I welcome many of the conclusions of May's (2018) Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind. He does for the domains of moral cognition and moral motivation what many other philosophers, including myself, have tried to do for agency and moral responsibility. I think “optimistic” and “rationalist” philosophers across these domains share a number of core concerns. Consider the following example (adapted from Gibson Reference Gibson2017, p. 34):
Colin is considering moving to either Delaware or Colorado for work. Colin has the following quirk that he employs to help him decide what to do. He feels that he can focus more on the facts that are relevant to the decision if he writes “Colorado” and “Delaware” down on a piece of paper, rapping his pen against the page while he ruminates. He typically writes them in that order, figuring that when other things are equal (which, attempting to be unbiased, he strives to make them as much as he can) alphabetic order is as good as any.
Colin may be subject to implicit egotism (Pelham et al. Reference Pelham, Mirenberg and Jones2002) with respect to the name of the state he is considering moving to. He may also be subject to an ordering effect. Some philosophers (such as Doris Reference Doris2015) have used cases like this to argue against rationalist theories of agency and responsibility. One way for a rationalist to respond is simply to question whether the purportedly agency-undermining effects are real (Simonsohn Reference Simonsohn2011). Another way of responding is to say even if they are real, it still remains whether they operate by bypassing whatever the supposedly necessary mental processes are for moral responsibility, or whether they operate by running through them. The relevant effects may operate on Colin simply causing him to attend to all of the lovely features of Colorado. Then it is far from obvious that his agency is undermined.
At bottom, the debate between rationalists and their empirically motivated opponents over agency and responsibility is about whether having the kind of contact with the normative domain that is thought by rationalists to be required for agency or responsibility is ruled out by an up-to-date conception of the mind. Crucially that involves disputing two different things: (i) what the rationalist picture of the mind really involves and (ii) what the commitments of a distinctively rationalist outlook really are. There is room for rationalist pushback on either score.
Much the same can be said about the debates May wants to intervene in. But May's book is less about (ii) than one might expect. It is very much about mounting an effective rationalist response by thoroughly investigating (i). But it is also about delivering us from pessimism. One could perhaps schematize the arguments that May is attributing to his opponents as follows:
1. Empirical premise describing moral cognition (descriptive sentimentalist premise) or moral motivation (descriptive egoist, Humean, or situationist premise)
2. If (1) then pessimism
3. Pessimism
This argument is about the stakes. But I often found myself wondering if some of his opponents’ arguments are not better schematized as:
1. Empirical premise describing moral cognition (descriptive sentimentalist premise) or moral motivation (descriptive egoist, Humean, or situationist premise)
2. If (1) then not-rationalism
3. Not-rationalism
This argument is about mental mechanics. Now, I think it is fair to say that May wants to argue that neither pessimism nor the denial of rationalism should be thought to follow from any of his opponents’ arguments. But these are actually quite different positions, and the connection between them is not always clear. (There is no doubt that May's opponents bear much of the blame for this confusion – Haidt (Reference Haidt2012) calling rationalism a “delusion” (as cited by May Reference May2018, p. 6) being a prime example of why.)
Perhaps the main virtue of May's book is that it provides ways to resist either argument schema without succumbing to the temptation to simply run the corresponding modus tollens against them. However, the debate, as May understands it, between rationalists and their opponents is then forced to turn on the respective roles played by some distinctively rational set of states or faculties, on the one hand, and theoretically competing states such as emotion, affect, or desire, on the other. Seen in this way, the operant questions are then: Which comes first? Which is primary? Which is essential? Focusing on these questions requires diving into the studies that purport to answer these questions and giving them a sober look over. May does this admirably, and the rationalist position comes out looking better for it. But framing the disagreement in this way threatens to obscure how defending a rationalist picture can help us avoid pessimism in the first place.
This is because we can always ask why it is important that we have proper regard for reason. I take it that at least part of the answer goes beyond simply making empirical room for us to have justified moral beliefs and for those beliefs to at least sometimes move us to action. There is a more general kind of pessimism at issue, and I suspect that those who are inclined toward various forms of rationalism in the domains of moral cognition, motivation, agency, and responsibility are united in resisting it. The concern, it seems to me, is to provide a picture according to which thought and action can be meaningfully connected to the normative. That is, it is important to have proper regard for reason because “reason” picks out a distinctive set of capacities in virtue of which we are able to make contact with considerations that weigh for or against courses of action and states of mind. Those considerations are simply reasons.
The capacity to respond to reasons is what makes us normatively sensitive creatures. It seems that those like Colin can still be sensitive to reasons even if they are subject to the operation of any number of “biased” or “unconscious” cognitive mechanisms. Still, one could say that what the twenty-first century view of the mind implies is that what you might call intellectualism about how we come into contact with those reasons would inevitably lead to pessimism. We simply do not consider the reasons for our thought and action deliberately, explicitly, or consciously, nearly enough of the time to generally count as responsible agents or justified moral believers if that is what such things require. It obviously helps a lot to acknowledge, as May does (pp. 8–10), that inference and judgment are largely unconscious. But I wonder what the distinctive value of having cognitive (rather than some other kind of) contact with reasons is.
May says he sympathizes with the characterization of rationalism (construed in this context more narrowly as a view about moral judgment) “as the thesis that moral judgment is ultimately ‘the culmination of a process of reasoning’ (Maibom Reference Maibom2010, p. 999)” (May Reference May2018, p. 12). I do not deny that there is a (perhaps largely empirical) debate to be had about whether moral judgment originates in reasoning or in emotion. But from the perspective of rebutting a pessimist about justified moral belief, I might have thought the issue was less whether our moral beliefs are (or rest on) judgments, and more whether they are appropriately connected to moral truths. One source of pessimism is that our moral beliefs are not under our rational control. But to resist this we do not need the etiology of a particular belief to run through judgment (though in cases like Colin's it probably does). It is enough for the state itself to be what Scanlon calls a “judgment sensitive attitude” (Scanlon Reference Scanlon1998, p. 20). The etiology of the belief notwithstanding, it is still a state for which reasons can be asked and offered.
The celebrated Huck Finn case (Arpaly Reference Arpaly2003; Arpaly & Schroeder Reference Arpaly and Schroeder1998) is usually read as one where Huck is praiseworthy for helping Jim escape slavery despite his explicit judgment that it would be wrong to do so. On Arpaly's reading of the case, Huck has come to see Jim as a human being after undergoing a “perceptual shift” (Arpaly Reference Arpaly2003, p. 77) that resulted from spending time with Jim. After this shift Huck has, on some level, the moral belief that Jim is deserving of certain forms of treatment. One could say he came to this belief as the result of a bunch of unconscious inferences. But my intuition that he is praiseworthy does not change if we simply stipulate that Huck has come to this belief purely as the result of non-inferential processes. Still, it seems, Huck has made a kind of contact with the moral domain that leads him to action – through justified belief, no less. Similarly, one can imagine Aristotle's phronimos coming to moral belief in much the same way. Being confronted with the particularities of this situation here and now the phronimos forms the belief that such-and-such is to be done. This belief might be the result of well-conditioned unconscious reasoning serving up that morally correct belief. Indeed it is plausible that in many cases this is how it will be. But I see no reason why in some cases it might not be. To draw the parallel with agency, it is not obvious that if there were some process that made Colin sensitive to the lovely features of Colorado in a way that bypassed judgment his conduct would be any less agential.
This need not be a capitulation to sentimentalism because, on this view, at least from the perspective of the dispute between pessimists and optimists, there is no morally relevant reason/emotion dichotomy. And this is not just because, as May says, we can “place great weight on the cognitive aspects of emotion that can facilitate inference and related belief-forming processes” (p. 228). It is also because both reason and emotion, or even mere feeling, can be ways of getting onto the reasons that are there and we can be accountable for getting on to them well or poorly. There are lots of different kinds of reasons and the difference between being sensitive and being insensitive to them need not track a simple – nor at any rate a “fuzzy … at best” (228) – distinction between kinds of mental states or processes. Some reasons require reasoning to apprehend. But there is no reason to think that all reasons do. This would appear to provide a response to the pessimistic sentimentalist irrespective of whether they think of emotion as brute or as partly cognitive (pp. 52-53).
Humeanism has a pessimistic character because we also want to have rational control over the states that are capable of moving us to action. But again, I think it is enough for the states that are capable of moving us to be judgment sensitive attitudes. One move that May makes against the pessimistic Humean is to impute to belief many of the functional properties of desire (pp. 193–95). Why this is a move that leads us to optimism is easier to see with the broad aims of rationalist picture and the idea of a judgment sensitive attitude held out front: desiderative states connect us to reasons and enter into relations of justification with other judgment sensitive states.
I found that working through my own reasons for gravitating toward a more optimistic picture across the domains of moral psychology helped me focus more clearly on the stakes of May's project. Some of the routes to optimism that I have suggested are shorter than the ones that May takes, but I do not mean to cast doubt on the value of taking the longer, thornier route that he does. I consider much of what I have said here to be complementary and congenial to May's overall goals, but I am genuinely curious whether he agrees.
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I welcome many of the conclusions of May's (2018) Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind. He does for the domains of moral cognition and moral motivation what many other philosophers, including myself, have tried to do for agency and moral responsibility. I think “optimistic” and “rationalist” philosophers across these domains share a number of core concerns. Consider the following example (adapted from Gibson Reference Gibson2017, p. 34):
Colin is considering moving to either Delaware or Colorado for work. Colin has the following quirk that he employs to help him decide what to do. He feels that he can focus more on the facts that are relevant to the decision if he writes “Colorado” and “Delaware” down on a piece of paper, rapping his pen against the page while he ruminates. He typically writes them in that order, figuring that when other things are equal (which, attempting to be unbiased, he strives to make them as much as he can) alphabetic order is as good as any.
Colin may be subject to implicit egotism (Pelham et al. Reference Pelham, Mirenberg and Jones2002) with respect to the name of the state he is considering moving to. He may also be subject to an ordering effect. Some philosophers (such as Doris Reference Doris2015) have used cases like this to argue against rationalist theories of agency and responsibility. One way for a rationalist to respond is simply to question whether the purportedly agency-undermining effects are real (Simonsohn Reference Simonsohn2011). Another way of responding is to say even if they are real, it still remains whether they operate by bypassing whatever the supposedly necessary mental processes are for moral responsibility, or whether they operate by running through them. The relevant effects may operate on Colin simply causing him to attend to all of the lovely features of Colorado. Then it is far from obvious that his agency is undermined.
At bottom, the debate between rationalists and their empirically motivated opponents over agency and responsibility is about whether having the kind of contact with the normative domain that is thought by rationalists to be required for agency or responsibility is ruled out by an up-to-date conception of the mind. Crucially that involves disputing two different things: (i) what the rationalist picture of the mind really involves and (ii) what the commitments of a distinctively rationalist outlook really are. There is room for rationalist pushback on either score.
Much the same can be said about the debates May wants to intervene in. But May's book is less about (ii) than one might expect. It is very much about mounting an effective rationalist response by thoroughly investigating (i). But it is also about delivering us from pessimism. One could perhaps schematize the arguments that May is attributing to his opponents as follows:
1. Empirical premise describing moral cognition (descriptive sentimentalist premise) or moral motivation (descriptive egoist, Humean, or situationist premise)
2. If (1) then pessimism
3. Pessimism
This argument is about the stakes. But I often found myself wondering if some of his opponents’ arguments are not better schematized as:
1. Empirical premise describing moral cognition (descriptive sentimentalist premise) or moral motivation (descriptive egoist, Humean, or situationist premise)
2. If (1) then not-rationalism
3. Not-rationalism
This argument is about mental mechanics. Now, I think it is fair to say that May wants to argue that neither pessimism nor the denial of rationalism should be thought to follow from any of his opponents’ arguments. But these are actually quite different positions, and the connection between them is not always clear. (There is no doubt that May's opponents bear much of the blame for this confusion – Haidt (Reference Haidt2012) calling rationalism a “delusion” (as cited by May Reference May2018, p. 6) being a prime example of why.)
Perhaps the main virtue of May's book is that it provides ways to resist either argument schema without succumbing to the temptation to simply run the corresponding modus tollens against them. However, the debate, as May understands it, between rationalists and their opponents is then forced to turn on the respective roles played by some distinctively rational set of states or faculties, on the one hand, and theoretically competing states such as emotion, affect, or desire, on the other. Seen in this way, the operant questions are then: Which comes first? Which is primary? Which is essential? Focusing on these questions requires diving into the studies that purport to answer these questions and giving them a sober look over. May does this admirably, and the rationalist position comes out looking better for it. But framing the disagreement in this way threatens to obscure how defending a rationalist picture can help us avoid pessimism in the first place.
This is because we can always ask why it is important that we have proper regard for reason. I take it that at least part of the answer goes beyond simply making empirical room for us to have justified moral beliefs and for those beliefs to at least sometimes move us to action. There is a more general kind of pessimism at issue, and I suspect that those who are inclined toward various forms of rationalism in the domains of moral cognition, motivation, agency, and responsibility are united in resisting it. The concern, it seems to me, is to provide a picture according to which thought and action can be meaningfully connected to the normative. That is, it is important to have proper regard for reason because “reason” picks out a distinctive set of capacities in virtue of which we are able to make contact with considerations that weigh for or against courses of action and states of mind. Those considerations are simply reasons.
The capacity to respond to reasons is what makes us normatively sensitive creatures. It seems that those like Colin can still be sensitive to reasons even if they are subject to the operation of any number of “biased” or “unconscious” cognitive mechanisms. Still, one could say that what the twenty-first century view of the mind implies is that what you might call intellectualism about how we come into contact with those reasons would inevitably lead to pessimism. We simply do not consider the reasons for our thought and action deliberately, explicitly, or consciously, nearly enough of the time to generally count as responsible agents or justified moral believers if that is what such things require. It obviously helps a lot to acknowledge, as May does (pp. 8–10), that inference and judgment are largely unconscious. But I wonder what the distinctive value of having cognitive (rather than some other kind of) contact with reasons is.
May says he sympathizes with the characterization of rationalism (construed in this context more narrowly as a view about moral judgment) “as the thesis that moral judgment is ultimately ‘the culmination of a process of reasoning’ (Maibom Reference Maibom2010, p. 999)” (May Reference May2018, p. 12). I do not deny that there is a (perhaps largely empirical) debate to be had about whether moral judgment originates in reasoning or in emotion. But from the perspective of rebutting a pessimist about justified moral belief, I might have thought the issue was less whether our moral beliefs are (or rest on) judgments, and more whether they are appropriately connected to moral truths. One source of pessimism is that our moral beliefs are not under our rational control. But to resist this we do not need the etiology of a particular belief to run through judgment (though in cases like Colin's it probably does). It is enough for the state itself to be what Scanlon calls a “judgment sensitive attitude” (Scanlon Reference Scanlon1998, p. 20). The etiology of the belief notwithstanding, it is still a state for which reasons can be asked and offered.
The celebrated Huck Finn case (Arpaly Reference Arpaly2003; Arpaly & Schroeder Reference Arpaly and Schroeder1998) is usually read as one where Huck is praiseworthy for helping Jim escape slavery despite his explicit judgment that it would be wrong to do so. On Arpaly's reading of the case, Huck has come to see Jim as a human being after undergoing a “perceptual shift” (Arpaly Reference Arpaly2003, p. 77) that resulted from spending time with Jim. After this shift Huck has, on some level, the moral belief that Jim is deserving of certain forms of treatment. One could say he came to this belief as the result of a bunch of unconscious inferences. But my intuition that he is praiseworthy does not change if we simply stipulate that Huck has come to this belief purely as the result of non-inferential processes. Still, it seems, Huck has made a kind of contact with the moral domain that leads him to action – through justified belief, no less. Similarly, one can imagine Aristotle's phronimos coming to moral belief in much the same way. Being confronted with the particularities of this situation here and now the phronimos forms the belief that such-and-such is to be done. This belief might be the result of well-conditioned unconscious reasoning serving up that morally correct belief. Indeed it is plausible that in many cases this is how it will be. But I see no reason why in some cases it might not be. To draw the parallel with agency, it is not obvious that if there were some process that made Colin sensitive to the lovely features of Colorado in a way that bypassed judgment his conduct would be any less agential.
This need not be a capitulation to sentimentalism because, on this view, at least from the perspective of the dispute between pessimists and optimists, there is no morally relevant reason/emotion dichotomy. And this is not just because, as May says, we can “place great weight on the cognitive aspects of emotion that can facilitate inference and related belief-forming processes” (p. 228). It is also because both reason and emotion, or even mere feeling, can be ways of getting onto the reasons that are there and we can be accountable for getting on to them well or poorly. There are lots of different kinds of reasons and the difference between being sensitive and being insensitive to them need not track a simple – nor at any rate a “fuzzy … at best” (228) – distinction between kinds of mental states or processes. Some reasons require reasoning to apprehend. But there is no reason to think that all reasons do. This would appear to provide a response to the pessimistic sentimentalist irrespective of whether they think of emotion as brute or as partly cognitive (pp. 52-53).
Humeanism has a pessimistic character because we also want to have rational control over the states that are capable of moving us to action. But again, I think it is enough for the states that are capable of moving us to be judgment sensitive attitudes. One move that May makes against the pessimistic Humean is to impute to belief many of the functional properties of desire (pp. 193–95). Why this is a move that leads us to optimism is easier to see with the broad aims of rationalist picture and the idea of a judgment sensitive attitude held out front: desiderative states connect us to reasons and enter into relations of justification with other judgment sensitive states.
I found that working through my own reasons for gravitating toward a more optimistic picture across the domains of moral psychology helped me focus more clearly on the stakes of May's project. Some of the routes to optimism that I have suggested are shorter than the ones that May takes, but I do not mean to cast doubt on the value of taking the longer, thornier route that he does. I consider much of what I have said here to be complementary and congenial to May's overall goals, but I am genuinely curious whether he agrees.