bruenig on the death penalty

 This morning, I read Elizabeth Bruenig's NYT article on capital punishment: https://nyti.ms/3gTQPhy.

Bruenig does an excellent job detailing the moments leading up to two very different men's executions: Alfred Bourgeouis brutally murdered his wife and infant child, while Brandon Bernard played a minor role in a robbery that led to the murder of a married couple. Our intuitions suggest different kinds of condemnations for these two men. Bourgeouis' brutal murders cry out for the most extreme kind of punishment possible, whereas Bernard's crime calls for something lesser. Still, Bruenig is staunchly committed to the wrongness of capital punishment. On her view, the system is too fallible to render just executions. This means that, regardless of her intuitions, she is ideologically committed to the view that neither men should be executed. 

The sort of dissonance between intuitions and moral commitments Bruenig admits to brings up a really interesting issue in how we form our moral judgments: how much should our intuitions guide our moral judgments? There are many good arguments for capital punishment, but what if my intuitions about its wrongness keep me from accepting them? Am I acting irresponsibly here?

I'm not sure. If the view that we should have arguments for every moral judgment we have is true, then Bruenig is in trouble here. But surely this is false because it's way too demanding. If I see a man mug a woman, I don't have to consciously reason out why theft is bad; I just immediately form the judgment that the man is doing something terribly immoral. So it's probably not the case we need an argument for every moral judgment we have.

But then this could lead to other sorts of worries. If we don't need arguments for moral judgments, then we might risk a kind of vicious emotivism in which most of our moral judgments are just expressions of how we feel about things. If this is the case, then when Bruenig expresses her view that capital punishment is categorically immoral, she might just be expressing her distaste for capital punishment. Some might argue that Bruenig's protests only matter once she appeals to some kind of Kantian principle like "murder is always bad" as the reason for her distate for capital punishment. 

I'm still not sure what I think about the place of intuitions, emotions, and reasons in forming moral judgments, but I at least think that none of these have a monopoly on how such judgments are formed. 

humean passions v kantian reason

Winter break has given me time to read two really interesting books. First is Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. Among the many things Haidt does in this work, he defends the view that most of our moral/religious/political beliefs are driven by our intuitions. We first encounter a question, have an intuition about it, form a judgment about our intuition, and then we engage in post hoc reasoning to rationalize our initial intuition. 

The second book I've been able to read over break is Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. Here, MacIntyre offers a historical sketch of Haidt's view that our intuitions play a large role in our judgments. He draws on the works of Kant and Hume to suggest that there's a general divide on how we should form our moral judgment. Kant thinks moral judgments should be the products of our use of reason; that is, we ought to think about which sorts of actions are ones we could universalize. In contrast, Hume is like Haidt with respect to our moral judgments. He thinks whenever we express a moral judgment about a particular action, we are expressing our feelings about the action. Unlike the Kantian view, Hume takes it that rationality doesn't play much of a role at all with respect to these sorts of judgments. 

It seems like the Haidt/Hume view is descriptively right but normatively wrong (or at least under-developed). It just seems like most people engage in the sort of post hoc reasoning that Haidt thinks we do. But, ironically, this isn't just an intuition; Haidt cites all kinds of studies that suggest this view is correct. One entertaining study Haidt cites is an examination in which two different groups assess a series of moral dilemmas. The catch is that one of the groups is in an area that is filled with fart spray, such that they're inhaling disgusting odors as they assess the situations. It turned out that the fart spray group condemned the moral dilemmas at an overwhelmingly higher rate than the other group. This is just one of many studies that suggest that our judgments are usually formed out of intuitions that aren't based on rationality.

I'm not sure what I think about this just yet; maybe I'll comment on it later. But I found MacIntyre's discussion interesting.