Annemarie Kalis – Moral Judgement and Rational Capacities

In this talk I will challenge a basic assumption underlying the contemporary psychology of moral judgement: the idea that moral judgements can be mechanistically explained. This assumption is not only held by sentimentalists such as Haidt or Nichols, who believe that the mechanisms involved are mostly affective, but also by those who argue that rational mechanisms play a crucial role in the explanation of moral judgement (as in Horgan and Timmons’ morphological rationalism). My aim is to point out difficulties faced by any attempt (be it sentimentalist or rationalist) at mechanistic explanation of moral judgement, on the basis of the not-very-radical philosophical idea that a moral judgement should be understood as an exercise of rational capacities. Recent work in the philosophy of action suggests that exercises of a rational capacity are not amenable to mechanistic explanation, because the criteria determining whether someone exercises such a capacity, are not mechanistic criteria. I will attempt to show that this argument ultimately entails the claim that there is no such thing as a rational mechanism. If this is correct, then in so far as one wants to hold on to the idea that making a moral judgement involves the exercise of rational capacities (an idea that even many sentimentalists do not seem to reject completely), such judgements cannot be mechanistically explained. However, this raises a crucial question: how to make sense of the idea of a rational capacity? I will conclude by suggesting that the existence of rational capacities requires a non-mechanistic (and thus radically anti-reductionist) understanding of nature, allowing for (amongst other things) top-down causation. This implies that moral psychologists should either reject a mechanistic account of nature, or give up on the idea that human beings have rational capacities.