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Seeing Wrongness
Abstract
This paper examines the plausibility of an attention-based version of moral perceptualism ( amp ). According to amp , our perception of moral properties is characterized by perceptual attentional patterns that reflect a sensitivity to morally salient features. First, I argue that the explanation for the empirical evidence offered to support amp primarily hinges on cognitive processes rather than perceptual ones. Second, while I acknowledge the critical importance of attention in recognizing moral properties, I contend that we must expand amp ’s explanatory scope to address the question of what drives this attention. I propose an account of our (in)sensitivity to wrongness that builds on amp ’s core statement. In this account, the notion of salience structure of information, defined by the varying accessibility of both perceptual and cognitive representations, plays a central explanatory role.
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Dual-process models of altruistic choice assume that automatic responses give way to deliberation over time, and are a popular way to conceptualize how people make generous choices and why those choices might change under time pressure. However, these models have led to conflicting interpretations of behaviour and underlying psychological dynamics. Here, we propose that flexible, goal-directed deployment of attention towards information priorities provides a more parsimonious account of altruistic choice dynamics. We demonstrate that time pressure tends to produce early gaze-biases towards a person’s own outcomes, and that individual differences in this bias explain how individuals’ generosity changes under time pressure. Our gaze-informed drift-diffusion model incorporating moment-to-moment eye-gaze further reveals that underlying social preferences both drive attention, and interact with it to shape generosity under time pressure. These findings help explain existing inconsistencies in the field by emphasizing the role of dynamic attention-allocation during altruistic choice.
Do we perceptually experience moral properties like rightness and wrongness? For example, as in Gilbert Harman’s classic case, when we see a group of young hoodlums pour gasoline on a cat and ignite it, can we, in the same robust sense, see the action’s wrongness? (Harman in The nature of morality, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977). Many philosophers have recently discussed this question, argued for a positive answer and/or discussed its epistemological implications. This paper presents a new case for a negative answer by, first, getting much clearer on how such experience could be possible at all; second, responding the only argument for a positive answer; and, finally, arguing that postulation of such experience is explanatorily redundant.
Based on the frameworks of dual-process theories, we examined the interplay between intuitive and controlled cognitive processes related to moral and social judgments. In a virtual reality (VR) setting we performed an experiment investigating the progression from fast, automatic decisions towards more controlled decisions over multiple trials in the context of a sacrificing scenario. We repeatedly exposed participants to a modified ten-to-one version and to three one-to-one versions of the trolley dilemma in VR and varied avatar properties, such as their gender and ethnicity, and their orientation in space. We also investigated the influence of arousing music on decisions. Our experiment replicated the behavioral pattern observed in studies using text versions of the trolley dilemma, thereby validating the use of virtual environments in research on moral judgments. Additionally, we found a general tendency towards sacrificing male individuals which correlated with socially desirable responding. As indicated by differences in response times, the ten-to-one version of the trolley dilemma seems to be faster to decide than decisions requiring comparisons based on specific avatar properties as a result of differing moral content. Building upon research on music-based emotion induction, we used music to induce emotional arousal on a physiological level as measured by pupil diameter. We found a specific temporal signature displaying a peak in arousal around the moment of decision. This signature occurs independently of the overall arousal level. Furthermore, we found context-dependent gaze durations during sacrificing decisions, leading participants to look prolonged at their victim if they had to choose between avatars differing in gender. Our study confirmed that moral decisions can be explained within the framework of dual-process theories and shows that pupillometric measurements are a promising tool for investigating affective responses in dilemma situations.
In this review, we synthesize the existing literature demonstrating the dynamic interplay between conceptual knowledge and visual perceptual processing. We consider two theoretical frameworks that demonstrate interactions between processes and brain areas traditionally considered perceptual or conceptual. Specifically, we discuss categorical perception, in which visual objects are represented according to category membership, and highlight studies showing that category knowledge can penetrate early stages of visual analysis. We next discuss the embodied account of conceptual knowledge, which holds that concepts are instantiated in the same neural regions required for specific types of perception and action, and discuss the limitations of this framework. We additionally consider studies showing that gaining abstract semantic knowledge about objects and faces leads to behavioral and electrophysiological changes that are indicative of more efficient stimulus processing. Finally, we consider the role that perceiver goals and motivation may play in shaping the interaction between conceptual and perceptual processing. We hope to demonstrate how pervasive such interactions between motivation, conceptual knowledge, and perceptual processing are in our understanding of the visual environment, and to demonstrate the need for future research aimed at understanding how such interactions arise in the brain.
Can the phenomenal character of perceptual experience be altered by the states of one's cognitive system, for example, one's thoughts or beliefs? If one thinks that this can happen (at least in certain ways that are identified in the paper) then one thinks that there can be cognitive penetration of perceptual experience; otherwise, one thinks that perceptual experience is cognitively impenetrable. I claim that there is one alleged case of cognitive penetration that cannot be explained away by the standard strategies one can typically use to explain away alleged cases. The case is one in which it seems subjects' beliefs about the typical colour of objects affects their colour experience. I propose a two-step mechanism of indirect cognitive penetration that explains how cognitive penetration may occur. I show that there is independent evidence that each step in this process can occur. I suspect that people who are opposed to the idea that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable will be less opposed to the idea when they come to consider this indirect mechanism and that those who are generally sympathetic to the idea of cognitive penetrability will welcome the elucidation of this plausible mechanism.
Whether emotion is a source of moral judgments remains controversial. This study combined neurophysiological measures, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye-tracking, and pupillary response with behavioral measures assessing affective and moral judgments across age. One hundred and twenty-six participants aged between 4 and 37 years viewed scenarios depicting intentional versus accidental actions that caused harm/damage to people and objects. Morally, salient scenarios evoked stronger empathic sadness in young participants and were associated with enhanced activity in the amygdala, insula, and temporal poles. While intentional harm was evaluated as equally wrong across all participants, ratings of deserved punishments and malevolent intent gradually became more differentiated with age. Furthermore, age-related increase in activity was detected in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in response to intentional harm to people, as well as increased functional connectivity between this region and the amygdala. Our study provides evidence that moral reasoning involves a complex integration between affective and cognitive processes that gradually changes with age and can be viewed in dynamic transaction across the course of ontogenesis. The findings support the view that negative emotion alerts the individual to the moral salience of a situation by bringing discomfort and thus can serve as an antecedent to moral judgment.
Gossip is a form of affective information about who is friend and who is foe. We show that gossip does not influence only how a face is evaluated--it affects whether a face is seen in the first place. In two experiments, neutral faces were paired with negative, positive, or neutral gossip and were then presented alone in a binocular rivalry paradigm (faces were presented to one eye, houses to the other). In both studies, faces previously paired with negative (but not positive or neutral) gossip dominated longer in visual consciousness. These findings demonstrate that gossip, as a potent form of social affective learning, can influence vision in a completely top-down manner, independent of the basic structural features of a face.
There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never been seriously considered. The authors argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development and that it is evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. They discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, the authors suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and they make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development.
In the present study, we examined whether emotional valence modulates the neural processes that are engaged during the encoding of information that is later vividly remembered versus that which is only known to be familiar. Participants underwent an fMRI scan while viewing positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. Later, recognized items were labeled as either remembered or known. Negative items that were later vividly remembered recruited temporo-occipital regions associated with sensory processing more than did positive or neutral items that were vividly remembered. The encoding of positive information later known recruited the cingulate gyrus and bilateral frontal and parietal areas--regions associated with episodic and semantic retrieval and self-referential processing--more than did the encoding of negative or neutral items that were later known. These results suggest that memories for negative items may be vividly recollected due to increased sensory processing during encoding, whereas enhanced gist-based processing of positive information may lead to increased feelings of familiarity.
A full understanding of the biology and behavior of humans cannot be complete without the collective contributions of the social sciences, cognitive sciences, and neurosciences. This book collects eighty-two of the foundational articles in the emerging discipline of social neuroscience.
The book addresses five main areas of research: multilevel integrative analyses of social behavior, using the tools of neuroscience, cognitive science, and social science to examine specific cases of social interaction; the relationships between social cognition and the brain, using noninvasive brain imaging to document brain function in various social situations; rudimentary biological mechanisms for motivation, emotion, and attitudes, and the shaping of these mechanisms by social factors; the biology of social relationships and interpersonal processes; and social influences on biology and health.
Bradford Books imprint
Moral perceptualism is the view that perceptual experience is attuned to pick up on moral features in our environment, just as it is attuned to pick up on mundane features of an environment like textures, shapes, colors, pitches, and timbres. One important family of views that incorporate moral perception are those of virtue theorists and sensibility theorists. On these views, one central ability of the virtuous agent is her sensitivity to morally relevant features of situations, where this sensitivity is often spoken of in perceptual terms. However, sensibility theorists have often not been careful to specify how to understand their claims about moral sensibilities as perceptual. In this paper, we distinguish between what we call Attentional Moral Perception and Contentful Moral Perception. We argue that sensibility theorists should endorse Attentional Moral Perception, because it has very powerful empirical evidence in its favor, and it can play all of the explanatory roles that the sensibility theorist needs in her theory of moral sensibilities.
What does it take to be prejudiced against a particular group? And is prejudice always epistemically problematic, or are there epistemically innocent forms of prejudice? In this paper, I argue that certain important forms of prejudice can be wholly constituted by the differential accessibility of certain pieces of information. These accessibility relations constitute a salience structure. A subject is prejudiced against a particular group when their salience structure is unduly organised around that category. This is significant because it reveals that prejudice does not require the presence of any explicit cognitive or emotive attitude, nor need it manifest in behaviour: it can be solely constituted by the organisation of information, where that information may be accurate and well-founded. Nonetheless, by giving an account of ‘undue organisation’ in epistemic terms, I show that this account is compatible with an understanding of prejudice as a negatively valenced epistemic category.
Potential cognitive penetrators include moods, beliefs, hypotheses, knowledge, desires, and traits. The challenge to perceptual justification posed by cognitive penetrability seems related to a circular structure of belief‐formation that it introduces. This chapter addresses on a simple and popular theory of perceptual justification known as dogmatism. It expresses that there are cases in which dogmatism predicts that a cognitively penetrated visual experience can elevate the subject from an epistemically bad situation to an epistemically better one, yet in which it is implausible to suppose that such epistemic elevation takes place. The chapter describes the phenomenon of cognitive penetrability. Cognitive penetrability is a kind of causal influence on visual experience. There are three aspects of cognitive penetrability: the penetrated aspects of visual experience; the potential penetrators; and the type of influence they have. The chapter focuses on the sensitivity of the content of visual experience to doxastic states, desire, mood, and emotion.
Both common sense and dominant traditions in art criticism and philosophical aesthetics maintain that aesthetic features or properties are perceived. However, there are many reasons to be sceptical of this. This chapter defends the thesis-that aesthetic properties are sometimes represented in perceptual experience-against one of those sceptical opponents who maintains that perception represents only low-level properties, and since all theorists agree that aesthetic properties are not low-level properties, perception does not represent aesthetic properties. This chapter offers a novel argument-the argument from seeing-as-against that sceptic which moves from consideration of ambiguous figures to consideration of visual art, concluding that aesthetic properties are sometimes perceived and delivers a general lesson for philosophy of perception. Contrary to extant theories of rich perceptual content, aesthetic properties are better candidates for high-level perceptual contents than standardly theorized rich contents like natural kinds.
Proponents of impure moral perception claim that, while there are perceptual moral experiences, these experiences epistemically depend on a priori moral knowledge. Proponents of pure moral perception claim that moral experiences can justify independently of substantive a priori moral knowledge. Some philosophers, most notably David Faraci (2015), have argued that the pure view is mistaken, since moral perception requires previous moral background knowledge, and such knowledge could not itself be perceptual. I defend pure moral perception against this objection. I consider two ways to understand the notion of "background knowledge" that is crucial to the objection. On a (stronger) reading, the claim that background knowledge is necessary for moral perception is likely false. On a second and weaker reading, the claim is true, but the background knowledge in question could be perceptual, and thus compatible with pure moral perception. Thus, the objection fails.
I defend doubts about the existence of genuine moral perception, understood as the claim that at least some moral properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. Standard examples of moral perception are better explained as habitual implicit inferences or transitions in thought whose degree of psychological immediacy varies with how readily non-evaluative perceptual inputs, jointly with the subject's background moral beliefs, training, and habituation, trigger the kinds of phenomenological responses that moral agents are disposed to have when they represent things as being morally a certain way.
Accounts of non-naturalist moral perception have been advertised as an empiricist-friendly epistemological alternative to moral rationalism. I argue that these accounts of moral perception conceal a core commitment of rationalism - to substantive a priori justification - and embody its most objectionable feature - namely, "mysteriousness." Thus, accounts of non-naturalist moral perception do not amount to an interesting alternative to moral rationalism.
I defend the thesis that at least some moral properties can be part of the contents of experience. I argue for this claim using a contrast argument, a type of argument commonly found in the literature on the philosophy of perception. I first appeal to psychological research on what I call emotionally empathetic dysfunctional individuals (eedis) to establish a phenomenal contrast between eedis and normal individuals in some moral situations. I then argue that the best explanation for this contrast, assuming non-skeptical moral realism, is that badness is represented in the normal individual’s experience but not in the eedi’s experience. I consider and reject four alternative explanations of the contrast.
This paper concerns what I take to be the primary epistemological motivation for defending moral perception. Offering a plausible account of how we gain moral knowledge is one of the central challenges of metaethics. It seems moral perception might help us meet this challenge. The possibility that we know about the instantiation of moral properties in something like the way we know that there is a bus passing in front of us raises the alluring prospect of subsuming moral epistemology under the (relatively) comfortable umbrella of perceptual or, more broadly, empirical knowledge. The good news on this front is that various combinations of metaethical positions and theories of perception arguably have the potential to vindicate moral perception (though I won’t do much to defend this claim here). The bad news, I’ll argue, is that moral perception would be dependent for its epistemic merit on background knowledge of bridge principles linking moral and non-moral properties. Thus, in order to defend a purely perceptual moral epistemology, one would have to argue that knowledge of those principles is likewise perceptual. I further argue it is not.
Perception is typically distinguished from cognition. For example, seeing is importantly different from believing. And while what one sees clearly influences what one thinks, it is debatable whether what one believes and otherwise thinks can influence, in some direct and non-trivial way, what one sees. The latter possible relation is the cognitive penetration of perception. Cognitive penetration, if it occurs, has implications for philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This paper offers an analysis of the phenomenon, its theoretical consequences, and a variety of experimental results and possible interpretations of them. The paper concludes by proposing some constraints for analyses and definitions of cognitive penetrability.
In the recent metaethical literature there has been significant interest in the prospects for what I am denoting ‘Perceptual Intuitionism’: the view that normal ethical agents can and do have non-inferential justification for first-order ethical beliefs by having ethical perceptual experiences, e.g., Cullison 2010, McBrayer 2010, Vayrynen 2008. If true, it promises to constitute an independent a posteriori intuitionist epistemology, providing an alternative to intuitionist accounts which posit a priori intuition and/or emotion as sources of non-inferentially justified ethical beliefs. As it is formulated, it is plausible that a necessary condition for the view is the truth of Ethical Perception: normal ethical agents can and do have perceptual experiences (at least some of which are veridical) as of the instantiation of ethical properties. In this paper a sophisticated and promising account of Ethical Perception is offered. Extant objections are shown to fail. However, it will be argued that it is far from obvious that the account of Perceptual Intuitionism which emerges constitutes an independent alternative to other intuitionist accounts. This is because we have reason to think that ethical perceptual experience may be epistemically dependent on other epistemic sources, e.g. a priori intuition or emotion.
People perceive religious and moral iconography in ambiguous objects, ranging from grilled cheese to bird feces. In the current research, we examined whether moral concerns can shape awareness of perceptually ambiguous stimuli. In three experiments, we presented masked moral and non-moral words around the threshold for conscious awareness as part of a lexical decision task. Participants correctly identified moral words more frequently than non-moral words—a phenomenon we term the moral pop-out effect. The moral pop-out effect was only evident when stimuli were presented at durations that made them perceptually ambiguous, but not when the stimuli were presented too quickly to perceive or slowly enough to easily perceive. The moral pop-out effect was not moderated by exposure to harm and cannot be explained by differences in arousal, valence, or extremity. Although most models of moral psychology assume the initial perception of moral stimuli, our research suggests that moral beliefs and values may shape perceptual awareness.
What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? This book develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. The book starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. It then introduces a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. It then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kind properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. The book goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. The book's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision.
In this paper, I defend the view that we can have perceptual moral knowledge. First, I motivate the moral perception view by drawing on some examples involving perceptual knowledge of complex non-moral properties. I argue that we have little reason to think that perception of moral properties couldn't operate in much the same way that our perception of these complex non-moral properties operates. I then defend the moral perception view from two challenging objections that have yet to be adequately addressed. The first objection is that the moral perception view has implausible commitments concerning the morally blind, people who would claim not to perceive wrongness. The second objection is that the moral perception view is not really compatible with a wide range of the main candidate moral theories. I argue that the moral empiricist has plausible responses to both of these objections. I then address three residual concerns that my defense raises.
Two experiments examined the generality of the negativity bias, the tendency of perceivers to regard immoral behaviors as more informative or diagnostic about an individual’s personal traits than moral behaviors. Both experiments yielded results indicating that perceivers are prone to the bias when information about others is inconsistent in its moral implications but not when information is consistent. Two category-based explanations for the results were considered, one postulating a two-stage process and the other proposing a simpler process that emphasizes the activation of perceivers’ character schemas. The results of both experiments suggest that the negativity bias, although prevalent, is not as pervasive as sometimes thought to be and that character appraisals, once made, are not immutable.
AbstractI argue that it is possible, in the right circumstances, to see what the kind thing is to do: in the right circumstances, we can, literally, see deontic facts, as well as facts about others’ emotional states, and evaluative facts. In arguing for this, I will deploy a notion of non-inferential perceptual belief or judgement according to which the belief or judgement is arrived at non-inferentially in the phenomenological sense (in the sense of involving no conscious reasoning on the subject’s part) and yet is inferential in the epistemic sense (in the sense of being justifiable by the subject after the belief or judgement has been arrived at). The ability to arrive at these kinds of beliefs and judgements is part of virtue, and is also part of what it is to grasp thick ethical concepts in an engaged way. When we come to thinner evaluative and deontic facts and thinner ethical concepts, however, the requirements for non-inferential perceptual belief and judgement are less easily met. Seeing what is the kind thing to do is one matter; seeing what is the right thing to do is another.
Many alleged counter-examples to intentionalism, the thesis that the phenomenology of perceptual experiences of a given sense modality supervenes on the contents of experiences of that modality, can be avoided by adopting a liberal view of the sorts of properties that can be represented in perceptual experience. I argue that there is a class of counter-examples to intentionalism, based on shifts in attention, which avoids this response. A necessary connection between the contents and phenomenal characters of perceptual experiences can be preserved by distinguishing perceptual phenomenology from the phenomenology of attention; but even if this distinction is viable, these cases put pressure on the thesis that phenomenal character can, in general, be explained in terms of mental representation.
One of the primary motivations behind moral anti-realism is a deep-rooted scepticism about moral knowledge. Moral realists attempt counter this worry by sketching a plausible moral epistemology. One of the most radical proposals in the recent literature is that we know moral facts by perception – we can literally see that an action is wrong, etc. A serious objection to moral perception is the causal objection. It is widely conceded that perception requires a causal connection between the perceived and the perceiver. But, the objection continues, we are not in appropriate causal contact with moral properties. Therefore, we cannot perceive moral properties. This papers demonstrates that the causal objection is unsound whether moral properties turn out to be secondary, natural properties; non-secondary, natural properties; or non-natural properties.1
This review focuses on covert attention and how it alters early vision. I explain why attention is considered a selective process, the constructs of covert attention, spatial endogenous and exogenous attention, and feature-based attention. I explain how in the last 25 years research on attention has characterized the effects of covert attention on spatial filters and how attention influences the selection of stimuli of interest. This review includes the effects of spatial attention on discriminability and appearance in tasks mediated by contrast sensitivity and spatial resolution; the effects of feature-based attention on basic visual processes, and a comparison of the effects of spatial and feature-based attention. The emphasis of this review is on psychophysical studies, but relevant electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies and models regarding how and where neuronal responses are modulated are also discussed.
Top-down versus bottom-up attentional control: A failed theoretical dichotomy.
- E Awh
- A V Belopolsky
- Awh, E.
Brain mechanisms of attention.
- J Duncan
- Duncan, J.
The influence of Outcome Status on the attending and memory of positive and negative feedback.
- P Huang
- C Liu
- Huang, P.
Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention: Different Processes and Overlapping Neural Systems.
- F Katsuki
- C Constantinidis
- Katsuki, F.
Value Judgment: Improving Our Ethical Beliefs
- J Griffin
- Griffin, J.
‘I can see it in your eyes’, Biased Processing and Increased Arousal in Dishonest Responses.
- G Hochman
- A Glöckner
- S Fiedler
- Hochman, G.
Moral judgments and visual attention: an eye-tracking investigation.
- Rebecca M Kastner
- Kastner, Rebecca M.
Cognitive penetrability: a no-progress report
- E Machery
- Machery, E.
Moral knowledge by perception.
- S Mcgrath
- McGrath, S.