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Which Moral Scenarios Are Unfamiliar?

1. Ethical judgements are explained by a dual-process theory, which distinguishes faster from slower processes.

2. Faster processes are unreliable in unfamiliar* situations.

3. Therefore, we should not rely on faster process in unfamiliar* situations.

4. When philosophers rely on not-justified-inferentially premises, they are relying on faster processes.

5. We have reason to suspect that the moral scenarios and principles philosophers consider involve unfamiliar* situations.

6. Therefore, not-justified-inferentially premises about particular moral scenarios, and debatable principles, cannot be used in ethical arguments where the aim is knowledge.

Mary [...] notices an empty boxcar rolling out of control. [...] anyone it hits will die. [...] If Mary does nothing, the boxcar will hit the five people on the track. If Mary pulls a lever it will release the bottom of the footbridge and [...] one person will fall onto the track, where the boxcar will hit the one person, slow down because of the one person, and not hit the five people farther down the track.

Is it for her to pull the lever?

‘I strongly suspect that the footbridge dilemma is unfamiliar*, a bizarre case in which an act of personal violence against an innocent person is the one and only way to promote a much greater good.’

Greene, 2014 p. 716

No one can argue with you.

unfamiliar* problems = ‘ones with which we have inadequate evolutionary, cultural, or personal experience’

Ok, but is it true
THis is supported by what we learned earlier ...

wicked learning environments

‘When a person’s past experience is both representative of the situation relevant to the decision and supported by much , trust the intuition; when it is not, be careful’

(Hogarth, 2010, p. 343).

This is based on situations where statistical inference is possible.

Mary [...] notices an empty boxcar rolling out of control. [...] anyone it hits will die. [...] If Mary does nothing, the boxcar will hit the five people on the track. If Mary pulls a lever it will release the bottom of the footbridge and [...] one person will fall onto the track, where the boxcar will hit the one person, slow down because of the one person, and not hit the five people farther down the track.

Is it for her to pull the lever?

Could past experience be representative of Footbridge?
Is their experience ‘supported by much valid feedback’?
Safe assumption: no one knows exactly.
Even on the boldest, most optimistic view, there will be moral scenarios bizarre enough that the answers would be no.
Further, insofar as philosophers use moral scenarios to explore edge cases and fine contrasts, they increase the risks of outrunning ‘representative experience’ and ‘valid feedback’.

Can we expect to find limits?

Fast processes are flexible and trainable. (No mention of limits.)

Railton (2014)

In other domains, fast processes show signature limits even in expert adults

- Objects (Kozhevnikov & Hegarty, 2001)

- Minds (Low, Apperly, Butterfill, & Rakoczy, 2016)

- Number (Feigenson, Dehaene, & Spelke, 2004)

This is not an accident: any broadly inferential process must make a trade-off between speed and accuracy.

1. Ethical judgements are explained by a dual-process theory, which distinguishes faster from slower processes.

2. Faster processes are unreliable in unfamiliar* situations.

3. Therefore, we should not rely on faster process in unfamiliar* situations.

4. When philosophers rely on not-justified-inferentially premises, they are relying on faster processes.

5. We have reason to suspect that the moral scenarios and principles philosophers consider involve unfamiliar* situations.

6. Therefore, not-justified-inferentially premises about particular moral scenarios, and debatable principles, cannot be used in ethical arguments where the aim is knowledge.

I'm giving this the green for two reasons
(a) even on the view most charitable to opponents, some moral scenarios will be bizarre enough to count as unfamiliar. Although we do not know which these are (as far as I can tell), philosophers’ interest in fine distinctions and edge cases increases the probability of hitting on unfamiliar situations.
(b) we also know that there fast processes in other domains exhibit signature limits even in adults. This means that even for experts with much experience, some quite ordinary-seeming scenarios may be unfamiliar.