Debunking Confabulation: Emotions and the Significance of Empirical Psychology for Kantian Ethics

Abstract

It is frequently argued that research findings in empirical moral psychology spell trouble for Kantian ethics. Results from psychology and neuroscience, in particular, have been used to argue that human moral judgment and behavior are pervasively influenced by emotional triggers and inhibitors. Some argue for the strong thesis that our behavior is ‘typically’ determined by emotional responses to situational factors, rather than by rational processes, and that even our cognitive processes are best explained in terms of emotional responses to features of the situation, rather than in terms of rational deliberation.¹ Others argue for a more restricted claim, namely, that the empirical research does not show reason to be ineffective in general, but rather that it debunks Kantianism in particular. Sometimes the charge is merely that Kantianism is mistaken about how human beings work, but it has also been argued that Kantianism should itself be understood as the product of precisely the emotion-driven processes it fails to acknowledge. The charge, then, is that Kantian moral theory as such is best understood as the result of emotional gut reactions. This claim has been formulated most prominently by Joshua Greene, who argues that despite Kantianism’s rationalist ambitions, emotion underlies not only the deontological judgments of ordinary people but also the theoretical justifications of deontology by Kantian moral philosophers.²