Huckleberry Finn Handout: Moral Reasoning
  Getting to "ought"

“People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning . . . but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.” Steven Pinker (The Moral Instinct)

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Most people believe that harming innocent children is wrong, as is cheating on an exam or breaking a promise. More controversially, some people believe that abortion is wrong, that the death penalty is unjust, or that animals should not be killed and eaten.

These moral judgments are unlike other social judgments in an important way. Not only do we believe that our moral judgments are correct, but we believe that (unlike our attitudes toward, say, chocolate ice cream) everyone else should agree with.

However, a problem arises when defending moral judgments. Defending a moral judgment by appealing to our subjective preferences (e.g., “abortion is wrong because I don’t like it") is unpersuasive, inasmuch it fails to provide a compelling reason why others should agree. And unlike factual beliefs (e.g., that the world is round), there is usually no objective set of facts that can be used to evaluate a moral claim.

These features make disagreement in the moral domain a tricky problem. What individuals often do, however, is defend a specific moral judgment by appealing to a general moral principle. Principles have the advantage of being foundational rules that can guide judgment across a wide variety of situations, making these judgments appear to be less like ad hoc preferences and more like rational facts.

A principle serves as a first step—once there is agreement about a principle, whether or not the specific moral claim is an instantiation of the principle can be deduced. Reasoning one’s way to specific moral judgments by using general principles is not only the way moral philosophers do things, it is also a sign of mature moral reasoning according to developmental psychologists.

Individuals at the highest stages of moral reasoning, according to Kohlberg, reason their way from a set of universal principles to making judgments about specific dilemmas they encounter in everyday life.

Of course, there has been significant debate within moral philosophy as to which principles should be endorsed. In particular, moral philosophers are quite divided as to whether a consequentialist or a deontological normative ethic is most defensible. Consequentialism holds that acts are morally right or wrong to the degree that they maximize good outcomes, and that the means to such maximization are irrelevant. Deontologists, on the other hand, believe that there are constraints against action independent of consequences some acts are wrong in-and-of themselves. Such constraints often include injunctions not to break promises, not to lie, and in general not to harm innocent others.