Moral decision making should not be a matter of personal preference. But is reasoning about facts all that is needed to determine what is morally right or wrong?
Good decision making is widely considered to be based on (or informed by) evidence – at least, the name of the course I have the pleasure and honour to teach twice a year goes by a title that asserts the importance of doing so. While the role of evidence might sound, well, kind of self-evident, it turns out we don’t always recognize it as such in our decision making. The emphasis placed on evidence – on facts – for good decision making stems principally from the fact that it is sometimes neglected. In other words, more attention to facts and evidence should lead to better decision making.
That does not mean that we can ascertain good decision making from the choice that was made alone. One reason is that different people have different preferences. Which evidence is material to a decision, and in what way, depends on the decision maker. A couple shopping for a vehicle to transport them and their three children will look for different elements of evidence and interpret it differently, compared to a single person looking for a sporty two-seater. A good choice for one would be a terrible one for the other. Second, often uncertainty plays a part in the decision making. Deciding to go out for the day with the family when the weather forecast states a 10% chance of rain makes good use of evidence, and makes good sense – even if, in the event, it happens to rain.
But do these complications hold when it concerns moral decisions? We expect morality to be universal – applying to everyone in the same way, and not subject to individual likings or biases. Something cannot be morally right and morally wrong at the same time. Doesn’t that mean there has to be some objective, factual basis to moral decisions and conclusions? Let’s put that to the test, with another snippet from my favourite long-running BBC radio soap opera, The Archers. The scriptwriters of this show are often pretty good in crafting complex moral configurations, and here, they arguably excelled themselves.
A complex moral sketch
What are the material facts? One Sunday afternoon, Alice, a young mother and a recovering alcoholic who has fallen off the wagon, buys a bottle of gin in the village shop. Later in the evening, George, a 19-year-old village lad discovers Alice passed out in her car, having consumed the entire bottle. He decides to drive her home and, after leaving a message for his father explaining why he’ll be home a little later than anticipated, moves her into the passenger seat and discovers the keys in the glove box. As the car approaches the bridge over the river Am (which gives the village its name, Ambridge), Alice feels sick and attempts to open her door. Distracted, George swerves, and causes an oncoming car to plunge into the water. George stops, calls the emergency services and gets into the water to help the occupants out. Soon another car approaches, with Alistair, the local vet, and Denise, the veterinary nurse at the practice. They stop to help George bring the occupants of the stricken car to the bank. He manages to rescue two people, a middle-aged couple from the village. Joy is in shock, but Mick seems OK, until he realizes a third occupant, Fallon, is missing. She is stuck on the back seat of the car, failing to open the door. George re-enters the water and succeeds to get her free and onto dry land, in the care of Alistair and Denise. As the sirens of the emergency services approach, George disappears momentarily towards Alice’s car parked further up, and drags her back onto the driver’s seat, saying out loud, “I am sorry, Alice, I don’t know what else to do”.
What happened next? George, who did not enjoy the best of reputations in the village, is now hailed as a hero by all. He obtains his father’s phone and manages to delete the message that his father had not yet listened to. Alice is arrested, and when sobered up, is shocked that, despite having placed her car keys in the glovebox to prevent her from driving, she nonetheless drove off. Alistair and Denise had been on the way to a hotel to spend their first night together (he is divorced, her marriage has been over for some time, and the reciprocal nature of their feelings for the other has only recently come to light). But to complicate matters, the next evening in the village pub, Paul – Denise’s son who also works as a junior veterinary nurse in the practice – innocently asks why his boss and his mother were on the road together late on a Sunday. Alistair clumsily invents a somewhat implausible story about a fictitious call-out (with unexpected support from Mick, who twigs what is going on between Alistair and Denise), involving a fictitious sheep in distress and the fictitious administration of some drug to soothe it. Unfortunately, Paul whose job it is to keep track of the practice paperwork, insists on logging the intervention, the drug etc., forcing Alistair to come up with ever more contorted lies. Finally, the routine tests carried out on Fallon the night of the accident reveal that she is pregnant. Fallon has a coil and does not want any children – as she had made clear to her husband, Harrison, before they got married. Nonetheless, Harrison (who would really have liked to be a father) is overjoyed with the news, seemingly oblivious of Fallon’s anguish. However, his joy is short lived, as at the ultrasound scan a few days later, no heartbeat is detected. He blames Alice for “losing his baby”, and is shocked by Fallon’s indifference at the situation. Alice and – as this news spreads – George are wracked by guilt, with Alice seeking further solace in alcohol.
Feelings at the root
Is it possible to pass a definitive, absolute judgment on the actions of the players based on these facts? At first sight, it seems easy to condemn George’s deception, and almost as easy to condemn Alistair’s– perhaps because we disapprove of his and Denise’s liaison. What should we make of Harrison’s reaction to Fallon’s being first pregnant, and then no longer? Should he have suppressed his own, genuine feelings, having agreed he and Fallon would never have children, and knowing how strongly she feels about it? Or was he entitled to express those feelings, first of joy and then of despair, even if it showed disregard for hers? What about Mick, who was clearly lying when he claimed to have made the fictitious call to Alistair? Isn’t lying simply immoral?
Maybe considering the consequences can help us out. Without the accident, none of this would have happened – so who is morally responsible for the accident? Alice never wanted to drive and it was George who was behind the wheel. But it was Alice who distracted George at the critical moment. Would it be just for George – whose motives and intentions were entirely pure – to carry the can? The facts fall well short for us to answer these questions.
When moral judgment of an action seems easy, it is often because we can either easily find well-known, simple moral rules that it clearly violated, or because we can easily pinpoint its negative, harmful consequences. Those are clear, unambiguous facts. But moral rules are often in conflict with one another – you can either support a friend and lie to do so, or refrain from lying and fail to support your friend. And consequences not only often have multiple causes, with responsibility impossible to attribute unambiguously, but are also often a complex mix of beneficial and harmful outcomes.
Working out the conflicts between moral rules, and between beneficial and harmful consequences involves feelings, not just cold, calculated logic. When we evaluate moral situations, we experience emotions – often a whole range of them – that embody those conflicts. These emotions are rooted in our moral intuitions, our subjective experiences and arguably even in our evolved neurological hardwiring. They are the ultimate source that informs us about what is right and wrong. Any moral reasoning follows later – as Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue, the function of reasoning is “to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade”, not “to improve knowledge and make better decisions”. We reason to persuade others and ourselves that what we feel is right.
Right and wrong is a largely matter of feelings, and certainly not just of facts.
Koenfucius 