A man is waiting at a train station. On his right, about twenty feet away, stands a woman reading a magazine. The man glances to his left to check if a train is coming and sees to his horror that another man, about twenty feet from him, is in a crouched position clearly aiming a gun at the woman. The man is too far away to either push the woman or stop the shooter. So he yells out “duck” as he steps between the shooter and the woman just as the gun is fired. As a result, the bullet intended for the woman strikes him in the arm, saving the woman’s life.
Generally, my students accept this scenario as a rather dramatic instance of what they had in mind. I then ask them to consider the following alternative scene. The same people are on the train platform in the same relative positions as in the first version. However, the man in the middle is in this case unaware of the presence of the gunman. While waiting for the train, he notices that his shoe is untied. Just at the moment that our “hero” bends forward to tie his shoe, the gunman fires at the woman. The bullet hits him in the arm, and the woman’s life is saved.
Despite the fact that the behavior of the “hero” (moving in between the shooter and the woman) and outcome (woman is saved) are the same, my students do not consider the second scenario as a depiction of a moral action. This is because there was no element of moral choice involved in the second set of events. The decision to move forward was unrelated to the moral elements of the situation, and the moral outcome (preservation of life) occurred quite by accident. On the basis of this example, my students conclude that moral action as opposed to an accidental or reflexive behavior requires moral judgment.
Now some objections may be raised to the interpretation the students offer with regard to this example. First, it may be argued that the act of saving someone’s life is an instance of supererogation (performing beyond the call of duty) and is not an example of action based on moral obligation (e.g., to refrain from harming another). This objection does not, however, negate the importance that the students placed on volition as a necessary element of moral action, and no one would argue that the act of saving someone’s life is without moral meaning. A second, and more pointed, objection would be to accept the example as portraying a moral action, but to argue that even in the first instance the person was not acting on the basis of rational choice, but did so out of instinct or emotion. This position makes clear that emotion plays an important role in morality.
Moreover, this interpretation reminds us of how many everyday moral actions seem to take place automatically without reflection. In fact, some recent writers have placed great emphasis on the apparent lack of reflection in everyday moral activity, and have argued that morality is guided by an inherited emotional “moral sense” (Wilson 1993).
The role of affect and emotion in the selection and motivation of moral action will be taken up again more thoroughly in a later chapter. For our purposes here, it is enough to recognize that the fact that a judgment is made quickly, and seemingly without reflection, does not necessarily mean that it was made “unthinkingly.” It takes little reflection, for example, for an adult to answer the question, “How much is one plus one?” The seeming automaticity of the response does not negate the answer as a product of thought, however quickly done.
Similarly, while moral actions may be motivated by emotion, and take place with very little conscious reflection, they always involve an element of thought. This is why we don’t consider the “prosocial” behavior of animals (e.g., placing their own lives at risk in order to protect their young) to be truly moral. We attribute such behavior to instinct rather than to the animal’s morality. Indeed, if our hero were acting solely out of instinct or automatic emotional processing, my students would not consider his behavior to have had any more “moral” status than that of the man who saved the woman’s life by accident.
At the core of what we mean by morality, then, is knowledge of right and wrong. Conduct is moral if it involves selection of particular courses of action that are deemed to be right. In the above example, if we were to shift our focus from the “hero” to the shooter, we would quickly see that the person’s moral culpability stems from his choice to harm another person.
If it were to turn out that the shooter were delusional and incapable of understanding the meaning of his actions, we would view the events as tragic rather than in moral terms. Thus, while the human experience of
morality may contain many things, such as emotions (which may be rooted in our evolutionary history), the defining element of morality is moral cognition. Moreover, our deliberations about right and wrong are not confined simply to those things we do seemingly automatically out of habit, or out of an emotional sense that a course of action is right. Moral issues are among the most engaging things that people think about.
It isn’t just philosophers who reflect on moral issues. Just about everyone has pondered the morality of various courses of action and reflected upon the moral meaning of personal decisions. This begins very early in life in the context of deciding on issues of fairness among playmates and siblings, and continues into the twilight concerns over death with dignity.
Read More : Morality and Domains of Social Knowledge
