… In fact, as Greene points out, those strong emotions often tell us to do the wrong thing from a "collective well being" standpoint.
This is hardly surprising. It’s one of the reasons why people engage in moral
theory – by critically reflecting on moral practices we see where they conflict, where some practise are not justified, and so forth.
You’re merely pointing out the need for critical reflection on morality. No shock here.
It is not simply that those moral principles fail to motivate the psychopath on rational grounds but they can't motivate the psychopath because they are not truly rational.
This is an invalid argument. You’re committing the fallacy of ‘affirming the consequent’.
If p, then q (If moral principles are not rational, then they will not motivate the psychopath)
q (they don’t motivate the psychopath
Therefore p (therefore moral principles are not rational)
There are other possible explanations for why moral principles don’t motivate the psychopath aside from the fact that they are not ‘rationally justifiable’.
Also, keep in mind that ‘rationally justifiable’ is different from ‘based on reason alone’. Many of my desires are ‘rationally justifiable’ even though they are not
based on reason.
Why does the conflict have to be the result of the failure to reason well?
Ultimately reason aims at providing a coherent and consistent account of reality. The fact that some emotional responses to particular situations lead us to act in ways that conflict with an impartial account of reality is hardly surprising or worrisome (at least for moral
theory; it’s obviously worrisome from a practical point of view).
The point that the psychopath demonstrates is that they are not motivating for rational reasons or because of the strength of the evidence but because of an emotional response. Thus your moral facts will only tend to motivate a person who shares the same emotional response to the moral facts, making them entirely subjective because they are all, at their core, attempts to explain rationally what is an arational emotional response.
The above claim is rather messy and confused – it reflects a misunderstanding of the view ‘moral realism’ and what ‘subjectivism’ is – but I’ll try to address it nonetheless.
A moral realist can claim:
(a.) moral properties exist (so he’s not a moral sceptic or a ‘subjectivist’);
(b.) a moral property
just is a property that will motivate properly situated human agents to act in certain ways (or prompt certain responses in them, etc.);
(c.) moral reactions can nonetheless be
rationally criticised and reformed (say, to better conform to the relevant moral properties; this is one reason why the moral realist is not a ‘subjectivist’);
(d.) people may often be in situations in which they are not responsive to the relevant moral properties; and
(e.) some people (e.g. psychopaths) may be incapable
permanently of being responsive to moral properties.
So moral realism is a view that (1.) affirms that objective moral properties exist, and for which (2.) the fact that psychopaths exist in no way threatens this fact.
Now, if psychopaths made up 96 percent of the population instead of 4 percent, then ‘moral properties’ as such would not exist (rather, 4 percent of the population would be capable of apprehending something that most people could not, in much the same way that only a small percentage of people can ‘lucid dream’, i.e. perceive that they are dreaming while they are doing it). If 100 percent of people were psychopaths, the properties would not exist at all (at least not for human beings), just as ‘colour’ would not exist (at least not ‘for us’) if 100 percent of people were colour blind.
Now you might not
like moral realism for some reason. That’s a separate debate. But it’s a perfectly coherent, defensible account of morality that is thoroughly naturalistic in its metaphysical assumptions.
What this suggests as if you eliminate the emotional component of moral decisions, there are no moral violations, thus morality, itself, is an artifact or byproduct of that emotional response and does not, and can not, exist independently of it.
Neither moral realists nor expressivists deny that morality would not exist if human beings – with their particular biological and psychological constitutions – did not exist. (I think that there are sophisticated ‘internalist’ ‘practical reason’ views that can overcome this challenge as well, but that’s a race in which I have no horse.) This doesn’t mean that particular moral practices cannot be rationally criticised and reformed.
In other words, it often seems more likely that a person is going to latch on to a moral philosophy that seems to explain what they feel than it is that they'll be convinced by moral philosophy to change their morality because the philosophy is limited in how much in can change how a person feels about moral issues.
But people
do change their views about particular moral issues because of arguments. For example, I know people who have become vegetarians because of utilitarian arguments that they found convincing, people who came to change their views about distributive justice, etc.
The best it can hope to do is help the rational mind scream more loudly by persuading a person to become more emotionally detached from moral problems…
Why couldn’t it also involve altering our emotional responses to particular situations after rational reflection, or finding that our emotional responses
have been altered after we come to view a particular situation differently thanks to moral argument and reflection? People seem to do this on a regular basis. I know that my own ‘emotional responses’ to certain situations that I now regard as cases of
injustice are quite different to my previous ‘emotional responses’ to analogous situations which I did not then regard as cases of injustice. And I changed my views about justice as a consequence of rational reflection and deliberation (indeed, in the course of taking two particular philosophy courses).
A moral realist would argue that the possibility of such changes is precisely what ‘moral progress’ hinges on. Similarly, changes in people’s emotional responses are key to theories of ‘virtue ethics’. Aristotle, for instance, thought that moral education involved teaching people to feel the
right emotions in response to certain situations. Nonetheless, rational reflection and judgement played a central role in Aristotle’s ethics, despite his acknowledgement that emotional responses were key (and his acknowledgement that some people were simply ‘insensible’ to virtue).
It is that when the psychopath, who has the rational capacity to understand the argument, looks at the moral argument, it is illogical to them.
I thought that you said previously that it was something that psychopaths could understand ‘logically’? No matter. The fact that claims about colour have no meaning for someone who is colour blind, or claims about other people’s ‘mindsets’ have no meaning for autistic people, does not mean that claims about colour or other people’s ‘mindsets’ are purely subjective or mere fictions.
Think of it as questioning whether the evidence supports the claim that morality can be "externalist in nature".
But it doesn’t do this
at all. It is not even clear to me
how it could pose a challenge to externalism.
I don't think it's a mistake, nor do I think it undermines my argument if you don't presuppose that the externalism theories that you favor are true and internalism theories that you don't are false. In other words, if you are wrong and morality does require some form of internalism, then I'm not the one making the mistake.
Perhaps morality requires some form of internalism – that’s a separate debate. (But
even if it did your points about psychopaths would only undermine
one kind of internalism, namely a very ‘rationalistic’ conception of it, typically associated with Kant.)
My objection all along has been that you are positing a
false dilemma: either ‘rationalistic internalism’ is true or moral scepticism is true. My point has been that these are not the only two alternatives. There are meta-ethical theories that are not in any way vulnerable to the existence of psychopaths (e.g. non-reductionist and reductionist moral realism, expressivism, ‘sentimentalist’ versions of ‘virtue ethics’, etc.). If you think that the existence of psychopaths requires moral scepticism, you need to show how they also rebut these other meta-ethical theories. But you haven’t even begun to do this!
In short, even if I were convinced that psychopaths undermine the plausibility of ‘rationalistic internalism’ (orthodox Kantianism), I would hardly feel the need to become a moral sceptic/error theorist. That’s because the existence of psychopaths does not even
affect the plausibility of a large number of alternative non-sceptical meta-ethical theories (including the ones that I find most plausible).
And this is why the philosophies that you keep trying to claim as slam dunks that should persuade people that you are right roll off of people in this thread (and even people much more qualified to debate philosophy with you) as if you were telling them that logic is a pretty flower that smells bad. If they don't share the same feelings about the argument that you do, the argument not only doesn't motivate emotionally but doesn't persuade rationally.
Well I certainly would not deny that some people ignore rational arguments for emotional reasons. Who would? However, I know that
some people who have been strongly emotionally attached to certain views (religious, ethical, political, etc.)
have come to change those views thanks to rational deliberation and reflection. So it certainly seems
possible (at least for some people).
Perhaps one needs to
want or desire that their beliefs conform to reality in order to feel the force of logic, reason, etc? Well, maybe. And if there are people who simply don’t have that desire, I don’t know what to say to them. But such persons seem simply to be ‘cabbages’ (as Aristotle described them), and not worth discussing anything with.
:shrug: