveyed, trulyði.e., uniquelyÞutilitarian. Koenigs et al. replied by analyzing the data fromonly those dilemmas approved by Kahane and Shackel and produced the same results.21. Elisa Ciaramelli, Michela Muccioli, Elisabetta La ´davas, and Giuseppe di Pelle-grino, “Selective Deﬁcit in Personal Moral Judgment Following Damage to VentromedialPrefrontal Cortex,”Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience2ð2007Þ:8 4–92.22. Giovanna Moretto, Elisabetta La `davas, Flavia Mattioli, and Giuseppe di Pellegrino,“A Psychophysiological Investigation of Moral Judgment after Ventromedial PrefrontalDamage,”Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience22ð2010Þ: 1888–99.23. Bradley C. Thomas, Katie E. Croft, and Daniel Tranel, “Harming Kin to SaveStrangers: Further Evidence for Abnormally Utilitarian Moral Judgments after Ventro-medial Prefrontal Damage,”Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience23ð2011Þ: 2186–96.24. Fiery A. Cushman, Kurt Gray, Allison Gaffey, and Wendy Berry Mendes, “Simu-lating Murder: The Aversion to Harmful Action,”Emotion12ð2012Þ:2–7.25. Michael Koenigs, Michael Kruepke, Joshua Zeier, and Joseph P. Newman, “Utili-tarian Moral Judgment in Psychopathy,”Social Cognitive and Affect Neuroscience7ð2012Þ:708–14.702Ethics July 2014
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People who are more empathetic, or induced to be more em-pathetic, give more deontological* responses.26Individuals high in psychopathy exhibit lower amygdala re-sponses and higher DLPFC responses to “personal” dilemmas.27Thinking about death reduces consequentialist* judgment.28Individuals with deﬁcits in emotional awarenessðdue to alexi-thymiaÞmake more consequentialist* judgments.29Amygdala activity correlates positively with ratings of negativeemotion in response to footbridge-like cases and correlatesnegatively with consequentialist* judgments.30Citalopram—an SSRI that, in the short term, increases emo-tional reactivity through its inﬂuence on the amygdala andVMPFC, among other regions—reduces consequentialist* re-sponses.31Inducing mirthðthe positive emotion associated with humor,here thought to counteract negative emotional responsesÞin-creases consequentialist* responses.3226. Paul Conway and Bertram Gawronski, “Deontological and Utilitarian Inclinationsin Moral Decision Making: A Process Dissociation Approach,”Journal of Personality andSocial Psychology104ð2013Þ: 216–35. This very clever study used the “process dissociation”method to separate utilitarian* and deontological* components. This required a modiﬁedset of dilemmas.27. Andrea L. Glenn, Adrian Raine, and R. A. Schug, “The Neural Correlates of MoralDecision-Making in Psychopathy,”Journal of Molecular Psychiatry14ð2009Þ:5–6; Andrea L.Glenn, Adrian Raine, R. A. Schug, and Marc D. Hauser, “Increased DLPFC Activity duringMoral Decision-Making in Psychopathy,”Journal of Molecular Psychiatry14ð2009Þ: 909–11.28. Bastien Tre ´molie `re, Wim De Neys, and Jean-Franc ¸ois Bonnefon, “Mortality Sa-lience and Morality: Thinking about Death Makes People Less Utilitarian,”Cognition124ð2012Þ: 379–84.29. Nancy S. Koven, Luke Clark, Marc D. Hauser, and Trevor W. Robbins, “Speciﬁcityof Meta-emotion Effects on Moral Decision-Making,”Emotion11ð2011Þ: 1255–61.30. Amitai S. Shenhav and Joshua D. Greene, “Integrative Moral Judgment: Dissoci-ating the Roles of the Amygdala and the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex,”Journal ofNeuroscience34ð2014Þ: 4741–49.31. Molly J. Crockett, “Serotonin Selectively Inﬂuences Moral Judgment and Behaviorthrough Effects on Harm Aversion,”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the UnitedStates of America107ð2010Þ: 17433–38.32. Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno, “Manipulations of Emotional ContextShape Moral Judgment,”Psychological Science17ð2006Þ: 476–77; Nina Strohminger, Rich-ard L. Lewis, and David E. Meyer, “Divergent Effects of Different Positive Emotions onMoral Judgment,”Cognition119ð2011Þ: 295–300.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics703
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Visual thinking is generally more emotionally evocative thanverbal thinking, and individuals with more visual cognitive stylestend to give less consequentialist* responses. Likewise, interfer-ing with visual thinkingðbut not verbal thinkingÞmakes judg-ments more consequentialist*.33Other evidence links characteristically consequentialist judgment tocontrolled cognition.Consequentialist* judgment is associated with increased DLPFCactivity within individuals34and across individuals.35Performing a distracting secondary taskði.e., being under cog-nitive loadÞreduces consequentialist* responses36or slows con-sequentialist* responses, while having no effect on deontologi-cal* responses.37Removing time pressure and encouraging deliberation increasesconsequentialist* responses.38The experience of successfully solving tricky math problemsðones that require one to question one’s intuitionsÞmakes peo-ple subsequently more likely to give consequentialist* responses.Individuals who solve more tricky math problems tend to givemore consequentialist* responses to a higher-stakes version ofthe footbridge case, independent of whether they solved mathproblems ﬁrst.39Individuals who generally favor effortful thinking over intuitivethinking are more likely to give consequentialist* responses.4033. Elinor Amit and Joshua D. Greene, “You See, the Ends Don’t Justify the Means:Visual Imagery and Moral Judgment,”Psychological Science23ð2012Þ: 861–68.34. Greene et al., “Neural Bases.”35. Sophie R. Wharton, “Thou Shalt versus Thou Shalt Not: The Neural ProcessesUnderlying Decisions to Help versus Decisions to Avoid Doing Harm”ðhonors thesis, De-partment of Psychology, Harvard University, 2011Þ; Fiery A. Cushman, Sophie R. Wharton,and Joshua D. Greene, “Distinct Neural Processes Underlying Decisions to Help versusDecisions to Avoid Doing Harm”ðmanuscript in preparationÞ.36. Tre ´molie `re, De Neys, and Bonnefon, “Mortality Salience and Morality”; Conwayand Gawronski, “Deontological and Utilitarian Inclinations.”37. Greene et al., “Pushing Moral Buttons.”38. Renata S. Suter and Ralph Hertwig, “Time and Moral Judgment,”Cognition119ð2011Þ: 454–58.39. Joseph M. Paxton, Leo Ungar, and Joshua D. Greene, “Reﬂection and Reasoningin Moral Judgment,”Cognitive Science36ð2012Þ: 163–77.40. Daniel M. Bartels, “Principled Moral Sentiment and the Flexibility of Moral Judg-ment and Decision Making,”Cognition108ð2008Þ:3 8 1–417. See also Conway and Gawronski,704Ethics July 2014
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People are invariably conscious of the consequentialist ratio-nale for making consequentialist* judgments, but lack consciousaccess to the causes of their deontological* patterns of judg-mentðapproving of some consequentialist* trade-offs but notothersÞ. People often question or rewrite dilemmas’ assumptionsso as to produce a coherent consequentialist justiﬁcation fordisapproval.41That’s a lot of evidence. All of it comes from trolleyology, but that’sno reason to dismiss it. We philosophers have puzzled over trolley di-lemmas for decades because they capture a central—if notthecentral—tension in normative ethics, and the myriad scientiﬁc results these di-lemmas have generated implies that they tap something deep—revealingthe hidden tectonics of the moral mind.42That said, there is evidence forthe dual-process theory beyond trolleyology:Negative emotional responses predict characteristically non-consequentialist disapproval of harmless moral transgressions,including disapproval that is characteristically deontologicalðe.g., disapproval of breaking a promise without negative con-sequencesÞ.43Several experiments indicate that consequentialist consider-ations play a minimal role in people’s judgments about punish-ment, though people readily appeal to consequentialist consid-erations when asked to explicitly justify punishments.44Instead,punishment judgments follow a pattern consistent with retribu-tivism, a distinctively nonconsequentialist, and speciﬁcally Kant-ian, philosophy of punishment. Punishment appears to be driven41. Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, and Marc Hauser, “The Role of Conscious Rea-soning and Intuition in Moral Judgment: Testing Three Principles of Harm,”PsychologicalScience17ð2006Þ: 1082–89; Marc Hauser, Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, R. Kang-Xing Jin,and John Mikhail, “A Dissociation between Moral Judgments and Justiﬁcations,”Mind andLanguage22ð2007Þ:1–21.42. Fiery A. Cushman and Joshua D. Greene, “Finding Faults: How Moral DilemmasIlluminate Cognitive Structure,”Social Neuroscience7ð2012Þ: 269–79.43. Jonathan Haidt, Silvia Helena Koller, and Maria G. Dias, “Affect, Culture, and Mo-rality, or Is It Wrong to Eat Your Dog?”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology65ð1993Þ:613–28; Thalia Wheatley and Jonathan Haidt, “Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral JudgmentsMore Severe,”Psychological Science16ð2005Þ: 780–84.44. See Kevin M. Carlsmith, John M. Darley, and Paul Robinson II, “Why Do We Pun-ish? Deterrence and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment,”Journal of Personality and So-cial Psychology83ð2002Þ: 284–99; see further evidence and discussion in Greene, “SecretJoke of Kant’s Soul,” andMoral Tribes.“Deontological and UtilitarianInclinations”; and AdamM. Moore, Brian A. Clark, and MichaelJ. Cane, “Who Shalt Not Kill? Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity, ExecutiveControl, and Moral Judgment,”Psychological Science19ð2008Þ:5 4 9–57.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics705
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primarily by automatic negative emotional responses, and peoplewho are more punitive tend to rely less on controlled cognition.45People’s judgments and decisions about helping behaviorfollow a nonconsequentialist* pattern and tend to be driven byautomatic processes.46Public health professionalsðfor whom the patient is the societyat largeÞmake more consequentialist* judgments than doctorsand ordinary people in response to medical dilemmas.47In sum, the dual-process theory is supported by an exceptionally widerange of convergent and complementary evidence from many indepen-dent researchers.48No one piece of evidence is deﬁnitive, and each piece,taken in isolation, is open to alternative interpretations. But no theoryof which I am aware comes anywhere close to explaining this body of evi-dence better than the dual-process theory, which explicitly predicted mostof these results in advance and predictsðin the timeless senseÞall of them.4945. Michael J. Sargent, “Less Thought, More Punishment: Need for Cognition Pre-dicts Support for Punitive Responses to Crime,”Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin30ð2004Þ: 1485–93.46. Deborah A. Small and George Loewenstein, “Helping a Victim or Helping theVictim,”Journal of Risk and Uncertainty26ð2003Þ:5–16; Tehila Kogut and Ilana Ritov, “TheSingularity Effect of Identiﬁed Victims in Separate and Joint Evaluations,”OrganizationalBehavior and Human Decision Processes97ð2005Þ: 106–16; Paul Slovic, “If I look at the massI will never act”: Psychic Numbing and Genocide,”Judgment and Decision Making2ð2007Þ:79–95.47. Katherine J. Ransohoff, “Patients on the Trolley Track: The Moral Cognition ofMedical Practitioners and Public Health Professionals”ðhonors thesis, Department ofPsychology, Harvard University, 2011Þ; Katherine J. Ransohoff, Daniel Wikler, and JoshuaD. Greene, “Patients on the Trolley Track: The Moral Cognition of Medical Practitionersand Public Health Professionals”ðmanuscript in preparationÞ.48. Unfortunately, some philosophers have been given a different impression by Ber-ker’s discussionð“Normative Insigniﬁcance of Neuroscience”Þof the evidence supportingthe dual-process theory, primarily in secs. 2 and 3 of his article. I have documented Berker’svarious errors, misleading statements, and misleading omissions in a set of notes that I pre-pared for a 2010 meeting. These notes are available on my web pageðhttp://www.wjh.harvard.edu/%7ejgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-Notes-on-Berker-Nov10.pdfÞor by request. Berker’serrors include multiple false statements about statistical analyses and experimental con-founds. More generally, he presents a misleading picture of the evidence supporting the dual-process theory by ignoring and/or erroneously dismissing most of the then-available evi-dence. For more details concerning these and other problems with Berker’s article, readersare encouraged to consult the aforementioned online document.49. It’s worth noting that the experiments described above did not use philosophersas subjects, and they have focused on responses to speciﬁc cases rather than abstract prin-ciples. For this reason, one might wonder whether these results have any bearing on thepsychology behind familiar philosophical theories. As I will explain in Sec. IV, I believe that706Ethics July 2014
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Counterevidence?Is there any positive evidence against the dual-process theory? Kahaneet al. hypothesize that consequentialist judgments have so far been as-sociated with controlled cognition simply because research has, so far,focused on cases in which consequentialist* judgments happen to besupported by controlled cognition.50If you look elsewhere, they say,you’ll ﬁnd characteristically deontological judgments preferentiallysupported by controlled cognition.I once speculated about the possibility of ﬁnding such cases:This½dual-process theory/C138also makes sense of certain deontologicalanomalies....Consider, for example, Kant’s infamous claim that itwould be wrong to lie to a would-be murderer in order to protect afriend who has taken refuge in one’s home....Kant sticks to his theoryand rejects the intuitive response.ðHe “bites the bullet,” as philoso-phers say.ÞBut what is interesting about this bit of Kantian ethics isthat it’s something of an embarrassment to contemporary Kantians,who are very keen to explain how Kant somehow misapplied his owntheory in this case....If you want to know which bits of Kant con-temporary Kantians will reject, follow the emotions.51This suggests a more general formula for generating counterintuitive de-ontological* judgments: Find a moral rule that reasonable adults rarelyhold as absoluteð“Don’t lie”Þand then pit that rule against a serious harmthat we are intuitively inclined to avoid and that we have consequentialistreason to avoid. This is precisely the strategy adopted by Kahane et al.,who examine cases of “white lies”ðShould you devastate your friend bytelling him what his mean-spirited uncle really thought of him?Þ, and “im-prudent autonomy”ðShould you buy an alcoholic beggar booze insteadof food because that’s what he really wants?Þ, and so on. Kahane et al.conducted an fMRI experiment usingdilemmas such as these, along withstandardfootbridge-like dilemmas. They predictedt h a td e o n t o l o g i c a l *j u d g -ments in response to their new dilemmas would show signs of preferen-tially engaging controlled cognition, providing evidence that these de-ontological* judgments are counterintuitive, contrary to the dual-processtheory and the Central Tension Principle, more speciﬁcally.50. Guy Kahane, Katja Wiech, Nicholas Shackel, Miguel Farias, Julian Savulescu, andIrene Tracey, “The Neural Basis of Intuitive and Counterintuitive Moral Judgment,”SocialCognitive and Affective Neuroscience7ð2012Þ: 393–402.51. Greene, “Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul,” 66.the psychology of philosophers is, in some important ways, different from that of ordinarymoralists, but that studies of ordinary people’s judgments in response to speciﬁc cases canalso illuminate the psychology behind familiar philosophical theories.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics707
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My collaborators and I did not ﬁnd Kahane et al.’s fMRI and re-action time data convincing, but we wondered whether they might beright about some of their cases.52With this in mind, Joe Paxton, Tom-maso Bruni, and I conducted a more deﬁnitive behavioral test using oneof our standard dilemmasðalso used by Kahane et al.Þand one of Ka-hane et al.’s “white lie” dilemmas.53We used the “tricky math problems”technique, mentioned above.54As expected, subjects who distrustedtheir intuitions on the tricky math problems were more likely to giveconsequentialist* responses to our standard case. And, most critically,subjects who distrusted their faulty intuitions on the math problems alsogave more consequentialist* responses to Kahane et al.’s “white lie” di-lemma—exactly what the original dual-process theory predicts, and ex-actly the opposite of what Kahane et al.’s theory predicts. Given that thisdilemma was engineered to be a counterexample to the Central TensionPrinciple and the dual-process theory, it’s hard to imagine this theory’sreceiving more striking conﬁrmation. That said, I’ve no doubt that,somewhere, an exception to the dual-process theory’s predicted patternwill be found. The point, however, is not that the dual-process theorypredicts every case perfectly, but rather that it captures the general shapeof philosophical moral psychology.At this point, having read a short summary of the evidence support-ing the dual-process theory, you may or may not be inclined to accept itas true, or approximately true. Nevertheless, for the remainder of thisarticle, I will assume that it’s correct, in order to explore its implications.III. WHAT PUSHES OUR MORAL BUTTONS?We have automatic emotional responses that support characteristicallydeontological judgments. But what triggers these emotional responses?What, for example, is it about pushing the man off the footbridge thatmakes us feel that it’s wrong? Experiments are answering this question,among others.52. They found no effect of “counterintuitive” deontological* judgment in theDLPFC, the signature of controlled cognition, previously observed in association withconsequentialist* judgmentðGreene et al., “Neural Bases”; Cushman, Wharton, andGreene, “Distinct Neural Processes”Þ. For the “white lie”–like dilemmas, the deontological*judgments took slightly longer than the consequentialist* judgments and were rated asmore difﬁcult, consistent with Kahane et al.’s conclusionsð“Neural Basis”Þ. However, these“counterintuitive” deontological* judgments were actuallyfasterthan the intuitive deon-tological* judgments in thefootbridge-like cases and were rated as no more difﬁcult thanthem. This is not consistent with their theory.53. Joseph M. Paxton, Tommaso Bruni, and Joshua D. Greene, “Are ‘Counter-intuitive’Deontological Judgments Really Counter-intuitive? An Empirical Reply to Kahane et al.ð2012Þ,”Social, Cognitive, and Affective NeuroscienceðforthcomingÞ.54. Ibid.708Ethics July 2014
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It seems that there are two key factors that explain why most peoplesay “yes” to theswitchcase and “no” to thefootbridgecaseðhenceforth, theswitch-footbridgeeffectÞ. The ﬁrst is whether the victim is harmed as ameans or as a side effect,55a factor that has long been cited by ethicists asrelevant here and elsewhere.56The second has to do with the “person-alness” of the harm.57I and my collaborators have conducted a set ofexperiments58showing that these two factors interact to produce theswitch-footbridgeeffect.59ðI use term “interact” in the technical statisticalsense, meaning that the inﬂuence of one factor is inﬂuenced by thepresence/absence of another factor, as in an interaction between med-ications.ÞHere I will focus on the personalness factor because it is themost normatively relevant. We’ll return to the means/side effect factorin Section VI.The action infootbridgeinvolves the application ofpersonal force. Thatis, the agent directly impacts the victim with the force of his/her mus-cles. The effect of personal force is revealed by examining four foot-bridge variations. In thefootbridge poleversion, the agent pushes the vic-tim with a pole. In thefootbridge switchversion, the agent drops the victimonto the tracks through a switch-operated trap door, while standing nearthe victim on the footbridge. In theremote footbridgeversion, the switch islocated elsewhere, away from the victim. We asked separate groups of sub-jects to judge whether the action proposed is morally acceptable. Theproportions of subjects responding “yes” to these cases are as follows:A. Standard footbridge: 31 percent yesB. Footbridge pole: 33 percent yesC. Footbridge switch: 59 percent yesD. Remote footbridge: 63 percent yesThe results for the ﬁrst two cases do not differ signiﬁcantly. That is, thereis no evidence for an effect of physical contact per se. Likewise, compar-ing the last two cases, there is no evidence for an effect of spatial distanceper se. However, the difference between the ﬁrst two cases and the lasttwo, the difference between pushing and hitting a switch, is highly sig-55. John Mikhail, “Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy: A Study of the ‘Generative Grammar’Model of Moral Theory Described by John Rawls inA Theory of Justice”ðdoctoral diss.,Cornell University, 2000Þ; Cushman et al., “Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition.”56. Foot, “Problem of Abortion.”57. Edward B. Royzman and Jonathan Baron, “The Preference for Indirect Harm,”Social Justice Research15ð2002Þ: 165–84; Cushman et al., “Role of Conscious Reasoning andIntuition”; Michael R. Waldmann and Jorn H. Dieterich, “Throwing a Bomb on a Personversus Throwing a Person on a Bomb: Intervention Myopia in Moral Intuitions,”Psycho-logical Science18ð2007Þ: 247–45; Moore, Clark, and Kane, “Who Shalt Not Kill?”58. Greene et al., “Pushing Moral Buttons.”59. Other factors contribute to theswitch-footbridgeeffect but these two factors accountfor much, if not most, of it.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics709
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niﬁcant, doubling the number of “yes” responses.ðAt this point, you mayalready feel a normative tingle in your extremities. That’s normal.ÞI’ll brieﬂy mention a parallel line of research,60led by Jay Musen,related to Peter Singer’s famous drowning child dilemma.61It seemsmonstrously wrong to allow a child to drown in a shallow pond becauseone is concerned about muddying up one’s clothes. And yet it seems tomost people morally acceptable, if not morally ideal, to spend one’sdisposable income on luxuries for oneself, even if that money could beused to save the lives of desperately needy people. Why do we say bothof these things? Evidence from Musen’s experiments suggests that ourjudgments are highly sensitive tomere spatial distance. This effect is nicelyillustrated by contrasting two cases, which we’ll callnearandfar.62In thenearcase, you are vacationing in a developing country thathas been hit by a devastating typhoon. You are safe and well suppliedin your temporary home on a coastal mountainside, but many peoplealong the coast are dying. A relief effort led by an international orga-nization is underway, and you can help by donating money. A relativelymodest donation can save a life, and no money will go to waste. Are youmorally obliged to donate?In thefarcase it’s your friend, rather than you, who is there. Yourfriend uses a smartphone to capture audio and video from the scene,transmitting these to you live over the internet, while you sit comfortablyat home. You can also donate to the relief effort over the internet. Inother words, you know everything your friend knows, see and hear ev-erything your friend sees and hears, and you are in just as good a posi-tion to help. The only difference is that your friend is physically nearwhile you are physically far.63It seems that this difference dramaticallyaffects people’s judgments.64ðTingle?Þ6560. Jay Musen, “The Moral Psychology of Obligations to Help Those in Need”ðhonorsthesis, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 2010Þ; Jay D. Musen and JoshuaGreene, “Mere Spatial Distance Weakens Perceived Moral Obligations to Help Those inDesperate Need”ðmanuscript in preparationÞ.61. Peter Singer, “Famine, Afﬂuence and Morality,”Philosophy and Public Affairs1ð1972Þ: 229–43.62. These cases borrow from Peter K. Unger,Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion ofInnocenceðNew York: Oxford University Press, 1996Þ.63. Is this theonlydifference? Strictly speaking, no. For example, infar, but not innear, you get your information over the internet. What matters for present purposes iswhether there are other differences that are plausibly regarded as morally relevant. Moreon this shortly.64. Further details are withheld so as not to preempt the scientiﬁc publication ofthese results.65. For further normative tingles, see Neeru Paharia, Karim S. Kassam, Joshua D.Greene, and Max H. Bazerman, “Dirty Work, Clean Hands: The Moral Psychology ofIndirect Agency,”Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes109ð2009Þ: 134–41.See also Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe, “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: TheCognitive Science of Folk Intuitions,”Nouˆs41ð2007Þ: 663–85.710Ethics July 2014
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IV. MORAL IMPLICATIONS: THE DIRECT ROUTEIt’s time to explain and vindicate theseoughtytingles, induced by purelyis-ishexperimental ﬁndings. I will do this with no is/ought sleight ofhand.Such experiments identify factors to which our moral judgments aresensitive. This information may be combined with independent norma-tive assumptions concerning the kinds of things to which our judgmentsought to be sensitive.66This combination can lead us to new, substantivemoral conclusions. In other words, scientiﬁc information can allow us totrade in difﬁcult “ought” questions for easier “ought” questions, and thusadvance ethics.For example, suppose we want to know whether capital juries makegood judgments—a normative question that is, at the outset, open.67Next we get a bit of disturbing scientiﬁc information: Capital juries aresensitive to race. May we now say that capital juries, at least sometimes,make bad decisions? Not yet. For that we need an additional, nonsci-entiﬁc normative assumption, stating that the judgments of capital juriesought not be sensitive to race. However, if we’re willing to make this as-sumption, we may now draw a new and substantive moral conclusion:Capital juries, at least sometimes, make bad decisions.As this example illustrates, we can reach interesting normative con-clusions by combining interesting scientiﬁc facts with uninteresting nor-mative assumptions. However obvious this may seem, some mistakenlyassume that empirically based normative arguments are empty or question-begging if they rely on nonempirical normative assumptions.68The aboveexample suggests a more general principle: An empirically driven nor-mative argument is non-question-begging if the normative assumptionsit requires are less interestingði.e., less controversialÞthan its normativeconclusion. I am not claiming one can derive a moral “ought” from noth-ing but a scientiﬁc “is.” Rather, my point is that moral psychology mattersfor ethics, that it is “normatively signiﬁcant.” Moral psychology matters,not because it can generate interesting normative conclusions all by itself,but because it can play an essential role in generating interesting norma-tive conclusions.66. Such assumptions are, ideally, shared by both philosophers and nonphilosophers,but this may vary from case to case.67. I am here and elsewhere in this article remaining metaethically agnostic andtherefore leaving it open as to what counts as a “good” judgment. “Good” judgments maybe true, or may simply be good according to some other set of evaluative criteria.68. For example, Berkerð“Normative Insigniﬁcance of Neuroscience,” 326Þclaimsthat nonempirical normative assumptions “do all the work” in the above arguments, ren-dering the science “normatively insigniﬁcant.” That is not true. Normative assumptions dosome work, but empirical evidence does essential work as well.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics711
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A natural objection to this example is that the work done by thescience, while not insigniﬁcant, isnormativelyinsigniﬁcant. The sciencedoes not challenge anyone’s values. Instead, it simply alerts us to anapplication of the values we already have.69With this objection in mind,let’s consider a second example, the case of consensual adult incest.Ought we condemn all incestuous behavior? This is a difﬁcult “ought”question, at least for some people, and any answer one gives will becontroversial. Suppose we learnðas we likely have alreadyÞthat the in-clination to condemn incest of all kinds is based on an emotional re-sponse whose function is to avoid producing offspring with geneticdiseases.70As before, we need to answer a second, easier “ought” ques-tion before reaching a new moral destination: Ought we rely on suchemotional responses in cases in which there is no special concern aboutgenetic diseases? For example, we might imagine a brother-sister pair,Joe and Jane, who were separated in early childhood and who later metand fell in love.71We might imagine that they become aware of theirbiological relation, but nonetheless choose to remain together, taking ma-jor precautionsðe.g., vasectomyÞto ensure that they are no more likelythan typical couples to produce children with genetic diseases. With Joeand Jane in mind, we might make the following normative assumption:If our inclination to condemn Joe and Jane’s behavior depends on anemotional response that makes their behavior seem wrong, and this emo-tional response evolved to prevent birth defects, and birth defects are nota special issue in their case, and we have no additional reason to condemntheir behavior, then we ought not condemn their behavior.72Having madethis assumption, and having learned something from science, we may nowconclude that we ought not condemn all incestuous behavior—an inter-esting normative conclusion. This example—a classicdebunkingexplana-tion—is notable because it genuinely challenges some people’s moral val-ues. Indeed, such arguments can change people’s minds, if you give themenough time to think.7369. Thanks to Thomas M. Scanlon on this point.70. Debra Lieberman, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides, “The Architecture of HumanKin-Detection,”Nature445ð2007Þ: 727–31.71. See Helen Weathers, “How We Fell in Love, by the Brother and Sister Who GrewUp Apart and Met in Their 20s,”MailOnline.com, February 17, 2008.72. For example, we do not believe that their behavior will damage them or otherspsychologically, promote immoral behavior more generally, and so on. One might objectthat this “no additional reason” clause is what’s doing “all the work” in this argument. Idisagree. This clause simply closes off alternative escape routes, forcing a confrontationbetween the emotional response that is driving the judgment and the empirically baseddebunking argument that challenges it.73. Paxton, Bruni, and Greene, “Are ‘Counter-intuitive’ Deontological JudgmentsReally Counter-intuitive?”712Ethics July 2014
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We’re now ready to make good on our tingles. Here, our initial,difﬁcult “ought” question in this: Do people make good moral judg-ments when confronted with moral dilemmas? Next, science tells us thatpeople’s judgments are, at least sometimes, sensitive to things like merepersonal force and mere spatial proximity. Next we face an easier “ought”question: Ought people’s moral judgments be sensitive to such things?We all answer, “no,” of course.ðPerhaps you’re tempted to withhold your negation because per-sonal force and spatial proximity may be reliable correlates of thingsthat matter morally, such as the presence of harmful violence andbinding social relationships. You should resist this temptation, bearingin mind the word “mere.” The questioni st h i s :W e r eaf r i e n dt oc a l ly o ufrom a footbridge seeking moral advice, would you say, “Well, that de-pends....Will you be pushing or using a switch?” If questions such asthis, including similar questions concerning mere spatial distance, arenot on your list of relevant moral questions, then you, too, should say“no.”ÞAnd thus we’ve earned an interesting normative conclusion: Peo-ple, at least sometimes, do not make good moral judgments in responseto moral dilemmas, for they are inappropriately sensitive to mere per-sonal force and mere spatial distance. And thus we’ve shown that in-teresting scientiﬁc facts about moral psychology can, when combinedwith relatively uninteresting normative assumptions, lead us to rela-tively interesting normative conclusions. That’s progress, powered byscience.Limited progress, however. We’ve seen how one can get a substan-tively new “ought” by combining an old “ought” with a new “is,” but, still,one might hope for more. The above argument tells us thatsomethingiswrong withsome people’sjudgments, but it doesn’t tell uswhatorwhoiswrong.74ðAre we oversensitive to personal force in response tofootbridge,or undersensitive in response toswitch?ÞThus, we could use a more gen-eral theory that tells us when our judgments are likely to go astray.V. MORAL IMPLICATIONS: THE INDIRECT ROUTEAccording to the dual-process theory, some moral judgments are driven byautomatic emotional responses, analogous to a camera’s automatic set-tings. Other judgments are made in manual mode, based on the con-trolled, conscious application of moral principles. So, what’s better, auto-matic settings or manual mode?74. See also Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell, “On the Normative Signiﬁcanceof Experimental Moral Psychology,”Philosophical Psychology25ð2012Þ: 311–30.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics713
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Some readers seem to think that I think that emotion-based moraljudgments are categorically bad.75I do not hold this view.76Rather, Ibelieve, as suggested by the camera analogy, that automatic settings andmanual mode are respectively better and worse at different things. Au-tomatic settings are efﬁcient, but inﬂexible, while manual mode is ﬂex-ible, but inefﬁcient.So, when is it better to rely on automatic settings? Automatic set-tings can function well only when they have been shaped bytrial-and-errorexperience. This may be the experience of our biological ancestors, asreﬂected in, for example, a genetic predisposition to fear snakes. Ourautomatic settings may be shaped by the experience of our cultural “an-cestors,” as reﬂected in a fear of guns, despite one’s having never beenharmed by one. Finally, our automatic settings are shaped by our own trialand error, as when one learns to fear hot stoves by touching them. Thesethree mechanisms—genetic transmission, cultural transmission, and learn-ing from personal experience—are the only mechanisms known to endowhuman automatic cognitive processes with the information they need tofunction well. For one of our automatic settings to function well, its de-sign must be informed bysomeone’strial-and-error experience. Any otherway, and it’s acognitive miracle.ðNote that being informed by trial-and-error experience is a neces-sary, but not sufﬁcient, condition for good function. In addition to this,the selection mechanism that classiﬁes trials as successful or unsuccess-ful must employ an evaluative standard that is consistent with the stan-dard we employ in calling a disposition “good” or “bad.” For example,some behaviors, such as aggression toward vulnerable out-groups, maybe good from a biological/genetic point of view, but not from ours.ÞLet us deﬁneunfamiliar* problems as ones with which we have in-adequate evolutionary, cultural, or personal experience.ðHere, too, anasterisk indicates the speciﬁed technical meaning.ÞDriving a car is, atﬁrst, unfamiliar*. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t drive, and cul-tural familiarity with driving is inadequate to produce skilled driving.And, of course, personal experience with driving is exactly what newdrivers lack. Thus, learning to drive requires manual mode—effortfulprocessing involving the conscious application of rules. If one coulddrive like an experienced driver from the outset, that would be a cogni-tive miracle.75. See Kamm, “Neuroscience and Moral Reasoning”; and James Woodward and JohnAllman, “Moral Intuition: Its Neural Substrates and Normative Signiﬁcance,”Journal ofPhysiology—Paris101ð2007Þ: 179–202. Woodward and Allman, by pressing me on thispoint, have helped me articulate my view more clearly.76. See Greene, “Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul,” 66–72.714Ethics July 2014
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Likewise,it would be a cognitive miracle if we had reliably good moralinstincts about unfamiliar* moral problems. This suggests the followingmore general principle:The No Cognitive Miracles Principle: When we are dealing with unfa-miliar* moral problems, we ought to rely less on automatic settingsðautomatic emotional responsesÞand more on manual modeðcon-scious, controlled reasoningÞ, lest we bank on cognitive miracles.This principle is powerful because it, when combined with empiricalknowledge of moral psychology, offers moral guidance while presuppos-ing nothing about what is morally good or bad. A corollary of the NCMPis that we should expect certain pathological individuals—VMPFC pa-tients? Psychopaths? Alexithymics?—to make better decisions than healthypeople in some cases.ðThis is why such individuals are no embarrassmentto the view I will defend in the next section.Þ77Wielding the NCMP requires us to knowðor make educated guessesaboutÞtwo things:ð1Þwhich of our candidate judgments are preferen-tially supported by automatic settings vs. manual mode, andð2Þwhich ofthe moral problems we face are unfamiliar*. We’ll consider each of theseepistemic demands in turn.Knowledge of which judgments are preferentially supported by au-tomatic settings vs. manual mode is precisely the kind of knowledge sup-plied by the research outlined in Section II in support of the dual-processtheory. And thus, with the No Cognitive Miracles Principle before us, weare ﬁnally positioned to appreciate theðindirectÞnormative signiﬁcanceof this research: If we believe that we ought to rely on automatic settingsvs. manual mode to different extents in different situations, and if cogni-tive science can tell us when we are relying on automatic settings vs. man-ual mode, then cognitive science gives us normatively signiﬁcant infor-mation—information that can nudge us, if not propel us, toward new andinteresting normative conclusions.It’s worth pausing here to correct a common misunderstanding.Some are under the mistaken impression thatneuroscienceplays a special,77. See Daniel M. Bartels and David A. Pizarro, “The Mismeasure of Morals: AntisocialPersonality Traits Predict Utilitarian Responses to Moral Dilemmas,”Cognition121ð2011Þ:154–61. These authors argue against utilitarianism as a normative theory on the groundsthat antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to standard dilemmas. How-ever, it is unlikely that such individuals are especially concerned with maximizing happi-ness. Rather, it is more likely that they are especially unconcerned with causing harm toinnocent people. In other words, they are really “undeontological” rather than utilitarian.More recent research using “process dissociation” supports this interpretation by dissoci-ating these two components. See Conway and Gawronski, “Deontological and UtilitarianInclinations.”Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics715
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essential role in my normative arguments.78It doesn’t. Neuroscience issimply one source of evidence concerning which judgments are pref-erentially supported by automatic settings vs. manual mode. I’ve notclaimed that one can derive moral “oughts” from scientiﬁc facts aloneðsee aboveÞ; nor have I claimed that neuroscientiﬁc facts possess somespecial normative power. This view is a straw man.Once again, to apply the No Cognitive Miracles Principle we mustdetermine which of the problems we face are unfamiliar*. We can makeeducated guesses about unfamiliarity* in two ways. First, moral problemsthat arise form recent cultural developments, most notably the rise ofmodern technology and the intersection of disparate cultures, are es-pecially likely to be unfamiliar*.ðThink climate change, global terror-ism, global poverty, bioethics, etc.Þ79As it happens, I strongly suspect thatthefootbridgedilemma is unfamiliar*, a bizarre case in which an act ofpersonal violence against an innocent person is the one and only way topromote a much greater good.80Second, and perhaps more practically, we can usedisagreementas aproxy for lack of familiarity*. If two parties have a practical moral dis-agreement—a disagreement aboutwhatto do, not aboutwhyto do it—it’s probably because they have conﬂicting intuitions.81This means that,from a moral perspective, if not from a biological perspective, at leastone party’s automatic settings are going astray.ðAssuming that both par-ties have adequate access to the relevant nonmoral facts.Þ82Absent a re-liable method for determining whose automatic settings are misﬁring,both parties should distrust their intuitions. Thus, I propose that we dis-trust our automatic settings, and rely more heavily on manual mode,whenever we have practical moral disagreements that do not appear tobe based on disagreements over nonmoral facts.ðAnd, for that matter,I make the same recommendation for when we think that our disagree-mentsareover nonmoral facts.ÞI’ve said that we should not rely on our automatic settings whenwe’re dealing with unfamiliar* problems. Two clariﬁcations concerning78. See Berker, “Normative Insigniﬁcance of Neuroscience.”79. Such problems undoubtedly share features with familiar* problems, but this neednot prevent us from identifying some problems as essentially unfamiliar*.80. I suspect that theswitchcase is an unfamiliarity* double negative, with unfamiliar*impersonal violence unfamiliarly* promoting the greater good.81. Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social IntuitionistApproach to Moral Judgment,”Psychological Review108ð2001Þ: 814–34. Haidt argues thatmoral controversies are primarily driven by conﬂicting moral intutions.82. John M. Doris and Alexandra Plakias, “How to Argue about Disagreement: Eval-uative Diversity and Moral Realism,” inMoral Psychology, vol. 2,The Cognitive Science of Mo-rality, ed. Walter Sinnott-ArmstrongðCambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007Þ, 303–31. Theseauthors argue many moral disagreements are not simply disagreements over nonmoralfacts.716Ethics July 2014
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the meaning of “rely”: First, not relying on automatic settings doesn’tmean assuming that the answers given by one’s automatic settings arealways wrong. This misguided policy is like that of a dieter who never eatsbecause he’s always hungry. Second, not relying on automatic settingsdoesn’t mean discounting one’s judgments when and only when one’sautomatic settings are actively engaged. Automatic settings can fail bybeing overactiveðe.g., fearing a life-saving injectionÞor underactiveðe.g.,not fearing the subway’s third railÞ. Relying on our automatic settingsmeans allowing our judgments to follow theirups and downs.On the one hand, the normative signiﬁcance of dual-process moralpsychology, by way of the NCMP, ﬂies in the face of is/ought orthodoxy.On the other hand, our conclusion here shouldn’t be too hard for mostethicists to embrace. The idea that we should apply manual mode think-ing to complex, controversial moral problems sounds more like a wantad for ethicists than a sheriff’s “Wanted” sign. Things get a bit stickier,however, when we combine the NCMP with what we’re learning aboutthe cognitive underpinnings of competing moral philosophies.VI. TILTING TOWARD CONSEQUENTIALISMWe should distrust our automatic settings and rely more on manualmode when attempting to resolve practical moral disagreements. So far,so palatable. But where does this lead? I believe it favors consequentialistapproaches to moral problem solving, ones aimed solely at promotinggood consequences, rather than deontological approaches aimed at ﬁg-uring out who has which rights and duties, where these are regarded asconstraints on the promotion of good consequences. More speciﬁcally, Ibelieve that reliance on manual mode favors act consequentialism at thelevel of ﬁrst principles and something resembling rule consequentialismin everyday practice.83As private individuals, we should nearly always re-spect the conventional moral rules, but in establishing those rulesðas vot-ers and policy makersÞwe should aim simply for the best long-term con-sequences.ðFor present purposes I will leave aside questions concerningthe metaethical status of these claims.ÞWhy consequentialism? Recall from Section II:The Central Tension Principle:C h a r a c t e r i s t i c a l l yd e o n t o l o g i c a lj u d g -ments are preferentially supported by automatic emotional responses,while characteristically consequentialist judgments are preferentiallysupported by conscious reasoning and allied processes of cognitivecontrol.83. See Richard Hare,Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and PointðOxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1981Þ.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics717
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Thus, shifting into manual mode means shifting toward consequential-ism. Satisﬁed? Maybe not.Why, you might ask, must manual mode thinking be consequential-ist? Do not others—Kant, for example—engage inmoral reasoning?I tm a yseem that I’ve made a giant, unwarranted leap from empirical facts aboutthe psychology behind ordinary people’s “characteristically” deontologicaljudgments to claims about the psychology behind sophisticated philo-sophical theories.There’s no denying that Kant et al. do plenty of work in manualmode. The critical question is: What are they doing in manual mode?I hypothesize that they are not,for the most part, actually engaged inmoral reasoning.84By this I mean that they are not using reasoning toﬁgure outwhat’s right or wrong. Instead, their reasoning serves primarilyto justify and organize their preexisting intuitive conclusions aboutwhat’s right or wrong. In other words, what looks like moral rationalismis actually moralrationalization.85I’ve called this the Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul, which is colorfullyillustrated by Kant’s views on masturbation.86Kant, being an uptighteighteenth-century Prussian, is uncomfortable with masturbation, buthe’s not content simply to voice his distaste. He wants toprove from ﬁrstprinciplesthat masturbation is immoral, and he’s got a pretty clever ideaabout how to do it: masturbation is wrong because it involvesusing oneselfas a means. We today ﬁnd this bit or rationalization amusing because weno longer share Kant’s sexual repression, but if I’m right, this passage isin fact representative of his general approach to ethics. Nietzsche agrees.Kant’s Joke: Kant wanted to prove in a way that would dumbfoundthe common man that the common man was right: that was thesecret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of thepopular prejudice, but for scholars and not for popularity.87If Nietzsche is right, this Kantian style of rationalizing goes well beyondthe ethics of masturbation. A standard method—if notthestandardmethod—for identifying the principles that deﬁne our rights and dutiesis rather like Kant’s method in the above passage. One discerns, intui-tively, the presence of rights and duties in particular cases, and then onesearches for principles that might explain why those rights and duties areindeed present. I call this processintuition chasing, conforming generalprinciples to speciﬁc judgments thatðmostlyÞfollow the ups and downs84. See below on biting “rubber bullets,” which involves genuine reasoning. Kant, how-ever, bites at least one metal bulletðsee Sec. IIÞ.85. Cf. Haidt, “Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.”86. Greene, “Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul.”87. Friedrich Nietzsche,The Gay Scienceð1882; New York: Random House, 1974Þ,2 0 5–6.718Ethics July 2014
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of intuition. The opposite of intuition chasing isbullet biting, conformingjudgments to principles, despite the ups and downs of intuition.A nice empirical illustration of intuition chasing and its pitfallscomes from an experiment by Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman.88They presented both ordinary people and philosophers with cases likefootbridgeðharm as means, with personal forceÞand cases likeswitchðharmas side effect, without personal forceÞ. We’ll call thesefootbridgesqueandswitchycases, respectively. Because these sets of cases straddle the means/side effect distinction, one may appeal to the doctrine of double effectðDDEÞto justify treating them differently.This experiment leverages people’s tendency to shift around theirjudgments depending on theorderin which cases are presented. Thisorder effect is explicitly predicted by the dual-process theory as follows:Suppose you getfootbridgeﬁrst. Your automatic emotional response is“No!,” and you go with it. Next comesswitch. Here the emotional re-sponse is minimal, leaving the decision to manual mode. Your manualmode thinking is naturally drawn toward the characteristically conse-quentialist response, but here it has a further problem. You just said thatit’s wrong to trade one life for ﬁve in thefootbridgecase, and you’re notconﬁdent that there is a morally relevant difference between theswitchandfootbridgecases. In an effort to be consistent, you judge that it’s alsowrong to hit the switch. That is, you give the same response to both cases,which is not the pattern of judgment encouragedðthough not requiredÞby the DDE.What happens whenswitchcomes ﬁrst? Here, once again, the emo-tional response is minimal, allowing manual mode to hold sway. Manualmode is drawn to the characteristically consequentialist response, andin this case there is no consistency-based reason to say otherwise. Thus,you endorse hitting the switch. Next comesfootbridge. The automatic set-ting kicks in, and the action feels terribly, horribly wrong. Manual moderecognizes the consequentialist rationale for pushing, along with theconsistency-based rationale for endorsing pushing, but your automaticemotional response tells you that you simply cannot endorse such a hor-riﬁc act. Thus, you say “no” to pushing. This response pattern—“yes” toswitch,“ n o ”t ofootbridge—isthe one encouraged by the DDE.To summarize, if you getswitchﬁrst, your pattern of judgment ismore likely to conform to the DDE. This happens because it’s a lot easierto say “no” to something that feels okay than to say “yes” to somethingthat feels horribly wrong. In other words, saying “no” toswitchinvolvesbiting a bullet, but it’s arubberbullet—easy to bite because it’s actually88. Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery A. Cushman, “Expertise in Moral Reasoning?: OrderEffects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Nonphilosophers,”Mind andLanguage27ð2012Þ: 135–53.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics719
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a manual mode consequentialist* judgment that is jettisoned. To say“yes” to footbridge is to bite ametalbullet—much harder. The desire forconsistency is sufﬁcient to motivate biting a rubber bullet, but not a metalbullet—hence the order effect.Results: Both ordinary people and professional ethicists exhibitedthe predicted order effect, and, remarkably, to the same extent. Later,Schwitzgebel and Cushman asked their participants whether they en-dorseðthe critical bit ofÞthe DDE. For the nonphilosophers, the order-ing of the dilemmas had no effect on their endorsement of the DDE.However, the ethicists were about 50% more likely to endorse the DDEif they got theswitchycases ﬁrst.Let us return to the motivating problem at hand, comparing laymoral psychology to professional moral psychology: Deontological phi-losophers, for understandable reasons, don’t want to be lumped in withlay moralists, who are undoubtedly much less thoughtful. Schwitzgebeland Cushman’s results help explain what’s right about this complaint,while also speaking to its limitations. Their experiment shows that phi-losophersaredifferent from lay moralists and that they do indeed thinkharder. Both groups’ judgments were affected by their intuitions, andboth groups made a manual mode effort to be consistent. However, onlyprofessional philosophers felt compelled to adjust their theoretical com-mitments to make them consistent with the judgments they’d made. Inother words, the folk are happy to let “popular prejudice” be “popularprejudice,” but philosophers are motivated to translate that popular prej-udice into principle. This is indeed a manual mode activity, but it’s notone that is likely to free philosophers from the ups and downs of theirautomatic settings. On the contrary, it codiﬁes those ups and downs.I suspect that many readers will be tempted to draw a different les-son from this experiment, which is simply that some philosophers oughtto have their licenses revoked. Suppose that’s correct. Whereexactlydidour errant colleagues go wrong? The most popular answer, I think, willbe this: The philosophers who said “no” to theswitchycases followingtheir “no” to thefootbridgesquecases messed up. Instead of being “consis-tent” by saying “no” to both, they should have recognized that these casesdiffer in ways thatjustifytreating them differently. In other words, theywere too quick to bite a bullet, albeit a rubber one.89Let’s see where this leads. What critical difference did the errantethicists miss? By design, theswitchyandfootbridgesquecases differ in twoways, in the presence of personal force and in the causation of harm as ameans versus a side effect. We’ve agreed that personal force is morallyirrelevant, which leaves the means/side effect factor, or perhaps a more89. But see Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Turning the Trolley,”Philosophy and Public Affairs36ð2008Þ: 359–74.720Ethics July 2014
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subtle variant thereof. The accusation, then, is that the errant philoso-phers failed to remember the DDE.ðRevoke their licenses!ÞBut whyshouldthey have invoked the DDE? Wherein lies its justiﬁcatory power?It’s been on the books for a long time, which gives it a dusty air ofauthority. But how did it get on the books? It seems that the DDE wascodiﬁed because it was observed that certain intuitive patterns in moraljudgment could besummarizedby a set of principles now known as theDDE. We may infer thisðinductively, not deductivelyÞfrom the ﬁndingthat lay moralists the world over make judgments consistent with theDDE while having no clue that they are doing so.90This suggests, inother words, that the Doctrine doesn’t justify the judgments. Instead,thejudgments justify the Doctrine.91This evidence suggests that the justiﬁca-tion for the DDE ultimately comes from nothing beyond the automaticsettings that produce the pattern of judgment that it summarizes.92ðAndif I’m right, the DDE is actually just a by-product of a morally irrelevantcognitive limitation.Þ93Indeed, the DDE’s lack of independent authorityis evident in the willingness of philosophers to abandon it when it failsto get the intuitively right answers. The DDE famously choked on theloopcase, for example, prompting a hunt for a better principle.94But whatis “better?” “Better” just means “better able to summarize our intuitivejudgments.” Thus, to chide our colleagues for failing to invoke the DDEðor one of its more sophisticated successorsÞis simply to chide them fornot abiding by the dictates of their—our—mysterious automatic settings.I’ve said that characteristically deontological judgments are used tojustify deontological principles, rather than the other way around, butthat’s a bit too strong. What intuition chasing aims for isreﬂective equi-librium, harmony between intuition and principle.95This means that90. Hauser et al., “Dissociation between Moral Judgments and Justiﬁcations.” Thealternative explanation—far less likely in my opinion—is that ordinary people, includingyoung children make judgments consistent with the DDE due to unacknowledged philo-sophical inﬂuences; Sandra Pellizzoni, Michael Siegal, and Luca Surian, “The ContactPrinciple and Utilitarian Moral Judgments in Young Children,”Developmental Science13ð2010Þ: 265–70.91. Fiery A. Cushman and Joshua D. Greene, “The Philosopher in the Theater,” inTheSocial Psychology of Morality, ed. Mario Mikulincer and Philip R. ShaverðWashington, DC:APA Press, 2011Þ, 33–50. See also Fiery A. Cushman, Dylan Murray, Shauna Gordon-McKeon, Sophie Wharton, and Joshua D. Greene, “Judgment before Principle: Engage-ment of the Frontoparietal Control Network in Condemning Harms of Omission,”Social,Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience7ð2012Þ: 888–95.92. One might note that it’s been in use for a long timeðsee John Mikhail, “AnyAnimal Whatever? Harmful Battery and Its Elements as Building Blocks of Moral Cogni-tion,”Ethics124½2014/C138, in this issue, 750–86Þ—true, but so have a lot of other moral andlegal practices that few readers would defend.93. Greene,Moral Tribes, 211–40.94. Thomson, “Trolley Problem.”95. John Rawls,A Theory of JusticeðCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971Þ.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics721
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some intuitive judgments will be jettisoned to achieve a better ﬁt withprinciple. In other words, even intuition chasers do some bullet biting.While this is undoubtedly true, I doubt it’s enough to save intuition chas-ing from the unreliability of intuition. Suppose that a scientist unwittinglycrafts a theory based on unreliable data. In so doing, he ignores some out-liers, data points that don’t ﬁt with his theory. He’s then informed thatthe data are unreliable. “Indeed!” he says, “Just as I suspected!” The re-ﬂective equilibrator’s analogous hope is that the judgments he’s jetti-soned through the equilibration process, the outliers, are the bad ones. Ithink that’s too optimistic. We may think that we’re biting the right bullets,when in fact we’re just biting thesoftbullets, the ones that are least emo-tionally offensive.Let us consider this pitfall in its proper trolleyological context.What should a deontologically minded trolleyologist make of the per-sonal force effect and the doubts it raises about our intuitions? I’ll takethis as an opportunity to respond to some remarks by Frances Kamm.96Here is Kamm’s response to the ﬁrst iteration of the “personalness”hypothesis from my 2001 research article:However, objections have been raised to this type of “personal ver-sus impersonal factors” explanations of intuitions...the Lazy SusanCase is a counterexample to this explanation. In this case, ﬁve peo-ple are on one side of a lazy Susan turntable and the only way tosave them from a trolley headed at them is to manually push thelazy Susan. However, if we do this, we will ram the lazy Susan into abystander. In this case, a new threatðthe lazy SusanÞand somethingup close and personal is done to the bystanderðpushing a lazy Susaninto himÞ....Intuitively, even a nonconsequentialist might agree itis permissible to act in such cases. Cases like the Lazy Susan Case ledme to say that “nonconsequentialists are not squeamish, they aredownstreamish,” in the sense that they are willing to “up close” per-sonally harm someone whenðvery roughlyÞthe person’s being killedis causally downstream from the good of the ﬁve being saved.Kamm’s response highlights the importance of doing the empirical work,as it’s all but impossible to know our minds from the armchair. As ithappens, Kamm’s intuition about the Lazy Susan case and others like itis widely shared.97But it’s also the case that people—Kamm included,perhaps—areboth“squeamish” and “downstreamish.” As noted in Sec-tion III such factorsinteract. In the Lazy Susan case and others like it, the96. Kamm, “Neuroscience and Moral Reasoning.”97. Eighty percent approvalðunpublished dataÞ. See also theobstacle collidecase inGreene et al., “Pushing Moral Buttons.”722Ethics July 2014
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effect of “squeamishness” disappears because the person is killed as adownstream side effect. But when the harmful event is upstream, as inthe footbridge variations, the effect of personal forceða kind of “squea-mishness”Þemerges. Once again, most people say “yes” tofootbridge switch,but “no” tofootbridge poleandfootbridge. Kamm anticipates this contrast:What if it were possible to press a switch that opens a trapdoorunder the man on the bridge...? Regardless of what fMRIs of thegeneral population indicate, moral philosophers who object topushing the man over the bridge would respond in the same way tothis “impersonal” way of getting the man off the bridge.Indeed, no self-respecting philosopher would explicitly give differentanswers to these two cases. But are we then licensed to ignore the ex-perimental research, conﬁdent that our philosophical reﬂections willjettison any bad intuitions and corresponding judgments? Not so fast.We dare not give different answers to these two cases, but which singleanswer should we give? Kamm’s answer is clear: We should say that it’swrong to act in both cases. But why? The psychological explanation isnow familiar: We say “no” to both cases because saying “yes” tofootbridgeðmetal bulletÞfeels worse than saying “no” toremote footbridgeðrubberbulletÞ. Thus, what appears to be a case of experts making better judg-ments than the folkðavoiding the pitfalls of untutored intuition throughcareful reﬂectionÞmay in fact be a case of experts outfolking the folkðmaking the not-so-hard choices necessary to protect our strongest un-tutored intuitions from inconsistencyÞ. To put the point another way,unless you’re prepared to say “yes” to thefootbridgecase, your automaticsettings are still running the show, and any manual adjustments thatyou’re willing to make are at their behest.But, so what if our emotions are leading us around? Perhaps they’releading us to the right placesðwith a few bumps along the wayÞ. Kamm’shope is that some other distinction, a more sophisticated variation onthe DDE perhaps, will save the day. But this just puts us back where wewere in condemning the “errant” philosophers in Schwitgebel and Cush-man’s experiment. The DDE and its more subtle successors have no in-dependent justiﬁcation. The most that can be said for them is that theyappeal to factors that are not obviously morally irrelevantðunlike per-sonal forceÞ. As noted above, I suspect that the means/side effect dis-tinction will seem irrelevant once we understand why we’re sensitive toit. We can wait and see if I’m right, but we can’t be indifferent to theoutcome of this research, or assume its conclusion.The upshot of the foregoing discussion is this: Ethicists need toworry about their intuitions, and not just the ones that they’re willing toGreene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics723
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dump in order to save the ones they really want to keep. We can’t assumethat our manual mode thinking will scrub away the blemishes of moralintuition if we’re relying on our moral intuitions to tell us where to scrub.The next step is to agree, but to insist that this is a problem for ev-eryone, consequentialists and deontologists alike. In the end, don’t we alljust have our intuitions? No. Not in the same way. Act consequentialismis not intuition chasing. An act consequentialist’s judgment may beconsis-tentwith the dictates of automatic settings, and in that sense there are“consequentialist intuitions,” but an actc o n s e q u e n t i a l i s t ’ sj u d g m e n tn e v e rdependson them. An act consequentialist can know what she thinks aboutac a s ew i t h o u tk n o w i n ga n y t h i n go t h e rt h a nt h ea n s w e rt ot h i sq u e s t i o n :Which choice produces better consequences? Act consequentialism isWYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get. It doesn’t rely on mysteriousautomatic settings, and thus its soul has no secrets.But doesn’t act consequentialism ultimately depend on some kind ofintuition? After all, where do act consequentialists get their ideas aboutwhich consequences are worth promoting or preventing? Here Sidgwickis helpful in distinguishing among what he calls “perceptual,” “dogmatic,”and “philosophical” intuitions.98If Sidgwick is correct, consequentialismðand utilitarianism, more speciﬁcallyÞdoes ultimately depend on “intui-tion,” that is, on an affectively based evaluative premise. But intuition en-ters consequentialist theory at a very high levelð“philosophical” intui-tionÞ, and not as a reaction to particular actionsð“perceptual” intuitionÞor action typesð“dogmatic” intuitionÞ. This is consistent with the psy-chological evidence, for example, the fact that VMPFC patients, whocannot react emotionally to particular actions, tend to make characteris-tically consequentialist judgments. That act consequentialism is basedon a “philosophical” intuition, rather than on “perceptual” or “dogmatic”ones, doesn’t imply that it’s correct, but it does shield it from the objec-tion that it’s is too tightly yoked to the ups and downs of unreliable au-tomatic settings.Let’s suppose, then, that we’ve forsaken all intuition chasing. Whyfavor act consequentialism? Aren’t there better alternatives? First, let’snote that act consequentialism is a pretty good place to start. The ideathat we should try to make things overall better makes moral sense toeveryone. The objection to act consequentialism is not that it’s based ona generally bad idea, but that it’s too imperialistic, that it fails to leaveroom for other legitimate values, both moral and self-interested. Likeother act consequentialists, I believe that act consequentialism, properly98. See David O. Brink, “Principles and Intuitions in Ethics: Historical and Contem-porary Perspectives,”Ethics124ð2014Þ, 665–94, in this issue; and Henry Sidgwick,TheMethods of Ethics, 7th ed.ðLondon: Macmillan, 1907Þ,9 7–102.724Ethics July 2014
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understood, does surprisingly well in the real world, and that its failures“in principle,” are really failures to comport with intuitions that are notworth chasing. But I will not offer a positive defense of act consequential-ism here.99For now, my point is simply that act consequentialism shouldget points for not chasing intuitions and that some of its competitorsðincluding some forms of consequentialismÞshould lose points for doingso. Note that the present argument also casts doubt on theories that,rather than chasing intuitions with codifying principles, simply allow ourintuitions roam free. Likewise, it casts doubt on theories that purport toderive from ﬁrst principles, but that are in fact intuition chasing—that is,theories that are actually attempts to get from ﬁrst principlesto the in-tuitively right answersrather than attempts to get from ﬁrst principles towherever those principles happen to lead.ðAnd, if you’re like me, yoususpect that this covers most, if not all, of act consequentialism’s com-petition.ÞVII. CONCLUSIONA great philosopher who despised the likes of me once wrote, “It is notproﬁtable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laidaside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, inwhich we are conspicuously lacking.”100I think Professor Anscombe wenttoo far. I don’t regret the last half-century of ethics. Nor do I share hervision for our enterprise. But she did have a point. There’s a lot going onbeneath the hood of morality, and we ignore the details at our peril.Our brains, like all complex functional systems, face a tradeoff be-tween efﬁciency and ﬂexibility. To promote efﬁciency, our brains havepoint-and-shoot automatic settings in the form of intuitive emotionalresponses. These are marvelous, but nonetheless limited in what theycan do. In particular, we should not expect them to perform well in theface of peculiarly modern problems, ones with which we have inade-quate genetic, cultural, and individual experience. Many of the mostimportant moral problems we face may be of this kind. For example, it’sonly very recently that ordinary people have routinely had the oppor-tunity to save the lives of distant strangers by making modest materialsacriﬁces. Our automatic settings tell us that our exercise of this privilegeis generally morally optional. Should we trust them?101Philosophy happens in manual mode, and this gives us a choiceabout what to do with our reasoning capabilities. We can use them, as99. See Greene,Moral Tribes.100. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,”Philosophy33ð1958Þ:1–19.101. Peter Singer,The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World PovertyðNew York:Random House, 2009Þ, and “Ethics and Intuitions,”Journal of Ethics9ð2005Þ: 331–52.Greene Why CognitiveðNeuroÞScience Matters for Ethics725
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William James said, to “rearrange our prejudices.” Alternatively, we canuse our capacity for moral and scientiﬁc reasoning to transcend ourprejudices. Today’s ethicists undoubtedly do both, but we could do moreof the latter and less of the former.In the last half-century, ethics has gone in two different directions.Some ethicists have gotten very sophisticated about moral theory, de-vising principles that aspire to comport with both consequentialist think-ing and incompatible moral intuitions. Others have given up on action-guiding moral theory altogether, and with it the hope of offering theworld speciﬁc answers to speciﬁc moral questions. I don’t think we shouldabandon this ambition. But if I’m right, the way forward is not throughthe construction of increasingly sophisticated moral theories. Instead, wemust get sophisticated about moraldata. We need to understand thestructure, origins, and limitations of our intuitive moral thinking, thebetter to know when our moral instincts are on target, and when they aregiving us the right answers to the wrong questions.102Is this a new approach to ethics, or just a natural extension of cur-rent practice? It’s a bit of both. On the one hand, this approach may beseen as nothing more than a further widening of our reﬂective equilib-rium. Along with our “considered judgments” and organizing principles,we must add to the mix a scientiﬁc understanding of the psychologicaland biological processes that have produced them.ðCall thisdouble-widereﬂective equilibrium.Þ103I regard this as a natural extension of currentpractice, and one consistent with philosophy’s historical commitment toactive empiricism.Nevertheless, from a professional perspective, what I am proposingmay sound rather radical. Today, ethicists are not expected to know any-thing in particular about how the mind actually works, and are trainedto dismiss anyone who laments this practice as confused about the rela-tionship between “is” and “ought.” I suggest that, in the future, we ethicistswill require a detailed knowledge of moral psychology, and the more ac-tively we participate in the generation of such knowledge, the better offwe’ll be. To do moral philosophy well we must understand the strengthsand limitations of the tools we bring to our job. Why would anyone thinkotherwise?102. See also Stephen Stich, “Is Morality an Elegant Machine or a Kludge?,”Journal ofCognition and Culture6ð2006Þ: 181–89.103. The problem with reﬂective equilibrating is its susceptibility to the inﬂuence ofinﬂexible automatic settings. If these ill effects can be neutralized with scientiﬁc self-knowledge, then reﬂective equilibrating is ﬁne.726Ethics July 2014
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