1. May's (Reference May2018) Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind addresses the interdisciplinary, empirically informed, moral psychology that has proliferated in the philosophy and psychology of the past 20 years. The overall tone of this work, May (preface, p. xi) contends, is pessimistic “about ordinary moral thought and action” Against such pessimism, May (p. xi) argues that “our best science helps to defend moral knowledge and virtue against prominent empirical attacks,” and thereby casts himself as an optimist, defending traditional notions of reason and virtue. Yet May (p. 19) departs from the a priori, ascientific methodology that until recently dominated moral psychology in anglophone philosophy, remarking that “few optimists have taken the empirical challenges seriously, let alone answered them successfully.”
May's assessment of his comrades in optimism may be a little unkind: Although there remain blissfully obdurate a priorists in moral psychology, increasing numbers of traditionally minded philosophers are engaging the empirical literature, most notably those working the burgeoning field of character studies (e.g., Miller et al. Reference Miller, Furr, Knobel and Fleeson2015). But May's book displays considerably more facility with the empirical literature than does the work of many optimists, making for an innovative and important contribution to moral psychology, which ought to be read by everyone in the field.
But (straightaway to the “but” endemic in these exercises) while I'm impressed by May's acumen, I have reservations about his management of the rhetorical space. In particular, I question his development of the optimist/pessimist dialectic. Although I will, for convenience, adopt May's nomenclature, I'll argue, as one of his pessimist foils, that this taxonomy is not generally apt, and I'll therefore, with no disrespect intended, henceforth flag our disagreement with “scare quotes” around optimist, pessimist, and variants where dialectical clarity requires it. Although there are certainly moments in the literature that are pessimistic in tenor, the sensibility driving the new interdisciplinary moral psychology is probably as often optimistic as not. Sharpening the taxonomy has a serious purpose, because misattributions of morally nihilistic pessimism help fuel the sometimes vitriolic repudiations of interdisciplinary moral psychology found in philosophical commentary.
2. An initial complication is that there are two, imperfectly overlapping, beneficiaries of May's optimism. The first is sometimes called folk morality; May (p. 7) declares “there are no empirical grounds for debunking core elements of ordinary moral judgment.” The second is what we might call philosophical orthodoxy – the family of traditional philosophical understandings of moral psychology targeted by the “pessimists.” May's (p. 7; cf. pp. xi, 3, 4, 6, 7, 19) frequent use of locutions like “our moral beliefs” and “our moral minds” notwithstanding, folk morality is far from a unity, and neither is there a monolithic philosophical orthodoxy, even within the comparatively narrow anglophone “analytic tradition” where this discussion lies. Nevertheless, certain commitments are often attributed to much of both folk morality and philosophical orthodoxy, at least in their anglophone guises: for example, that reflection has a central place in moral experience; that moral judgments are supported by tolerably undistorted reasoning; that character traits powerfully influence moral judgment and behavior.
May is right that those he dubs “pessimists” have frequently criticized such claims, in both folk and philosophical variants. Yet just as the optimist orthodoxy manifests considerable diversity, so does the pessimist insurgency. To the extent that the pessimism at issue is supposed to be pessimism about the possibility of progress in moral inquiry (metaethical difficulty surrounding “moral progress” hereby noted and skirted), many of May's “pessimists” are not pessimists at all. On the contrary, they understand their work as contributions to progress in moral inquiry. Most often, his “pessimists,” at least those identified as philosophers, target particular aspects of philosophical orthodoxy, rather than moral inquiry in general (e.g., even Machery's [Reference Machery2010] gloomily titled “The Bleak Implications of Moral Psychology,” is not generally pessimistic, but focused on difficulties with character and intuitions in ethics).
3. May identifies two main forms of pessimism, one about cognition and the other about motivation. Pessimists about cognition, May thinks, are dubious about the role of reason in ethics. In this, he's not alone: according to D'Arms and Jacobson (Reference D'Arms, Jacobson, D'Arms and Jacobson2014, p. 253), “the champions of empirical ethics are united in holding that the emotional basis of morality systematically undermines its pretensions to rational justification.” Certainly, among the most central preoccupation of we “pessimists” – a main take home message for our students – is the influence of emotion on moral cognition and behavior, especially the disquieting influence of rationally arbitrary, “incidental,” emotions. But this needn't entail the derogation of reason; a concern about rationally arbitrary influences may embody a regard for reason. Indeed, one thing scientific moral psychology can do is help show how people might reason better: For example, Cameron et al. (Reference Cameron, Payne and Doris2013) used a simple intervention – a rather rationalist instruction to observe differences among one's emotional experiences – to ameliorate the influence of incidental disgust on moral judgment.
Furthermore, as May himself notes, two of the authors most concerned about the influence of emotion on morality, Greene (Reference Greene2013; Reference Greene2014) and Singer (Reference Singer2005; Reference Singer2015), actually advocate highly aspirational utilitarianisms, rather than moral despair. And they are certainly not anti-rationalists; as D'Arms and Jacobson (Reference D'Arms, Jacobson, D'Arms and Jacobson2014, p. 255) read these two, they favor a “hyper-rationalist” approach. Finally, Greene and Singer are not even uniformly critics of commonsense morality: Their utilitarianism certainly has roots in everyday intuitions about the moral importance of harm and aggregate harm, and neither are above deploying thought experimental appeals to intuition (e.g., Singer Reference Singer1999).
May (p. 6) also targets “a brand of sentimentalism which contends that moral cognition is fundamentally driven by emotion, passion, or sentiment that is distinct from reason (e.g., Nichols Reference Nichols2004; Prinz Reference Prinz2007).” But although Prinz (Reference Prinz2007) may count as an anti-rationalist, other sentimentalists take different views. D'Arms and Jacobson (Reference D'Arms, Jacobson, D'Arms and Jacobson2014; Reference D'Arms and Jacobsonforthcoming) defend “rational sentimentalism” and Nichols’ work has always had something of a rationalist feel, emphasizing the importance of rule-based inference, as well as emotion, in moral judgment (e.g., Nichols Reference Nichols2004, Ch. 1; Nichols et al. Reference Nichols, Kumar, Lopez, Ayars and Chan2016). I suspect Nichols is more the sort of empirically inclined “pessimist” May takes in his sights, but D'Arms and Jacobson (Reference D'Arms, Jacobson, D'Arms and Jacobson2014, p. 254), though at pains to deplore “the scientism implicit in much empirical ethics,” are themselves avowedly in the business of crafting scientifically credible ethical theory.
In fact, many “pessimist” projects may be seen as animated by a quite orthodox concern with how to harmonize the deliverances of emotion and cognition in optimally reasonable judgments of ourselves and our worlds – a project, it seems to me, quite in the spirit of May's own. So understood, they join May in extending a time honored philosophical enterprise.
It is true that “pessimists” are more likely than “optimists” to take seriously the science identifying the shortcomings of human rationality. Whether traditional a priorists or empirically concerned, “optimists” are more likely to adopt debunking perspectives on the science, apparently in hopes the orthodoxy can persist more or less unchanged. But the “pessimist” must despair of progress in moral inquiry only if the orthodox way to think about morality is the only way to think about morality, and the antecedent is manifestly untrue. There is more than one way to think about morality, and these ways may depart orthodoxy to varying degrees.
4. This important point is further illustrated when we turn to May's treatment of pessimism about motivation, particularly as he finds it in discussion of situationism and virtue ethics. May (p. 209) characterizes situationism as “the idea that human behavior is influenced by features of one's circumstances far more heavily and more often than we tend to think,” though his concern “isn't necessarily situationism in particular, but a view closely associated with it, to the effect that much of our behavior is motivated by factors we would recognize as arbitrary, alien, or non-reasons.” I'm guessing many drawn to views in the vicinity of situationism hold something like these positions; at least, I'm guessing I do. But May's (p. 15) real concern is with something else, the thought that if “we are motivated by ethically arbitrary factors” it may be that “we're chronically incapable of acting for the right reasons.” In May's (pp. 5, 16, 173, 199–200) view, this is a kind of skepticism about what he calls “virtuous motivation.”
In this context May (pp. 15, 199, 210) mentions Nelkin (Reference Nelkin2005), Nahmias (Reference Nahmias, Marraffa, Caro and Ferretti2007), Vargas (Reference Vargas, Clark, Kiverstein and Vierkant2013b), and Doris (Reference Doris2015), apparently as pessimist exemplars. But none of us deny that people can act on the right reasons (whatever these turn out to be); indeed, Nelkin and Vargas are best known for their anti-skeptical “reasons responsiveness” accounts of morally responsible agency. May (p. 210) is sometimes more qualified, allowing that “some of these theorists wouldn't consider themselves to be arguing for pessimism about moral motivation.” But, he (p. 210) thinks, “such frameworks can easily lead to it.” If I am right, a better reading of most theorists in question is that they go to lengths to evade the pessimism initially seeming to follow from taking the troubling empirical findings seriously.
Curiously, May does not cite the main work, Lack of Character (Doris Reference Doris2002), in which I, perhaps with an excess of youthful ebullience, advocated situationism; in the later work he does cite, I (Doris Reference Doris2015, pp. 14–16) explicitly decline to enter the “character controversy.” (May [213–22] contends that the arguments I make in Doris [Reference Doris2015] are subject to a fatal dilemma. I have [Doris Reference Doris2018] contested this elsewhere.) When I was espousing situationist character skepticism, my target was a particular conception of character traits, understood as issuing in cross-situationally consistent behavior. This is only skepticism about “virtuous motivation” if virtuous motivation must flow from a robust “firm and unchangeable” character, as Aristotle may have supposed (see Doris Reference Doris2002, pp. 16–18). But there are multiple ways way to think about traits and multiple ways to think about virtuous motivation. I was at pains, in developing character skepticism, to eschew moral skepticism; indeed, a central concern was to argue that moral thinking could get on, and indeed get on better, without reliance on empirically suspect notions of character.
I belabor this “inside baseball” issue not – at least not only! – out of the narcissistic pique common to scholars who imagine themselves misunderstood, but to underscore the difficulty with May's taxonomy. Very often, the “pessimist's” pessimism is tightly focused – in this case on a particular conception of character traits – whereas May's objections often address more sweeping arguments that many “pessimists” eschew. Some moral psychologists may tend toward sweeping pessimisms about the prospects of moral inquiry, and I share May's suspicion of these views. But I don't think May has identified a more or less homogeneous cadre of interdisciplinary moral psychologists, say as exemplified by myself and my colleagues (e.g., in the Moral Psychology Research Group, www.moralpsychology.net), that is appropriately set up as pessimistic foil to his “optimistic rationalism.” As May (p. 18) acknowledges, “pessimism comes in many forms” – and many of those, I'd insist, aren't all that pessimistic.
5. All this said, May is not wrong about the gestalts diverging. For May (pp. xi, 4) is right that many of those he dubs “pessimists” believe that commonsense morality, in many of its many forms, is in need of “serious repair.” Here, they often appeal to systematic empirical research, but I suspect that many of them, like me (Doris Reference Doris2002, Ch. 3; Doris & Murphy Reference Doris and Murphy2007; Murphy & Doris, Reference Murphy, Doris, Nelkin and Pereboomforthcoming), are equally motivated by the horrors of human history – as well as an appalling present and terrifying future. Call this the pessimistic abduction: Part of the best explanation of why the story of humanity is at so many points a story of moral horror is that our moral thinking is in serious disrepair.
In this respect, the “pessimist's” glass is half empty. And May's, perhaps, is half full. In discussing data suggesting that “a politician's followers are inclined to rationalize continued support even in the face of rather egregious scandals,” May (p. 207) concludes, hopefully, that “the love isn't unconditional and supporters will eventually jump ship.” On January 23, 2016, a U.S. presidential candidate boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.” That candidate is now president, and events have done distressingly little to suggest that he is wrong and May is right. (To take one of uncounted examples: if vicious middle school mockery – on camera – of a disabled person does not cost you the love of your diehard supporters, what will?) Here, me and many of my empirically minded colleagues in moral psychology may well be pessimists: We think the impediments to thinking clearly and humanely are many, and the obstacles to behaving accordingly are still more. But there's also a sense in which we are cock-eyed optimists: We are animated by the conviction that a scientifically credible understanding of why we so often go wrong is a necessary part of finding ways to do better. And that, many of us empirically minded moral psychologists would say, is why we do what we do.
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1. May's (Reference May2018) Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind addresses the interdisciplinary, empirically informed, moral psychology that has proliferated in the philosophy and psychology of the past 20 years. The overall tone of this work, May (preface, p. xi) contends, is pessimistic “about ordinary moral thought and action” Against such pessimism, May (p. xi) argues that “our best science helps to defend moral knowledge and virtue against prominent empirical attacks,” and thereby casts himself as an optimist, defending traditional notions of reason and virtue. Yet May (p. 19) departs from the a priori, ascientific methodology that until recently dominated moral psychology in anglophone philosophy, remarking that “few optimists have taken the empirical challenges seriously, let alone answered them successfully.”
May's assessment of his comrades in optimism may be a little unkind: Although there remain blissfully obdurate a priorists in moral psychology, increasing numbers of traditionally minded philosophers are engaging the empirical literature, most notably those working the burgeoning field of character studies (e.g., Miller et al. Reference Miller, Furr, Knobel and Fleeson2015). But May's book displays considerably more facility with the empirical literature than does the work of many optimists, making for an innovative and important contribution to moral psychology, which ought to be read by everyone in the field.
But (straightaway to the “but” endemic in these exercises) while I'm impressed by May's acumen, I have reservations about his management of the rhetorical space. In particular, I question his development of the optimist/pessimist dialectic. Although I will, for convenience, adopt May's nomenclature, I'll argue, as one of his pessimist foils, that this taxonomy is not generally apt, and I'll therefore, with no disrespect intended, henceforth flag our disagreement with “scare quotes” around optimist, pessimist, and variants where dialectical clarity requires it. Although there are certainly moments in the literature that are pessimistic in tenor, the sensibility driving the new interdisciplinary moral psychology is probably as often optimistic as not. Sharpening the taxonomy has a serious purpose, because misattributions of morally nihilistic pessimism help fuel the sometimes vitriolic repudiations of interdisciplinary moral psychology found in philosophical commentary.
2. An initial complication is that there are two, imperfectly overlapping, beneficiaries of May's optimism. The first is sometimes called folk morality; May (p. 7) declares “there are no empirical grounds for debunking core elements of ordinary moral judgment.” The second is what we might call philosophical orthodoxy – the family of traditional philosophical understandings of moral psychology targeted by the “pessimists.” May's (p. 7; cf. pp. xi, 3, 4, 6, 7, 19) frequent use of locutions like “our moral beliefs” and “our moral minds” notwithstanding, folk morality is far from a unity, and neither is there a monolithic philosophical orthodoxy, even within the comparatively narrow anglophone “analytic tradition” where this discussion lies. Nevertheless, certain commitments are often attributed to much of both folk morality and philosophical orthodoxy, at least in their anglophone guises: for example, that reflection has a central place in moral experience; that moral judgments are supported by tolerably undistorted reasoning; that character traits powerfully influence moral judgment and behavior.
May is right that those he dubs “pessimists” have frequently criticized such claims, in both folk and philosophical variants. Yet just as the optimist orthodoxy manifests considerable diversity, so does the pessimist insurgency. To the extent that the pessimism at issue is supposed to be pessimism about the possibility of progress in moral inquiry (metaethical difficulty surrounding “moral progress” hereby noted and skirted), many of May's “pessimists” are not pessimists at all. On the contrary, they understand their work as contributions to progress in moral inquiry. Most often, his “pessimists,” at least those identified as philosophers, target particular aspects of philosophical orthodoxy, rather than moral inquiry in general (e.g., even Machery's [Reference Machery2010] gloomily titled “The Bleak Implications of Moral Psychology,” is not generally pessimistic, but focused on difficulties with character and intuitions in ethics).
3. May identifies two main forms of pessimism, one about cognition and the other about motivation. Pessimists about cognition, May thinks, are dubious about the role of reason in ethics. In this, he's not alone: according to D'Arms and Jacobson (Reference D'Arms, Jacobson, D'Arms and Jacobson2014, p. 253), “the champions of empirical ethics are united in holding that the emotional basis of morality systematically undermines its pretensions to rational justification.” Certainly, among the most central preoccupation of we “pessimists” – a main take home message for our students – is the influence of emotion on moral cognition and behavior, especially the disquieting influence of rationally arbitrary, “incidental,” emotions. But this needn't entail the derogation of reason; a concern about rationally arbitrary influences may embody a regard for reason. Indeed, one thing scientific moral psychology can do is help show how people might reason better: For example, Cameron et al. (Reference Cameron, Payne and Doris2013) used a simple intervention – a rather rationalist instruction to observe differences among one's emotional experiences – to ameliorate the influence of incidental disgust on moral judgment.
Furthermore, as May himself notes, two of the authors most concerned about the influence of emotion on morality, Greene (Reference Greene2013; Reference Greene2014) and Singer (Reference Singer2005; Reference Singer2015), actually advocate highly aspirational utilitarianisms, rather than moral despair. And they are certainly not anti-rationalists; as D'Arms and Jacobson (Reference D'Arms, Jacobson, D'Arms and Jacobson2014, p. 255) read these two, they favor a “hyper-rationalist” approach. Finally, Greene and Singer are not even uniformly critics of commonsense morality: Their utilitarianism certainly has roots in everyday intuitions about the moral importance of harm and aggregate harm, and neither are above deploying thought experimental appeals to intuition (e.g., Singer Reference Singer1999).
May (p. 6) also targets “a brand of sentimentalism which contends that moral cognition is fundamentally driven by emotion, passion, or sentiment that is distinct from reason (e.g., Nichols Reference Nichols2004; Prinz Reference Prinz2007).” But although Prinz (Reference Prinz2007) may count as an anti-rationalist, other sentimentalists take different views. D'Arms and Jacobson (Reference D'Arms, Jacobson, D'Arms and Jacobson2014; Reference D'Arms and Jacobsonforthcoming) defend “rational sentimentalism” and Nichols’ work has always had something of a rationalist feel, emphasizing the importance of rule-based inference, as well as emotion, in moral judgment (e.g., Nichols Reference Nichols2004, Ch. 1; Nichols et al. Reference Nichols, Kumar, Lopez, Ayars and Chan2016). I suspect Nichols is more the sort of empirically inclined “pessimist” May takes in his sights, but D'Arms and Jacobson (Reference D'Arms, Jacobson, D'Arms and Jacobson2014, p. 254), though at pains to deplore “the scientism implicit in much empirical ethics,” are themselves avowedly in the business of crafting scientifically credible ethical theory.
In fact, many “pessimist” projects may be seen as animated by a quite orthodox concern with how to harmonize the deliverances of emotion and cognition in optimally reasonable judgments of ourselves and our worlds – a project, it seems to me, quite in the spirit of May's own. So understood, they join May in extending a time honored philosophical enterprise.
It is true that “pessimists” are more likely than “optimists” to take seriously the science identifying the shortcomings of human rationality. Whether traditional a priorists or empirically concerned, “optimists” are more likely to adopt debunking perspectives on the science, apparently in hopes the orthodoxy can persist more or less unchanged. But the “pessimist” must despair of progress in moral inquiry only if the orthodox way to think about morality is the only way to think about morality, and the antecedent is manifestly untrue. There is more than one way to think about morality, and these ways may depart orthodoxy to varying degrees.
4. This important point is further illustrated when we turn to May's treatment of pessimism about motivation, particularly as he finds it in discussion of situationism and virtue ethics. May (p. 209) characterizes situationism as “the idea that human behavior is influenced by features of one's circumstances far more heavily and more often than we tend to think,” though his concern “isn't necessarily situationism in particular, but a view closely associated with it, to the effect that much of our behavior is motivated by factors we would recognize as arbitrary, alien, or non-reasons.” I'm guessing many drawn to views in the vicinity of situationism hold something like these positions; at least, I'm guessing I do. But May's (p. 15) real concern is with something else, the thought that if “we are motivated by ethically arbitrary factors” it may be that “we're chronically incapable of acting for the right reasons.” In May's (pp. 5, 16, 173, 199–200) view, this is a kind of skepticism about what he calls “virtuous motivation.”
In this context May (pp. 15, 199, 210) mentions Nelkin (Reference Nelkin2005), Nahmias (Reference Nahmias, Marraffa, Caro and Ferretti2007), Vargas (Reference Vargas, Clark, Kiverstein and Vierkant2013b), and Doris (Reference Doris2015), apparently as pessimist exemplars. But none of us deny that people can act on the right reasons (whatever these turn out to be); indeed, Nelkin and Vargas are best known for their anti-skeptical “reasons responsiveness” accounts of morally responsible agency. May (p. 210) is sometimes more qualified, allowing that “some of these theorists wouldn't consider themselves to be arguing for pessimism about moral motivation.” But, he (p. 210) thinks, “such frameworks can easily lead to it.” If I am right, a better reading of most theorists in question is that they go to lengths to evade the pessimism initially seeming to follow from taking the troubling empirical findings seriously.
Curiously, May does not cite the main work, Lack of Character (Doris Reference Doris2002), in which I, perhaps with an excess of youthful ebullience, advocated situationism; in the later work he does cite, I (Doris Reference Doris2015, pp. 14–16) explicitly decline to enter the “character controversy.” (May [213–22] contends that the arguments I make in Doris [Reference Doris2015] are subject to a fatal dilemma. I have [Doris Reference Doris2018] contested this elsewhere.) When I was espousing situationist character skepticism, my target was a particular conception of character traits, understood as issuing in cross-situationally consistent behavior. This is only skepticism about “virtuous motivation” if virtuous motivation must flow from a robust “firm and unchangeable” character, as Aristotle may have supposed (see Doris Reference Doris2002, pp. 16–18). But there are multiple ways way to think about traits and multiple ways to think about virtuous motivation. I was at pains, in developing character skepticism, to eschew moral skepticism; indeed, a central concern was to argue that moral thinking could get on, and indeed get on better, without reliance on empirically suspect notions of character.
I belabor this “inside baseball” issue not – at least not only! – out of the narcissistic pique common to scholars who imagine themselves misunderstood, but to underscore the difficulty with May's taxonomy. Very often, the “pessimist's” pessimism is tightly focused – in this case on a particular conception of character traits – whereas May's objections often address more sweeping arguments that many “pessimists” eschew. Some moral psychologists may tend toward sweeping pessimisms about the prospects of moral inquiry, and I share May's suspicion of these views. But I don't think May has identified a more or less homogeneous cadre of interdisciplinary moral psychologists, say as exemplified by myself and my colleagues (e.g., in the Moral Psychology Research Group, www.moralpsychology.net), that is appropriately set up as pessimistic foil to his “optimistic rationalism.” As May (p. 18) acknowledges, “pessimism comes in many forms” – and many of those, I'd insist, aren't all that pessimistic.
5. All this said, May is not wrong about the gestalts diverging. For May (pp. xi, 4) is right that many of those he dubs “pessimists” believe that commonsense morality, in many of its many forms, is in need of “serious repair.” Here, they often appeal to systematic empirical research, but I suspect that many of them, like me (Doris Reference Doris2002, Ch. 3; Doris & Murphy Reference Doris and Murphy2007; Murphy & Doris, Reference Murphy, Doris, Nelkin and Pereboomforthcoming), are equally motivated by the horrors of human history – as well as an appalling present and terrifying future. Call this the pessimistic abduction: Part of the best explanation of why the story of humanity is at so many points a story of moral horror is that our moral thinking is in serious disrepair.
In this respect, the “pessimist's” glass is half empty. And May's, perhaps, is half full. In discussing data suggesting that “a politician's followers are inclined to rationalize continued support even in the face of rather egregious scandals,” May (p. 207) concludes, hopefully, that “the love isn't unconditional and supporters will eventually jump ship.” On January 23, 2016, a U.S. presidential candidate boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.” That candidate is now president, and events have done distressingly little to suggest that he is wrong and May is right. (To take one of uncounted examples: if vicious middle school mockery – on camera – of a disabled person does not cost you the love of your diehard supporters, what will?) Here, me and many of my empirically minded colleagues in moral psychology may well be pessimists: We think the impediments to thinking clearly and humanely are many, and the obstacles to behaving accordingly are still more. But there's also a sense in which we are cock-eyed optimists: We are animated by the conviction that a scientifically credible understanding of why we so often go wrong is a necessary part of finding ways to do better. And that, many of us empirically minded moral psychologists would say, is why we do what we do.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Justin D'Arms, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich for very helpful comments on earlier versions.