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Which Moral Scenarios Are Unfamiliar?

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THis is supported by what we learned earlier ...

wicked learning environments

‘When a person’s past experience is both representative of the situation relevant to the decision and supported by much , trust the intuition; when it is not, be careful’

(Hogarth, 2010, p. 343).

This is based on situations where statistical inference is possible.

Mary [...] notices an empty boxcar rolling out of control. [...] anyone it hits will die. [...] If Mary does nothing, the boxcar will hit the five people on the track. If Mary pulls a lever it will release the bottom of the footbridge and [...] one person will fall onto the track, where the boxcar will hit the one person, slow down because of the one person, and not hit the five people farther down the track.

Is it for her to pull the lever?

Could past experience be representative of Footbridge?
Is their experience ‘supported by much valid feedback’?
Safe assumption: no one knows exactly.
Even on the boldest, most optimistic view, there will be moral scenarios bizarre enough that the answers would be no.
Further, insofar as philosophers use moral scenarios to explore edge cases and fine contrasts, they increase the risks of outrunning ‘representative experience’ and ‘valid feedback’.
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Can we expect to find limits?

Fast processes are flexible and trainable. (No mention of limits.)

Railton (2014)

In other domains, fast processes show signature limits even in expert adults

- Objects (Kozhevnikov & Hegarty, 2001)

- Minds (Low, Apperly, Butterfill, & Rakoczy, 2016)

- Number (Feigenson, Dehaene, & Spelke, 2004)

This is not an accident: any broadly inferential process must make a trade-off between speed and accuracy.

Why do physical intuitons have these limits? They are largely a product of evolution, and evolution focusses on getting things right in situations that were frequent and significant in human experience.
It makes sense that physics would be limited in this way.

reliable

unreliable

physical intuitions

straight tubes

horizontal motion

curved tubes

vertical motion

culturalrevolution 12,000 generations hunter-gatherer lifestyle 240 generations cities exist <2% live in cities 232 generations 8 generations

reliable

unreliable

physical intuitions

straight tubes

horizontal motion

curved tubes

vertical motion

ethical intuitions

food sharing in small bands

cooperative breeding

trolley problems

climate change

‘ultimately we would like to identify the mechanisms which can lead to mistaken intuitions, since that might sometimes help us to confirm which intuitions are erroneous.’

(Kagan, 2023, p. 175)

Bit hard to take because actually there’s a good amount of research on This already and we can see roughly what the limits of intuition are likely to be from it.
Key points include relations between purity and disgust, and a distinction between faster and slower processes.

‘there must be some evolutionary advantage in having a faculty that [...] gets at least some basic moral truths right.’

(Kagan, 2023, p. 184)

cooperative breeding (Hrdy, 2011)

food sharing (Kaplan & Gurven, 2005)

small-scale cooperation

Here I’m thinking about not free-riding when unobserved (Not sure where I have a source from this; could be about religion?)

managing shamans and other leaders (Boehm et al., 1993)

Boehm et al. (1993) is a reference to reverse hierarchial dominance: you have fine-grained control over hierarchy.
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1. Ethical judgements are explained by a dual-process theory, which distinguishes faster from slower processes.

2. Faster processes are unreliable in unfamiliar* situations.

3. Therefore, we should not rely on faster process in unfamiliar* situations.

4. When philosophers rely on not-justified-inferentially premises, they are relying on faster processes.

5. The moral scenarios and principles philosophers consider involve unfamiliar* situations.

6. Therefore, not-justified-inferentially premises about particular moral scenarios, and debatable principles, cannot be used in ethical arguments where the aim is knowledge.

I'm giving this the green for two reasons
(a) even on the view most charitable to opponents, some moral scenarios will be bizarre enough to count as unfamiliar. Although we do not know which these are (as far as I can tell), philosophers’ interest in fine distinctions and edge cases increases the probability of hitting on unfamiliar situations.
(b) we also know that there fast processes in other domains exhibit signature limits even in adults. This means that even for experts with much experience, some quite ordinary-seeming scenarios may be unfamiliar.