What Kind of Ethics? – How Understanding the Field Affects the Role of Empirical Research on Morality for Ethics

Abstract

Today, many ethicists are wont to display a certain reticence and skepticism toward new empirical psychological and neurobiological research into moral behavior. The reasons for this are manifold. The first is almost certainly to be found in the widespread view that ethics is concerned with normative questions, as well as the examination of moral language and the logical structure of moral arguments. Empirical research on morality seems incapable of making any contribution here. A second reason has to do with the excessive aspirations and expectations linked by some authors to this type of research, which come close to a “naturalization” of morality and ethics. Third, such research frequently raises the question of whether what is being experimentally examined as “morality” is not in fact based on models that are far too simple, ones that might relate to a pretheoretical everyday comprehension of morality, but that do not grasp the phenomenon in the differentiating approach adopted by ethicists. The most important reason, however, is the fact that findings from state-of-the-art empirical research on morality run counter to a perception of ethics characterizing large parts of modern ethical thinking. According to this perception, the task of ethics is to justify moral judgments rationally (i.e., argumentatively), deeming that moral judgments can be rationally justified. An obvious tension exists between this view and empirical moral research findings stating that moral evaluations are based on the emotional evaluation of actions or situations. If, namely, moral evaluations develop in this way, then they cannot be demonstrated to a third party argumentatively. Rather, the morally right or wrong can only show itself to a third party when that party takes a close look at the action or situation in question and evaluates it emotionally. Current empirical moral research therefore raises the challenge of subjecting a widely accepted view of ethics to a critical reappraisal. This is what the following will attempt. I shall proceed by, first, examining the arguments used to validate the comprehension of ethics as a rational justification of morality, in order to expose their untenability against a background of the current empirical findings on morality. I shall then ask what types of reasons are encountered within morality and how they differ from arguments. Finally, I shall advocate the theory that rather than providing a rational justification of moral judgments, ethics has the far more modest task of guiding us toward correct moral thinking that does justice to moral phenomena.