Stephen Stich: Rutgers Dept. of Philosophy

The talk has three parts:

In Part I, I will sketch a hotly debated question in moral philosophy. Roughly stated, the issue in dispute is whether moral disagreement is fundamental or superficial; disagreement is fundamental if it would persist even under “idealized” circumstances in which the parties to the dispute are fully rational, impartial, and agreed on all non-moral issues. I’ll then explain why moral many moral philosophers think the answer is of enormous importance.

In Part II, I’ll review two empirical studies that suggest moral disagreement is indeed fundamental. One study, rarely cited by social scientists, is Richard Brandt’s philosophically motivated moral ethnography of the Hopi. The other is drawn from the work of Richard Nisbett and his colleagues on cultures of honor. These studies are hardly conclusive, however, and even if issues of interpretation are put to one side, those who do not believe that moral disagreement is fundamental might argue that the examples of moral disagreement on which they focus are outliers, and that in general moral views will converge under idealized circumstances. To address these concerns, we need an empirically supported theory of the psychological mechanisms underlying the acquisition & utilization of moral norms and of how those mechanisms might have evolved.

In Part III, I will provide an overview of a collaborative project aimed at developing an empirical theory of the psychology & evolution of moral norms. I will focus on two crucial issues that the theory must address:
• What sort of psychological mechanisms subserve the acquisition and implementation of norms?
• What constraints (if any) are there on the sorts of norms that can be acquired?
Though the existing empirical literature provides some very important clues, there are many crucial questions for which, as far as we have been able to discover, there is little or no relevant data available. My goal, in this part of the talk, is to provide a framework which makes clear what we need to know about the psychological mechanisms subserving moral norms. My hope is that some people in the audience will know of relevant findings that have escaped our notice, or (better still) that they can be tempted to design new studies that will help answer or reconfigure some of the most important and most venerable questions in moral theory.