On the reliability of our moral intuitions
A few decades ago, Peter Singer argued that our moral intuitions often contradict each other, rendering them an unreliable guide for the evaluating of ethical theories [2]. After all, if our moral intuitions are contradictory, then the claim that such-and-such about Utilitarianism is “counterintuitive” certainly loses much, if not all, of its force. Recently, Singer’s argument has been picked up by Peter Unger in his Living High and Letting Die. According to Nahmias and Ernst,
They [Singer and Unger] charge that when we introspect on our moral intuitions, we find a conflicted mess - cases differing only in what seem to be morally irrelevant ways elicit dramatically different moral intuitions. Ethical principles that cohere with our intuitions about some cases inevitably conflict with our intuitions about relevantly similar cases [1].
So consider two of Singer’s cases.
The Shallow Pond scenario. You see a small child drowning in a shallow pond. You could wade out and save the child’s life, but doing so would ruin your $200 suit. Since you don’t want to ruin your suit, you walk on, and the child dies.
The Envelope scenario. You get a letter from UNICEF in the mail, telling you that a donation of $200 will save a dozen innocent third-world children. Without even considering donating, you throw the envelope away.
Most people have the intuition that walking away from the drowning child would be wrong of you to do; but throwing the envelope away, people often feel, is not nearly as wrong, if at all.
Not only am I having a difficult time understanding just what the salient difficulty really is for those considering making an appeal to our intuitions (or, perhaps more controversially, ethical intuitionists), but I also wonder whether or not the problem, whatever it turns out to be, must be an empirical matter, as Nahmias and Ernst suggest. Consider Singer’s point about the circumstantial similarities shared by the Shallow Pond and Envelope scenarios. He suggests that the action-guiding principle one might derive from our intuitive response to the former is
Principle 1: If one can save the life of an innocent person at relatively little cost to oneself, then it is wrong to let the person die.
The rub, Singer supposes, lies in the fact that Principle 1 would be violated by our throwing the UNICEF letter away. And this, both Singer and Unger suggest, is evidence not only that our ethical intuitions are “incoherent,” but also that appeals to such confused intuitions, something often done in ethical theorizing, turn out to be unhelpful in the evaluation of different ethical theories.
This conclusion seems a bit hasty to me. Why suppose that the conflict in this circumstance lies in the intuitions rather than the principles we are supposed to derive from those intuitions? For instance, suppose, based upon my intuitive response to the Shallow Pond scenario, I form the following ethical principle instead of Principle 1:
Principle 1*: If the saving of S’s life depends upon my doing X, then I ought to do X.
I would guess that sensible people would be just as willing to agree that Principle 1* is an appropriate reflection of our intuitive sense of the wrongness of walking away from the drowning girl as is Principle 1. Clearly, in the Shallow Pond example, the saving of the girl’s life depends upon me wading into the pond and rescuing her. However, whether or not the saving of an unidentified dozen of innocent third-world children depends upon me sending UNICEF a check for $200 is not nearly as clear. While throwing away the UNICEF envelope would seem to violate Principle 1, indicating conflicting intuitions, it is not clear that it violates Principle 1* at all, for the dependence condition so clear in the Shallow Pond example is arguably absent in the Envelope example.
To make this point about what I’m calling “the dependence condition” even clearer, consider a revision of the Envelope scenario.
The Envelope/Hostage scenario. You get another letter from UNICEF in the mail. This time, however, you read that UNICEF is holding your neighbors hostage in their home, and that unless you reply with a $200 donation by a certain deadline, they’ll kill your neighbors.
I would argue that our intuitive response to the Envelope/Hostage scenario would be that throwing away this envelope would be just as wrong as walking away from the drowning child. For it is much clearer in this case that the saving of your neighbors’ lives depends upon your $200 donation.
All this would suggest that the real problem lies not in the allegedly contradictory intuitions, but rather in the derivation of an appropriate action-guiding principle. But this is something for which even intuitionists allow - that is, that in theorizing, we might be mistaken in the formulation of a particular principle based upon our intuitions. After all, doing ethics is hard work.
Furthermore, the Shallow Pond and Envelope scenarios are supposed to be “differ[ent] only in what seem to be morally irrelevant ways.” According to my analysis, however, it seems there is a morally relevant difference between the two - namely, that the lives of others depends upon my doing something.
And finally, since it remains to be seen whether or not this problem has anything to do with apparently inconsistent intuitions, it certainly is not yet clear that resolving the problem is an empirical undertaking, unable to “be settled by philosophers’ armchair speculations,” as Nahmias and Ernst put it. After all, I was able to resolve the conflict between our intuitive responses to Singer’s two examples from the comforts of my armchair.
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[1] Eddy Nahmias and Zachary Ernst, “The (Un)Reliability of Moral Intuitions: Evidence from Neuroeconomics,” (under review).
[2] Peter Singer, “Famine, affluence, and morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (1, 1972) 229-243.
[3] Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).