Moral dumbfounding is not moral reasoning
Moral judgement and moral reasoning are basically two different processes. People tend to have a knee-jerk reaction for what’s good or bad, often based more on cultural conditioning, prejudice, or gut feelings than any reasonable morality or ethics. When asked to elaborate, you get “moral dumbfounding,” moral reasoning made up ex-post facto to justify moral judgement.
Back in 20011, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt2 coined the term “moral dumbfounding” to refer to the phenomenon in which we struggle to elaborate on the precise reasons why we believe certain acts are immoral. Emotionally fueled tautologies (or expressions of redundancy that fail to offer any actual clarification, such as “It’s wrong because it’s just nasty,” “You shouldn’t do it, because it’s creepy,” “It’s immoral because it’s plain evil,” and of course “It’s not right, because God says so”) only echo intense social disapproval for certain crimes that shouldn’t be crimes at all when we prioritize the question of harmfulness. —Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us
Our moral intuition is grossly fallible, which we would do well to remember.
- see also: disgust is a culture-bound syndrome, so our perceptions of disgust as an arbiter of morality is fatally flawed
The paper by Haidt, Björklund, and Murphy: https://www.polpsy.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/haidt.bjorklund.pdf ↩︎
Note: perhaps Haidt should take some of his own medicine, as he’s now largely the source of the moral panic over teens and smartphone use 🙃 (great rebuttal here: https://torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/the-moral-panic-over-social-media-and-teen-depression/) ↩︎