Critiquing empirical moral psychology

Commonsense psychology seems to have it that most morally significant decisions arise through practical reasoning and moral delibaeration. No doubt, there are social psychological data that put pressure on reflective views of human agency. However, even on the assumption that non-rational and irrational processes are implicated in many morally significant decisions (cf., Doris, 2002, forthcoming), there still seems to be room for rational deliberation in structuring a morally significant life (cf., Annas, 2005; Kamtekar, 2004). Yet, recent rumblings from the emerging field of empirical moral psychology (hereafter EMP) suggest reason for a wide-ranging and thoroughgoing reevaluation of the role of deliberation and reflection in moral cognition. Research in EMP has attempted to establish 1) that moral intuitions are typically produced by reflexive computations that are implicit, fast, and largely automatic (cf., Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006; Greene & Haidt, 2002; Haidt, 2001; Hauser, Young, & Cushman, 2007) and, 2) that practical deliberation can only intervene to offer post-hoc justifications of these reflexive moral intuitions (Haidt, 1993). Such justifications may have long-term implications (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Paxton & Greene, in press); but even so, moral deliberation and practical reflection are supposed to play a less important role in moral cognition than are the reflexive intuitions that are produced by a distinctively moral system. My goal in this paper is to motivate a skeptical conclusion about the deeply reversionary claims about moral intuitions that are common in EMP by demonstrating that current empirical methods provide too blunt of a tool to offer genuine insight into the computational processes that are responsible for the production of our moral intuitions.