A Dialogue on Moral Psychology

Preface
This hopefully ongoing conversation stems from my previous post about the Stanford Prison Experiment. Of course, I welcome other participants.

Tarun
There's a fairly interesting documentary on the experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o0Nx31yicY

There are people who think situationist psychology should lead us to revise our notion of moral responsibility. I'd like to think the soldiers in Abu Ghraib did what they did because they were more racist and/or more callous than me, but attributing the difference in action (or in my case, imagined action, I guess) to a difference in character rather than a difference in context is a mistake. The best predictor of moral behavior is situation rather than character. We assume the Abu Ghraib behavior is aberrant without understanding that the context in which they are placed fundamentally distorts practical reasoning. We assume that soldiers in a war-zone or in the Stanford Prison Experiment are more or less moral agents like us (their moral cognitive faculties operate more or less like ours) and on that basis judge their behavior pathological and therefore blameworthy. But the presumption is wrong - our cognitive faculties are significantly impacted by situational factors. We have reason to think that in a prison-like setting the behavior of the SPE subjects or the Abu Ghraib jailers is, from a psychological perspective, normal moral functioning.

I have a feeling that if we accept situationist claims, these kinds of exculpations are not going be restricted to extreme situations like war-zones. After all, finding a dime in a phone booth is apparently sufficient to produce a significant difference in moral behavior. If such apparently insignificant contextual factors have a quantifiable effect on our moral cognition, then the argument from the last paragraph should lead us to a radical skepticism about our folk theories of moral motivation and consequently moral responsibility. But then we already knew folk psychology is bullshit, right? Especially folk moral psychology.

Me
It's left-coast relativism like this that's destroying America! Seriously, though, not everyone goes apeshit in evilgenic situations. The issue of course is what we can reasonably expect of people. I'll focus on Abu Ghraib because the prison experiment was distorted by roleplaying (for those of you who haven't seen the documentary, one of the guards styled himself after a particularly sadistic guard in Cool Hand Luke in order to see, according to him, how much verbal abuse people would put up with; I wouldn't rule out shits and giggles). The issue of reasonable expectations is complicated by personal differences. If it's systemically viable, perhaps we should account for factors such as education, temperament, and life experiences, as we do age, when setting moral baselines. Shouldn't someone familiar with Milgram, Zimbardo, and moral psychology ideally be held to a higher standard than someone without a college education (leaving aside any perverse incentives that may result)? "Normal moral functioning" depends significantly on non-situational factors. Given my (perception of my) psychology, I can't imagine that I should be excused for committing atrocities akin to those in Abu Ghraib. Most of the soldiers apparently didn't cross the line, and I doubt most of them exhibited superhuman willpower; they probably just weren't as racist and/or callous as the abusers. Naturally this raises the question of how responsible people are for being callous or racist, but we have to put our foot down somewhere; we can't limit moral blame to the Jeffrey Skillings of the world and regard other wrongdoers as, to some extent, sociopathic. Essentially the problem seems to come down to what fictional account of moral responsibility the law should embrace, given that we can't excuse everyone to the extent that his psychology makes it hard for him to follow the law. I recall that Gideon Rosen had some persuasive things to say about the limitations of real moral culpability. Maybe I'll read this more recent paper of his.

Perhaps this is the same kind of arrogance that any of the participants in these experiments would have exhibited. But I stand by it. Just don't testify at my war crimes trial.

BTW, what's the story with the phone booth example?

Tarun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_character#Experiments

"In one experiment that was done, the moral character of a person was based on whether or not a person had found a dime in a public phone booth. The findings were that 87% of subjects who found a dime in a phone booth helped somebody in need, while only 4% of those who did not find a dime helped."