title: Difficulty of morality and the difficulty of moral psychology: some methodological and theoretical considerations
title: The difficulty of morality and the difficulty of moral psychology: some methodological and theoretical considerations
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Zhang, Jenny Qiaopo
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: moral psychology
subject: empirical approaches
subject: sacrificial dilemmas
subject: utilitarianism
subject: ethical theories
subject: real-world moral situations
subject: fragmentation

description: This thesis offers a novel critical examination of influential approaches and methodologies in empirical moral psychology by elucidating the hitherto overlooked convergence in critiques from psychology, philosophy of science and twentieth-century moral philosophy. The general aim is to show that there are some pervasive and sometimes peculiar methodological and theoretical issues pertaining to moral psychology. These issues prevent experimental findings from attaining a high degree of validity and/or reliability. At the heart of it all is the difficulty of studying a subject matter as complex as morality and the significant impact of researchers’ values and interests on research outputs. Chapter 1 is the introductory chapter, where I spell out the context from which the relevant issues arise and provide an outline of the thesis. Chapters 2 to 4 constitute the negative critique, while Chapter 5 presents the positive proposal. In Chapter 2, I discuss some issues with influential empirical approaches to study utilitarian thinking. The first issue concerns moral psychological studies that draw explicit connection between sacrificial dilemmas and normative ethical theories, such as utilitarianism. This approach reflects what I call an “assumption of fit with theory” – the assumption that sacrificial dilemmas reliably track attitudes towards, or inclinations about, certain ethical theories. I argue that there are good reasons to question this assumption. This casts doubt on the experimental findings that allegedly shed light on utilitarian thinking. To address the assumption of fit, some researchers propose paradigms that move beyond using sacrificial dilemmas as stimulus materials. I argue that when the proposed research paradigm involves studying a broad prescriptive recommendation, further problems arise. In Chapter 3, I cast doubt on the ecological validity of moral psychological lab studies, through examining studies that use sacrificial dilemmas as stimulus materials. I first argue that the hypothetical sacrificial dilemmas used as stimuli in laboratories are often unrepresentative of real-world moral situations. I then argue that simply changing the stimuli does not resolve the issue. This is because there are some potentially important features of real-world moral behaviour and experience (e.g., relationality, subjectivity, context-dependency, creativity and unpredictability) that certain experimental methods (e.g., using stimulus materials in laboratories and controlling for confounding variables) cannot accommodate. However, even if one rejects this characterisation of moral behaviour and experience, there is still a cause for concern. This is because methodologies employed to design and conduct studies aim at experimental control. Experimental control comes in tandem with abstraction, which is characterised by the omission of details. The mere possibility that whatever lies outside of the confines of a lab study is in fact morally significant warrants concerns about ecological validity. In Chapter 4, I discuss issues surrounding what I call “fragmentation” in moral psychology. Fragmentation involves breaking a target of inquiry into constitutive parts or categories, with the assumption that the identified parts are fundamental to the target, and invoking these parts explains the target’s behaviour. In moral psychology, fragmentation is seen in the way in which moral foundations are identified and isolated, and an explanation of the moral behaviour of interest is furnished by reference to the moral foundation(s) alone. It is also seen in the way in which a small number of categories of psychological processes, e.g., automatic emotional processes and controlled reasoning processes, are invoked as the fundamental processes underpinning deontological and utilitarian judgements. More broadly, fragmentation manifests in the way in which neurocognitive properties and processes are fragmented from other features relevant to a target moral phenomenon. I demonstrate that worries about fragmentation raised elsewhere can be applied to contemporary theorists’ approaches in moral psychology. I highlight that firstly, fragmenting tendencies might be counterproductive to understanding a subject matter that is by nature complex, multifaceted and pluralistic, such as moral subjects or phenomena. I then argue that there is room to question the extent to which the morally relevant foundations, processes or mechanisms identified comprise stable separable parts, which display reliable behaviour across different contexts. Finally, I address two instrumentalist responses to my critique and argue that adopting an instrumentalist or pragmatist stance does not readily escape the danger of fragmentation. In light of the issues discussed in Chapters 2 to 4, I gesture towards some recommendations in Chapter 5 for future research on morality in moral psychology. While some methodological issues may be resolved by correcting, changing or adopting new methods, some other issues that I have discussed are resistant to simple, methodologically oriented solutions. This is because solutions that merely target methodologies still operate within the confines of, and thus do not eliminate, the underlying theoretical issues. The aim of the positive proposal is in part to identify which of the issues discussed previously can be resolved, diminished or avoided in a minimally problematic way, and offer some considerations for how to achieve that. The general lesson is that a paradigmatic shift towards more hypothesis-generating and theory-building approaches can alleviate concerns about ecological validity significantly.