In his conclusion, Knobe reminds us that the target article began with a metaphor (well, a simile, actually) comparing the organization of the mind to the organization of a modern university: “Just as a university would have specific departments devoted especially to the sciences, our minds might include certain specific psychological processes devoted especially to constructing a roughly ‘scientific’ kind of understanding” (sect. 6, para. 1) This suggests a view on which moral judgments play a quite limited role in cognition.
In a university, there might be faculty members in the philosophy department who were hired specifically to work on moral questions, but researchers in the sciences typically leave such questions to one side. So maybe the mind works in much the same way. We might have certain psychological processes devoted to making moral judgments, but there would be other processes that focus on developing a purely ‘scientific’ understanding of what is going on in a situation and remain neutral on all questions of morality (sect. 6, para. 2).
Knobe maintains that this picture is “deeply mistaken”:
[There is no] clear division whereby certain psychological processes are devoted to moral questions and others are devoted to purely scientific questions. Instead, it appears that everything is jumbled together. Even the processes that look most “scientific” actually take moral considerations into account. It seems that we are moralizing creatures through and through. (sect. 6, para. 3, emphasis added)
This is a bold and radical view. And while we share Knobe's fondness for views that fly in the face of conventional wisdom, we are not persuaded that he has made a convincing case. Indeed, we think that Knobe's own explanation for the sorts of phenomena he so clearly and carefully documents flies in the face of these audacious and dramatic claims.
To explain our skepticism, we will focus on the target article's Figures 6–8. These are aimed at explaining how people make judgments about whether an agent is in favor of an outcome. Knobe begins his explanation with the “fundamental assumption” that
people's representation of the agent's attitude is best understood not in terms of a simple dichotomy between “in favor” and “not in favor,” but rather, in terms of a whole continuum of different attitudes an agent might hold…. For simplicity, we can depict this continuum in terms of a scale running from con to pro. (Fig. 6) (sect. 5.2, para. 2)
An agent whose attitude falls way over on the con side, Knobe tells us, will be classified as “not in favor” and an agent whose attitude falls way over on the pro side will be classified as “in favor.” But that does not tell us “how … people determine the threshold at which an agent's attitude passes over from the category ‘not in favor’ to the category ‘in favor’” (sect. 5.2, para. 2). To explain this, Knobe posits “an additional element” that includes a variable default position whose location along the continuum is determined, in part, by people's moral judgments. Knobe proceeds to tell us, in some detail, how this default-setting system works, and how it plays a role in determining whether we judge that an agent is in favor of the outcome in question.
There is, however, one central and important part of the system about which Knobe tells us nothing at all. The lacunae emerges very clearly when we compare Figure 7 to Figure 8. One difference between these two figures, the one that Knobe focuses on, is that the Default position, and thus the part of the continuum that supports a judgment that the agent is “IN FAVOR,” has been shifted to the right. But there is another difference. In Figure 8, the position of the Agent on the continuum has been marked. And that position is, of course, crucial to the account. In Figure 8, the Agent is located to the left of the Default, leading to a judgment that the Agent is not in favor of the outcome in question. Had the Agent been located significantly further to the right, the system would produce the judgment that the Agent is in favor of the outcome.
But how does the psychological mechanism that Knobe posits succeed in locating the Agent along the continuum? As far as we can see, Knobe tells us nothing about this, and there is certainly no hint that the psychological processes responsible for locating the Agent along the continuum are sensitive to any moral or evaluative judgment made elsewhere in the system. Rather, it seems, this crucial determination is made in a value-free way. To revert to Knobe's recurrent metaphor, it is made by one of the mind's “science departments” that focuses on “developing a purely ‘scientific’ understanding of what is going on in a situation and remain[s] neutral on all questions of morality” (sect. 6, para. 2).
The point is underscored by Knobe's analogy with the process that a teacher might use in assigning grades. The teacher starts out with a “continuum of different percentage scores on a test” (sect. 5.2, para. 4) and must then decide on a threshold beyond which a score will count as an A. Her process for setting the threshold involves a variable default determined by the teacher's assessment of the difficulty of the test. This is analogous to the variable, morally influenced default depicted in Figures 7 and 8. However, presumably the test scores themselves are not influenced by the teacher's assessment of the difficulty of the test. They, like the position of the Agent in Figure 8, are determined by a “purely scientific” component in the assessment process.
The bottom line is that on Knobe's own account of how we decide whether an agent is in favor of an outcome, there is a clear division between psychological processes that involve moral considerations and those that do not. It is not the case that “everything is jumbled together,” nor is it the case that “we are moralizing creatures through and through.”
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In his conclusion, Knobe reminds us that the target article began with a metaphor (well, a simile, actually) comparing the organization of the mind to the organization of a modern university: “Just as a university would have specific departments devoted especially to the sciences, our minds might include certain specific psychological processes devoted especially to constructing a roughly ‘scientific’ kind of understanding” (sect. 6, para. 1) This suggests a view on which moral judgments play a quite limited role in cognition.
In a university, there might be faculty members in the philosophy department who were hired specifically to work on moral questions, but researchers in the sciences typically leave such questions to one side. So maybe the mind works in much the same way. We might have certain psychological processes devoted to making moral judgments, but there would be other processes that focus on developing a purely ‘scientific’ understanding of what is going on in a situation and remain neutral on all questions of morality (sect. 6, para. 2).
Knobe maintains that this picture is “deeply mistaken”:
[There is no] clear division whereby certain psychological processes are devoted to moral questions and others are devoted to purely scientific questions. Instead, it appears that everything is jumbled together. Even the processes that look most “scientific” actually take moral considerations into account. It seems that we are moralizing creatures through and through. (sect. 6, para. 3, emphasis added)
This is a bold and radical view. And while we share Knobe's fondness for views that fly in the face of conventional wisdom, we are not persuaded that he has made a convincing case. Indeed, we think that Knobe's own explanation for the sorts of phenomena he so clearly and carefully documents flies in the face of these audacious and dramatic claims.
To explain our skepticism, we will focus on the target article's Figures 6–8. These are aimed at explaining how people make judgments about whether an agent is in favor of an outcome. Knobe begins his explanation with the “fundamental assumption” that
people's representation of the agent's attitude is best understood not in terms of a simple dichotomy between “in favor” and “not in favor,” but rather, in terms of a whole continuum of different attitudes an agent might hold…. For simplicity, we can depict this continuum in terms of a scale running from con to pro. (Fig. 6) (sect. 5.2, para. 2)
An agent whose attitude falls way over on the con side, Knobe tells us, will be classified as “not in favor” and an agent whose attitude falls way over on the pro side will be classified as “in favor.” But that does not tell us “how … people determine the threshold at which an agent's attitude passes over from the category ‘not in favor’ to the category ‘in favor’” (sect. 5.2, para. 2). To explain this, Knobe posits “an additional element” that includes a variable default position whose location along the continuum is determined, in part, by people's moral judgments. Knobe proceeds to tell us, in some detail, how this default-setting system works, and how it plays a role in determining whether we judge that an agent is in favor of the outcome in question.
There is, however, one central and important part of the system about which Knobe tells us nothing at all. The lacunae emerges very clearly when we compare Figure 7 to Figure 8. One difference between these two figures, the one that Knobe focuses on, is that the Default position, and thus the part of the continuum that supports a judgment that the agent is “IN FAVOR,” has been shifted to the right. But there is another difference. In Figure 8, the position of the Agent on the continuum has been marked. And that position is, of course, crucial to the account. In Figure 8, the Agent is located to the left of the Default, leading to a judgment that the Agent is not in favor of the outcome in question. Had the Agent been located significantly further to the right, the system would produce the judgment that the Agent is in favor of the outcome.
But how does the psychological mechanism that Knobe posits succeed in locating the Agent along the continuum? As far as we can see, Knobe tells us nothing about this, and there is certainly no hint that the psychological processes responsible for locating the Agent along the continuum are sensitive to any moral or evaluative judgment made elsewhere in the system. Rather, it seems, this crucial determination is made in a value-free way. To revert to Knobe's recurrent metaphor, it is made by one of the mind's “science departments” that focuses on “developing a purely ‘scientific’ understanding of what is going on in a situation and remain[s] neutral on all questions of morality” (sect. 6, para. 2).
The point is underscored by Knobe's analogy with the process that a teacher might use in assigning grades. The teacher starts out with a “continuum of different percentage scores on a test” (sect. 5.2, para. 4) and must then decide on a threshold beyond which a score will count as an A. Her process for setting the threshold involves a variable default determined by the teacher's assessment of the difficulty of the test. This is analogous to the variable, morally influenced default depicted in Figures 7 and 8. However, presumably the test scores themselves are not influenced by the teacher's assessment of the difficulty of the test. They, like the position of the Agent in Figure 8, are determined by a “purely scientific” component in the assessment process.
The bottom line is that on Knobe's own account of how we decide whether an agent is in favor of an outcome, there is a clear division between psychological processes that involve moral considerations and those that do not. It is not the case that “everything is jumbled together,” nor is it the case that “we are moralizing creatures through and through.”