Concrete Over Abstract: Experimental Evidence of Reflective Equilibrium in Population Ethics

Schoenegger, P. & Grodeck, B. 

(forthcoming). In H. Viciana, F. Aguiar, 

& A. Gaitan (Eds.), Issues in Experimental Moral 

Philosophy. Routledge.

Abstract

One central method of ethics is narrow reflective equilibrium, relating to the conflict between intuitions about general moral principles and intuitions about concrete cases. In these conflicts, general principles are refined, or judgements in concrete chases change to accommodate the until no more conflicts exist. In this paper, we present empirical data on this method in the context of population ethics. We conduct an online experiment (n=543) on Prolific where participants endorse a number of moral principles related to population ethics. They also judge specific population ethical cases that may conflict with their endorsed principles. When conflicts arise, they can choose to revoke the principle, revise their intuition about a case, or continue without having resolved the conflict. We find that participants are significantly more likely to revoke their endorsements of general principles, than their judgements about concrete cases. This evidence suggests that for a lay population, case judgements play a central revisionary role in reflective equilibrium reasoning in the context of population ethics.

Discussion

Our main result is that when participants’ choices result in a conflict between their endorsed abstract principles and their judgements on concrete cases, they prefer to revoke their previously endorsed principle rather than changing or revoking their judgement regarding the concrete population ethical case. Our findings are relevant to theorizing of reflective equilibrium.  Specifically, we take these results to indicate that for lay moral reasoning, case judgements do play a major revisionary role. While we find that some participants want to maintain consistency with the abstract principles, the evidence shows that participants do put more weight on their concrete choices. 

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As a secondary interest, we also tested whether presenting participants with the abstract principles first and then the concrete cases or the reverse changes their endorsement rates of these principles. We found no statistically significant effects in the Control, Person Affectism, or Pareto, though for both versions of Utilitarianism we did find order effects. This drop in endorsement rates provides further evidence for the case above that once participants are presented with some concrete cases that they can form judgements on, they are less likely to endorse the principles (and if they already endorsed them, more likely to revoke their endorsement). This adds to both the literature on order effects in social psychology and experimental philosophy, as well as to our understanding of folk utilitarian morality.

The research can be downloaded here.

Population ethical intuitions

Caviola, L., Althaus, D., Mogensen, A., 

& Goodwin, G. (2021, April 1). 

A pdf is here.

Abstract

We investigated lay people’s population ethical intuitions (N = 4,374), i.e., their moral evaluations of populations that differ in size and composition. First, we found that people place greater relative weight on, and are more sensitive to, suffering compared to happiness. Participants, on average, believed that more happy people are needed to outweigh a given amount of unhappy people in a population (Studies 1a-c). Second, we found that—in contrast to so-called person-affecting views—people do not consider the creation of new people as morally neutral. Participants considered it good to create a new happy person and bad to create a new unhappy person (Study 2). Third, we found that people take into account both the average level (averagism) and the total level (totalism) of happiness when evaluating populations. Participants preferred populations with greater total happiness levels when the average level remained constant (Study 3) and populations with greater average happiness levels when the total level remained constant (Study 4). When the two principles were in conflict, participants’ preferences lay in between the recommendations of the two principles, suggesting that both are applied simultaneously (Study 5). In certain cases, participants even showed averagist preferences when averagism disfavors adding more happy people and favors adding more unhappy people to a population (Study 6). However, when participants were prompted to reflect as opposed to rely on their intuitions, their preferences became more totalist (Studies 5-6). Our findings have implications for moral psychology, philosophy and policy making.

From the Discussion

Suffering is more bad than than happiness is good

We found that people weigh suffering more than happiness when they evaluate the goodness of populations consisting of both happy and unhappy people. Thus, people are neither following strict negative utilitarianism (minimizing suffering, giving no weight to maximizing happiness at all) nor strict classical utilitarianism (minimizing suffering and maximizing happiness, weighing both equally). Instead, the average person’s intuitions seem to track a mixture of these two theories. In Studies 1a-c, participants on average believed that approximately 1.5-3 times more happy people are required to outweigh a given amount of unhappy people. The precise trade ratio between happiness and suffering depended on the intensity levels of happiness and suffering. (In additional preliminary studies, we found that the trade ratio can also heavily depend on the framing of the question.) Study 1c clarified that, on average, participants continued to believe that more happiness was needed to outweigh suffering even when the happiness and suffering units were exactly equally intense. This suggests that people generally weigh suffering more than happiness in their moral assessments above and beyond perceiving suffering to be more intense than happiness. However, our studies also made clear that there are individual differences and that a substantial proportion of participants weighed happiness and suffering equally strongly, in line with classical utilitarianism.