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How to Ethics?

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Lecture 09

Moral Psychology

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Let me finish where I started ...

Why study moral psychology?

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3

ethics?

1

human sociality

2

political conflict,

e.g. over climate change

[we shouldn’t be doing ethics as if moral psychology were irrelevant.]
This is the one that we have studied least.
Ethical abilities are the basis of human sociality, and I think this is clear enough, but did not study the particular ways in which our ethical abilities shape are social lives. In particular, we did not study cooperative breeding, food sharing or collective action.
but now: future of human sociality (the gap)
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theme for today (and the whole course)

we have limited ethical knowledge

I do’t mean we humans know nothing ethically. I mean that our current ethical knowledge is insecure, and does yet not support substantive general theories which enable us to thrive in the new situations created by recent technologies like farming or cities.
(Note 'yet': I think it might in the future)
This is the main thing we get from studying moral psychology.
Doesn’t seem like much.
Actually it’s an enormous thing.
Taking seriously the limits on our ethical knowledge requires a fundamental change to how most philosophers do ethics.
And it holds the key to working around political conflicts which threaten the future of all humans, like that over climate change.
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There is a gap between progress in science and technology versus progress in ethics.
Here’s what I mean by saying there is a gap: in biology (say), many issues that were controversial ~20 years ago are now resolved and there are new controversies and this is not just a matter of fashion; by contrast, in ethics you can go right back to the ancients and find controversies that are still live today.
More carefully: ethics does not exhibit the same degree of cumulative, controversy-resolving progress as many other fields do.
Put colourfully: if Aristotle were reincarnated later today, it would take him a long time and much effort to understand modern biology, but he would quickly find himself at home in much of modern ethics.
This is not a narrowly academic concern: the gap in theoretical progress results also in a costly practical gap.
The practical gap is between: (1) our rapidly increasing capacity to affect human lives at scale and (2) our much weaker capacity to reach consensus on reliable, justified, and action-guiding ethical views about how that capacity should be used and how it should be limited.
Let me give you some examples of the practical gap ...
[old] To apply our discoveries in moral psychology, we need three things.
1. [drop] we need to be sure that there is a gap;
2. second we need to know why there's a gap;
3. and third we need to know what we might do about the gap.
Let me start with the first. How do we know there is a gap?
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Image source: Chazan (2025)

ethical successes

government-sponsored slavery and serfdom

landmines reduced (partial)

ozone depletion

vaccination (e.g. smallpox)

...

Why are these *ethical* successes and failures? Because ethical attitudes play a key role in solving, or failing to solve, these problems.
You can see this in the case of vaccination, which requires lots of people to pay a small cost for a large collective benefit.
The current anti-vax movement is driven by ethical concerns (ignorance is not the whole explanation cause; it is ethical attitudes).
Illustrated by Martin Sichert (AfD): ‘vaccines are a massive encroachment on people’s bodily autonomy and every one should be free to decide’ quoted in (Chazan, 2025)
‘Björn Höcke, AfD leader [...] likened Covid vaccines to the Nazis’ experiments on humans’ (Chazan, 2025)
Martin Sichert (AfD) claims that the AfD defended your freedom (Chazan, 2025).
Despite some notable successes, there remain many situations (1) which limit human flourishing and which carry enormous costs, and (2) which we could easily avoid or remedy; and (3) the reasons these situations persist have their roots in human moral psychology.

ethical failures

global poverty
 

nuclear deterrence

climate change

driving cars (?)

...

Why are what I am calling ‘failures’ failures?
You might object that from a libetarian perspective, global poverty is not an ethical failure at all.
This ignores that eliminating global poverty is easy, relatively inexpensive, and would bring enormous benefits for almost everyone.
This is nicely illustrated by the billionare Bezos’ motive for building space civilizations. He talks about having hundreds of living Mozarts.
The quickest and most direct way to get there is probably to unleash the wasted potential of those perhaps 700 million people who currently experience extreme poverty (World Bank, 2024).
The gap is between: (1) our rapidly increasing capacity to affect human lives at scale and (2) our much weaker capacity to reach consensus on reliable, justified, and action-guiding ethical views about how that capacity should be used and how it should be limited.
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Why is there a gap?

(The gap is between the progress we have made in technology and the progress we have made in ethics.)
Previously I stressed that it’s because we have been doing ethics in the Aristotelian mode.
But we can get an even clearer picture of the gap by looking at the main findings from moral psychology.
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1. ethical abilities are for solving problems

2. moral pluralism (within culture)

3. cultural variation

4. faster processes are unreliable outside familiar situations

Discoveries in moral psychology pose a challenge to theories in normative ethics which aim to endorse universal and strongly justified moral principles.

- consequentialism, contractualism (?), Kantian ethics, ...

The challenge is to understand how any of these theories might be justified.
This needs careful nuance.
These discoveries do not refute consequentialism, Kantian ethics, or contractualism.
But they do make such views look revisionary of common sense; and they do make it harder to justify them strongly by appeal to intuition, reasonableness, or reflective fit.

BUT: the problems are universal (e.g. global poverty, climate change, bioethics)

We have to solve for both the limits and the universality of the problems!
What, if anything, do these main findings tell us about the limits of humans’ ethical knowledge?
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To apply our discoveries in moral psychology, we need three things.
1. we need to be sure that there is a gap;
2. second we need to know why there's a gap;
3. and third we need to know what we might do about the gap.
On why there is a gap: I was just suggesting, tentatively, that there's a gap because moral psychology reveals limits on the ethical capacities that we currently rely on for theorizing about ethics.
We have the first two. Now let’s consider the third.

Can we do ethics with limited knowledge?

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financial ethical bets

In the financial domain, we have many theories and much conflicting evidence. Traders also have a pressing need to act. They will not usually make money by attempting first to identify the correct theory and then sticking to that. They will probably instead combine approaches that are inspired by a mix of evidence and theory.

Do ‘the global poor have a much stronger moral claim to that 1 percent of the global product they need to meet their basic needs than we affluent have to take 81 rather than 80 percent for ourselves’?

(Pogge, 2005, p. 2)

Primary consideration: the upside of being right about the ethics outweighs the downside of being wrong (will not do great harm even if we are wrong)
Other consideration: Pogge argues that you can justify a positive answer from a wide range of philosophical views, including libertarianism (which is typically a view opposed to redistribution because it emphasizes property rights)

... and humility

We also have to recognize that there is a lot we do not know.
[Be careful: the point is not that theories are bad or wrong and we should just gamble; it's that, for now, we need to accept that there is a lot of uncertainty and act accordingly.]
This is going to be very hard given that many of us have quite strong ethical views in some areas. The strong views may concern environmental issues, identity and self-expression, social justice, or sexuality.
It’s hard for me because I feel that anti-vaxxers are literally killing babies and children.
It is particularly difficult because respecting others’ ethical positions can sometimes feel unethical.
The important thing is to try to include everyone, all of the human beings, as moral agents with their limited knowledge.