The Effect of Negative Experience on Moral Judgments

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I think I mean something a little bit different than what you interpreted me as meaning because I'm not talking about emotions like anger and anxiety and things like that. And so what I often take people to be doing when they're making moral judgments is they're thinking about a state of the world or an action or a person and then they're experiencing some experience of it being good or bad. Then they can make proclamations like that's bad or that's immoral or whatever. So would you say people are consulting their normative phenomenology? When a person's considering something like murder or abortion, they're considering their subjective experience of how that seems to them. That part of how when they

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What is metaethics? Is moral objectivism the same thing as moral realism? When philosophers examine sentences like "Murder is wrong", are they generally more interested in (1) the role that the language is playing in a social interaction (e.g., that it's an imperative or that it expresses an emotion) or (2) the concepts themselves and their relations? Could it be the case that all moral statements are false? What do we know about how people actually use moral language in everyday life? Or do people even have any idea what they're doing when they use moral language? We're familiar with the idea that cultures vary in how they emphasize and value moral concepts; but are there cultures that have radically different moral concepts than our own (i.e., cultures that might not even have the concepts of modesty or honor in the first place, or that might have moral concepts that have never occurred to us)? Are there cultures that have have no moral concepts at all? What does it really mean to say that someone "should" do something? What is the use of intuition in philosophy? Where is philosophy going wrong today?

Lance S. Bush is a PhD student in social psychology at Cornell University. Most of his research focuses on moral psychology, metaethics, and methodological issues in experimental philosophy. He is also interested in psychological factors relevant to effective altruism and existential risk, particularly cognitive biases, reputational concerns, and other psychological phenomena that inhibit altruism and concern for the distant future. Email him at lancesbush@gmail.com or learn more about him at LanceSBush.com.

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