Recent years have seen more and
more philosophers turning to cognitive science and social psychology as a
source of data to guide and constrain their theories. Nichols is one of the
growing number who have gone a step further, and actually begun to conduct
experiments of their own.  This book is the fruit of his research into the
affective responses of children and adults to moral, conventional and
disgusting transgressions. It presents us with a unified account of the origins
and causes of moral norms, one that is simultaneously philosophically
sophisticated and empirically up to date.

On this account, which Nichols dubs
the Sentimental Rules theory, moral judgments are the product of two factors:
our affective response to certain actions and a normative theory specifying
which actions are wrong. Both are necessary for us to judge an action
paradigmatically morally wrong. Our normative theories prohibit some actions
that do not provoke a strong emotional response: for instance, tax evasion.
When moral transgressions lack what Nichols calls Affective Resonance, they are
not felt to be especially wrong. On the other hand, it is at least possible for
actions to provoke strong emotional responses (or so at least Nichols seems to
think) without being prohibited by a normative theory.

The Sentimental Rules account of
moral judgment yields a variety of Humeanism which is able to respond to some
of the standard argument against emotivist theories of ethics. One of the most
common, and most powerful, objections against emotivism is that it is unable to
capture the semantics of moral argument. We seem to engage in moral disputes
with one another, and to use moral claims as premises in logical arguments. But
if moral claims are simply the expressions of our feelings, then it seems that
we fail to really disagree with one another, and that we make some kind of
mistake when we use attempt to use moral claims as premises in arguments.
Nichols suggests that moral arguments ought to be understood as disputes about
the content and implications of our normative theory. Emotions play a crucial
role in shaping the content of our normative theory, but moral judgments do not
concern these emotions, but are instead about the content of the normative
theory.

Nichols makes much of empirical
work on the moral/conventional distinction in motivating the Sentimental Rules
account. It is now well established that from an early age children (as well as
adults) distinguish paradigm moral transgressions from conventional
transgressions on a number of dimensions. Moral transgressions are held to be
more serious and less permissible, but more importantly they are held to be
less authority dependent. For example, children hold that conventional
transgressions, such as talking in class or wearing gender-inappropriate
clothes, are alright if the authorities permit them, but deny that the
authorities can modify the wrongness of moral transgressions. Actions that harm
victims are typically held to be non-conventionally wrong.

Now, though he does not draw
attention to the fact, Nichols draws conclusions from the empirical findings on
the moral/conventional distinction that are almost diametrically opposed to
those its originators claimed for them. The psychologists who he relies upon
take the distinction to show that the core of morality is cross-culturally
invariant, and that therefore morality is universal and objective. Nichols
himself takes the distinction to show that morality is relative and lacking in
objectivity. His argument is, essentially, that vindicating the objectivity of
morality would require us to show that the emotions we have are the right ones,
and that this is a challenge that cannot be met. There are two possible
responses available to this argument. First, we might question whether a
universal morality mightn’t count as an objective morality. That is, we might
concede that were we to have different emotions we would probably have a
different normative theory, but deny that this possibility is enough to shake
our confidence in the objectivity of our morality as it is. Nichols seems to
think that moral norms are not cross-culturally universal, but it is far
from clear that he is right about this. Beneath the surface diversity, there
may be deep agreement. That is precisely what the original proponents of the
moral/conventional distinction thought, and it may well be true.

The second possible response to
Nichols’s Humean assault on objectivity is, to my mind, more interesting. We
might confront his challenge head on, and argue that our emotions are
the right ones. This may be easier than Nichols thinks. Our core moral
emotions, he argues, are responses to harms. Now, suppose it is true, as
Nichols thinks, that were we never to have developed our repugnance toward
harms, we would never have developed a normative theory which (defeasibly)
prohibits harms. Would it really be the case that such a normative theory would
have been just as good as our current theory (on this question)? Surely not; it
is plausible to believe that to the extent to which our affective response to
harms brings us to see them as impermissible, this affective response allows us
to tune into a genuine feature of the world. Perhaps the point is clearer with
the notion of "bad" (in the sense of undesirable, as opposed to in
the sense of reflecting badly upon an agent), rather than "wrong."
Suppose we had never come to realize that pain is bad, because we lacked the
appropriate emotional response. Nichols suggests that in case it would not be
true that puppy torture for fun would be wrong. Clearly, however, it would
still be true that puppy torture was bad (the puppy’s responses are sufficient
to make this so). It may be that "wrong" is an amalgam of "bad"
in this sense, and of "blameworthy", in the sense in which the latter
can only be addressed to moral agents who are capable of controlling their
actions in the light of a knowledge of moral goods. Hence we don’t feel that
non-human animals commit wrongs when they cause unnecessary pain. But we do
believe that their actions are nevertheless bad: that it is objectively better
that the cat kills the mouse quickly rather than slowly. Why not think exactly
the same of the puppy torturing of our emotionless counterparts? If this is
plausible, then our responses to harms give us access to a genuine feature of
the world, and therefore our emotions are the right ones (or, less grandly, to
the extent to which they allow us to be sensitive to the badness of suffering
they are the right ones).

Nichols’s failure to consider this
possibility is the result of a deeper failure, to distinguish between deeper
and shallower notions of response dependence. Some concepts wear their response
dependence on their sleeves. For instance, something may be "fun"
just in case someone finds it fun. Other concepts may be more deeply response
dependence. For instance, something may be wrong just in case it has certain
properties that typically elicit certain responses in observers in ideal
conditions. Something that has the latter property has a genuine property, to
which we respond or fail to respond, whereas something that is only shallowly
response dependent need not have any such property: different people may
describe an activity as fun for quite different reasons.

Nichols’s exposition and defence of
the Sentimental Rules account, quibbles about objectivity aside, is the most
interesting and successful part of his book. Less successful, to my mind, is
his epidemiological speculations about the development of our norms. He
suggests that our norms are importantly the product of a process of cultural
evolution, in which our affective responses to certain kinds of things – to
harms, as well as the kinds of things we innately find disgusting – would have
given certain norms an enhanced degree of fitness. Now, it certainly seems
right to suggest Affective Resonance would enhance fitness in cultural
evolution, but the evidence suggests that this process cannot explain the
origin of our norms. As Brian Skyrms’ work on the evolution of norms seems to
show, given a very small edge in cultural evolution, norms backed by feelings
ought to go to fixation very quickly, other things being equal. The basin of attraction
of these norms will be far greater than most others, and almost all societies
will end up with the same norms ("same" at some, perhaps quite high,
level of abstraction). Nichols’s postulated mechanism is too successful:
it leaves us unable to explain normative diversity, or, more importantly, the
fact that the affectively backed harm norms and disgust norms have only
recently become widely accepted in Western societies.

To be sure, Nichols does proffer an
explanation of why other things weren’t equal. So long as animals were
threatening we could not afford to extend our harm norms to them; so long as we
had no effective alternative to corporal punishment we could not allow our
distaste for harm to find expression. Even if we grant that we could not afford
to extend our harm norms to all animals, however, why should we not have taken
those that were harmless to us under its umbrella? Why not extend it to birds,
for instance? As Nichols points out, Hopi Indians knew that birds could suffer
pain, but did not see this fact as counting against hurting them. Second, even
if Nichols’s explanation for the slowness of the evolution of norms against
harming succeeds, he offers no parallel explanation for the recent emergence of
norms against disgusting actions. Relatively recently etiquette manuals were
advising those who wanted to behave properly to spit on the ground and blow one’s
nose on one’s fingers. If we really are innately disposed to find these
behaviors disgusting, then these norms should have emerged much more recently.

I suspect that the problem Nichols
seeks to solve just doesn’t exist, at least not with regard to moral norms. He
is trying to explain the development, over cultural history, of norms against
harming. But I suspect that these norms have existed more or less as long as
human beings have, though they have been understood in different ways and have
been extended to cover different classes of beings at different times.
Evolution proper explains the fundamental norms we have (though culture may
explain the exact form they take in different societies at different times). It
is no mystery why our emotions tend to back our norms; we evolved to have the
emotions we do because they back these norms, and these norms enhanced
the inclusive fitness of our ancestors in the environment to which they were
adapted. The development which those norms have since undergone is to be
explained largely by rational factors: we dislike inconsistency and have
therefore gradually universalized these norms where we have been unable to
detect differences which would justify refusing to do so.

I have dealt briefly only with some
aspects of this extraordinarily rich book. There is a great deal more to be
said: about Nichols’s use of data on psychopathy to criticize certain
philosophical theories, about the relationship between the capacity to make
moral judgments and the capacity for perspective taking, and much else besides.
I should not like my criticisms of Nichols’s theories to disguise my admiration
for his achievement. This book is a genuine advance in empirically informed
moral philosophy, one which should be read by all those interested in normative
theory and philosophical psychology, as well as those who seek a model for the
manner in which philosophy can become empirical without sacrificing its
distinctive methods and identity.

© 2005 Neil Levy

Neil Levy is a research fellow at
the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne, Australia
and is author of Being
Up-To-Date: Foucault, Sartre, and Postmodernity (Peter Lang, 2001), Moral
Relativism: A Short Introduction (Oneworld, 2002), Sartre
(Oneworld, 2002), and What
Makes Us Moral?: Crossing the Boundaries of Biology (Oneworld, 2004).

Categories: Philosophical, Ethics