Philosophers debate morality perception

Philosophers and those-to-be debated the origins of moral judgments in the film room of?Old Main on Jan. 29.

Guest speaker, Neil Sinhababu from the National University of Singapore gave a lecture over where moral judgments come from in the human brain.

?His specialty is ethics and moral motivation, so we?re very lucky to have him speak,? Benjamin Rider, philosophy professor, said.

Sinhababu presented an emotional perception model,? which defined moral judgments as being ?beliefs about objective properties of the things we judge, typically caused by motivationally potent emotional responses to those things,? he said.

He said moral judgments are caused by an emotional response to a certain situation; the examples he used were anger caused by being punched and horror caused by seeing murder.

?These negative emotional reactions are filed away in our brains and we make moral judgments that these things are necessarily bad, based on our negative emotions,? Sinhababu said.

He presented Smith?s Moral Problem, which attempts to tie together two of three ideas to explain the process and reasoning behind moral judgments. The first idea is cognitivism, which says that moral judgments are beliefs. The second idea is internalism, which says that moral judgments necessarily produce motivational force. The third idea is the Humean theory, which says that desires are necessary for producing motivational force and that beliefs alone can?t do it.

Sinhababu said the emotional perception model explains the correlation between moral judgments and motivation, not by having the moral judgment itself produce motivation, but by making motivational emotions the cause of moral judgment. He said two out of three ideas can be accepted because by accepting all three, moral judgment becomes impossible.

Sinhababu presented the perceptual analogy between morality and color, which draws a parallel between the way people judge color and the way they judge morality. He explained it in terms of a visual experience.

?Color perception works the same way as moral judgment,? Sinhababu said. ?If you are impaired in some way, like colorblindness for a color perception, or alcohol use for moral judgment, you?re more likely to be affected by external arguments.?

He said color judgments are hard-wired into our biology, while moral judgments are subjective and absorbed. He cited experimentation that shows when people are subjected to external forces that change their mood, they?re more likely to judge moral belief through that lens, further, as the force increases, so does the force of the judgment.

Following the lecture was a heated discussion between Sinhababu, Rider and Charles Harvey, chair of the philosophy department, as well as other professors and students.

Harvey said he disagreed with Sinhababu, saying that beliefs come before moral judgments rather than after them and they are the cause of the judgments rather than emotional responses. Sinhababu was receptive to the disagreement but held his initial point. Most of the students present seemed with the lecture.

?I think it ultimately makes morality subjective. People don?t have objective feelings,? senior Jonathan McDougal said.

Source: http://ucaecho.net/campus-life/philosophers-debate-morality-perception/

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