/Volumes/SP UFD U2/Boulder RoME 13/MP8.odt

Morphological Pluralism
Matjaž Potrč

Morphological pluralism provides an account of moral judgment that combines its psychological and/or normative aspects. It builds upon two main presuppositions: plurality of reasons or principles proper to morally relevant situations, and morphological effect of reasons or principles upon them.
	Morphological pluralism is inspired by morphological rationalism (Horgan and Timmons 2007), which is opposed to intuitionism, the view that moral judgments are emotional gut reactions to the morally relevant situations, and that reasons or principles are just the rational tail wagged by the emotional dog (Haidt 2001; Haidt&Bjorklund 2008). Contrary to intuitionism, morphological rationalism affirms the importance of moral reasons or principles in moral judgment formation and explanation, relying upon the thereby related phenomenological data. It also stresses the importance of morphological, i.e. background procedural mode of reasons' or principles' effectivity upon moral judgment formation and explanation. Reasons involving explanations of moral judgment thus are not confabulations as intuitionism presumes. They rather involve several ways in which reasons procedurally chromatically illuminate morally relevant situation leading to moral judgment, from the morphological background. Morphological rationalism is thus opposed to the reduction of reasons to emotions in moral judgment, and as well to the full blown conscious access of the judger to the explicit representation of moral reasons or principles for most of the cases. Morphological pluralism may be seen as a version of morphological rationalism, just that it explicitly stresses the presence of plurality of reasons or principles in a morally relevant judgmental situation. Morphological rationalism is not committed to the plurality of reasons.
	The difference between morphological pluralism and between what may be called the traditional representational pluralism (Ross 1930, Timmons 2002) is that this last one embraces plurality of reasons and principles in the moral judgment, all in not acknowledging the morphological mode of these reasons exercising effect upon the moral judgment. Representational pluralism sticks to the conscious access in respect to the occurrently represented reasons and their underlying principles in moral judgment formation. At least in some regard the access must be conscious indeed since those propositions must be known intuitively. This is what morphological pluralism denies for easy, spontaneous moral judgment cases. Morphological pluralism builds upon the tension appearing in the moral judgment situation coming from the plurality of involved principles. In opposition to the representational pluralism though, morphological pluralism denies explicit conscious representational approach to this tension, thereby enabling moral judgment formation through morphological background based chromatic illumination mode of effectivity by the involved reasons or principles.
	Morphological pluralism may be defended in respect to both consequentialism and to deontology in its account of moral judgment formation and explanation. Consequentialism as a generic monistic approach denies pluralism of reasons or principles such as they are present in morally relevant judgmental situations, trying thereby to eliminate the need for moral judgment by reducing plurality of reasons to one single principle. The constitutive tension between several reasons or principles which enables falling of judgment in morally relevant situations is thereby precluded. Despite of its generic monistic reasons' reduction aim, consequentialism in some of its forms acknowledges the plurality of reasons and the need for judgments.
	Deontology on the other hand tends to promote as its decisive point the denial of the morphological mode of chromatic illumination as the reasons' effectivity in morally relevant situations leading to moral judgment. In this way deontology in its generic form actually again precludes the relevant moral judgment formation, for it does not recognize the constitutive tension between several reasons or principles as its prerequisite. Deontology risks to be a phenomenologically implausible approach, for it precludes the constitutive moral judgment producing tension by deontic requirement of principles' self-evidential representation. Pluralist deontology version (Hill 2000) tries to account for this fact, without appreciating the morphological mode of reasons' effectivity. Morphological pluralism has no problems with this, for it embraces both plurality of reasons and their morphological mode of effectivity in moral judgment.

Morphological Pluralism
Matjaž Potrč

1.	Morphological pluralism provides an account of moral judgment that combines its psychological and/or normative aspects. It builds upon two main presuppositions: plurality of reasons or principles proper to morally relevant situations, and morphological effect of reasons or principles upon them.
Morphological pluralism is the view affirming the importance of moral judgment. As its name indicates, morphological pluralism consists of two main ingredients. First, it opts for plurality of reasons or principles that characterize morally relevant situations. And then, it adopts morphological mode of these reasons' effectivity in the production of moral judgment. We will first shortly introductorily clarify these two ingredients, and then we will as well introductorily try to spell out why their combination is appropriate for an account of moral judgment.
	Moral pluralism is the view that there exist several mutually irreducible moral reasons backed up with general principles. Notice that just the plurality of reasons requirement may be embraced by moral particularism. Moral pluralism is opposed to moral monism and to moral particularism. Moral monism, as its name indicates, claims that ultimately there exists just one relevant moral reason or principle that is involved into a morally relevant situation. Moral particularism, on the other hand, claims that moral situations are unique and holistic, so that moral judgment has to be fallen without the normative authority of ultimately relevant reasons or principles.
	Morphology refers to the structure or shape that supports whatever appears at the surface. Geomorphology refers to the result of the forces that have accumulated along long periods of time and which contributed to the actual shape of the Earth's core. In the connectionist architecture inspired dynamical model of cognition one mentions morphological content (Horgan and Tienson 1996, Potrč 1999). This is not an occurrent but rather a dispositional kind of content. Morphological content embraces all the knowledge that is accumulated in the background of the cognitive system, waiting there to be prompted at the occurrent surface in a procedural manner as the occasion is ripe. The morphological content as the background dispositional knowledge also has the function of automatically leading the direction of total cognitive states such as they occurrently appear in the attention hopper of the cognitive system. In this sense morphology indicates a dormant, dispositional, and not an occurrent structure. In the case of morphological pluralism, reasons and their underlying principles exercise morphological influence upon whatever appears at the moral judgment's attention supported surface.    
	The combination of pluralism and morphology reveals itself as appropriate for support of moral judgment. Moral judgment is needed where the direction of taking action should be indicated or where a decision has to be made. For the moral judgment to appear normally there have to be some possible alternatives and thereby some tension, which may not be really accentuated in most of everyday cases. Tension will appear if not just one but several, plurality of reasons or principles will participate in a morally relevant situation. A standard example of moral pluralism is where there are two or more reasons or principles involved into an estimation leading to a possible action. I promised to meet you but on my way I happen to encounter a road accident. I am the only one around to help and I happen to be qualified to do so. So I am torn between obligations of keeping my promise to you and helping the person in need. A judgment needs to be fallen, as I have to decide between the two reasons and between their underlying principles. Whatever I choose may leave me with some regret, but choosing seems to be the correct thing to do. Taking my decision I fall a judgment, say that I will help the person in need. This is what I embrace as based upon my character, thus upon my accumulated knowledge and ways to react. Normally I have disposition to react in a certain manner, and I will do so in a moment without engaging into any long process of deliberation. There are two types of cases though – even phenomenology would support that – the easy everyday one and the hard one. With the first one the judgment tends to be fallen quickly or automatically, whereas in the case of the second one there is bigger inclination to deliberate. One may understand intuition as a case of quick and automatic judgment formation (Haidt 2001), compatible with the first kind of cases. For the pluralist though intuition may be rather understood as the possibility of epistemic access to basic moral truths. Usually, this pluralist move will be taken to involve conscious access to reasons and to their underlying principles. But morphological pluralism draws our attention towards the non-evidential and towards the background illumination providing role of reasons and principles. Following this proposal, moral judgment that I fall will be normally based on some reasons or principles, and these will not be there displayed in a consciously accessible manner, but they will rather be active from the morphological background, coloring the situation that will lead towards my predominantly automatic judgment falling. Pluralism and morphology combination is thus appropriate for an account of moral judgment in most of the cases. Notice that plurality of reasons easily accounts for the tension that underlies moral judgment. This tension will not lead to a plausible form of intuition supported judgment again if the effect of reasons upon the judgmental overall situation will not follow the morphological mode. A genuine judgment seems not really be needed where everything is already explicitly positioned before one's mind.
	Reasons or principles have been mentioned as a prerequisite for moral judgment formation, contrary to intuitionism. Pluralism takes reasons to be supported by their underlying principles which usually appear as basic and exceptionless. Plurality of reasons and of their underlying principles provides normative justification for moral judgment. Morphology, on the other hand, seems to push in the direction of reasons' psychological plausibility which also appears to be needed for a plausible account of moral judgment.

2.	Morphological pluralism is inspired by morphological rationalism (Horgan and Timmons 2007), which is opposed to intuitionism, the view that moral judgments are emotional gut reactions to the morally relevant situations, and that reasons or principles are just the rational tail wagged by the emotional dog (Haidt 2001). Contrary to intuitionism, morphological rationalism affirms the importance of moral reasons or principles in moral judgment formation and explanation, relying upon the thereby related phenomenological data. It also stresses the importance of morphological, i.e. background procedural mode of reasons' or principles' effectivity upon moral judgment formation and explanation. Reasons involving explanations of moral judgment thus are not confabulations as intuitionism presumes. They rather involve several ways in which reasons procedurally chromatically illuminate morally relevant situation leading to moral judgment, from the morphological background. Morphological rationalism is thus opposed to the reduction of reasons to emotions in moral judgment, and as well to the full blown conscious access of the judger to the explicit representation of moral reasons or principles for most of the cases. Morphological pluralism may be seen as a version of morphological rationalism, just that it explicitly stresses the presence of plurality of reasons or principles in a morally relevant judgmental situation. Morphological rationalism is not committed to the plurality of reasons.
In order to understand morphological pluralism, one has to get acquainted with the position of morphological rationalism. This is especially important as morphological pluralism may be seen as a species of morphological rationalism, although not being identical to it, and thus preserving its own specificity. Morphological rationalism (Horgan and Timmons 2007) position is best approached by the view about moral judgment that it opposes – intuitionism (Haidt 2001). Intuitionism takes moral judgments to be emotional gut reactions to the situations that are encountered by the moral agent. The real work in the moral judgment formation, according to intuitionism, gets done by emotions, and so reasons or principles are accorded just an auxiliary role, as confabulation involving post hoc explanations: the emotional dog wags its rational tail. Morphological rationalism counters the intuitionist approach by giving moral reasons or principles a substantial underlying role in the moral judgment formation and explanation. So in order to understand morphological pluralism, one has to understand both its close relatedness to morphological rationalism as well as its difference in respect to this position.
	Besides taking reasons or principles to be important in moral reasoning, morphological rationalism also stresses the mode under which these reasons or principles exercise their influence upon the formation of moral judgment. The mode of reasons' influence upon moral judgment formation is taken to be indirect, so that they chromatically illuminate the overall situation from the dispositionally forthcoming morphological background. This fits the nature of moral judgment, where reasons and their underlying principles are predominantly not appearing in an explicit, but rather in an insightful intuition involving mode. In this respect, intuitionism is right, just that according to morphological pluralism it wrongly bets upon emotions and not upon reasons as being basically operative in the background of the judgment. The manner in which reasons exercise their impact from the cognitive dispositional background may be called chromatic illumination. In order to understand this concept we may provide a painting and its characteristics as an illustration. Imagine a painting where the depicted scene, say people sitting around tables in a bar, is illuminated by the sources of light that are themselves not depicted in the painting. You can see these persons being mostly illuminated by the red light coming somewhere from the left side outside of the scene, and then there are these other persons that are illuminated by the green light source which is situated somewhere up there on the right side outside of the depicted scene. Some parts of the depicted scenery are illuminated by the mixture of these sources. In a similar manner, we can now say, the reasons which are not directly or explicitly present in the judgment chromatically illuminate, from the background, the overall situation that the judgment is trying to capture. Just as the aesthetic effect of the painting would be lost if the sources of light would explicitly figure in the depicted scene, the genuine judgmental character would be distorted by reasons that would explicitly pop up in the judgment.  It may be claimed that this cannot be a sensible account for all moral judgments. One must explain why at least sometimes we do seem to recognize some explicit salient reasons. Would interpreting them as being “in the picture” amount to some kind of error? The answer is that we may deliberate a lot before we fall the judgment. But once as we fall the judgment the accent is upon the overall situation, which is recognized, say, by the distinction between prima facie reasons and between the overall reason. Aesthetic and judgmental effect profits from a subtle indirectness, which gets enhanced by the holistic character of the overall situation in respect to which the judgment is required.
	In order to get a grip on the moral judgment one is thus advised to abandon the presupposition according to which direct conscious access to reasons or principles is required in order for them to be effective in judgment formation. The approach of morphological rationalism agrees with the mentioned explicit views that reasons or principles exercise an important role in the formation of moral judgment. Its specificity though is in the specific mode of reasons' or principles' influence, namely the morphologically based chromatic illumination mode. A common presupposition to the contrary is namely that for most reasons or principles to be effective in the formation of moral judgment, there has to exist the possibility of direct conscious access to them. This is countered by morphological rationalism's view that the mode of reasons and principles in the formation of moral judgments is indirect. Moral judgment underlies a complex situation with several forces where some overall direction is aimed at. There is no need for direct conscious access to these forces at the time as the judgment happens to be fallen. To the contrary, reasons or principles illuminate the situation from the holistic shape of the overall cognitive background that is proper to the moral judge. The form of the background landscape may be captured as the system's cognitive morphology, involving the holistic dispositional structure comprising everything that the agent has as her accumulated knowledge. Given that this knowledge is dispositional and thus that it is not manifestly present, it just chromatically illuminates the situation of the moral judgment. Moreover, the background illumination of an indirect kind is the very precondition of moral judgment formation, for moral judgment to be there in a non-jarring manner. In a sense though the influence of morphological background coloring the judgment is direct, in that there are no epistemic intermediaries such as presentations of the involved reasons or principles. Again, the influence of reasons in moral judgment is indirect, in the sense that the agent has no direct access to these reasons or principles, since they just color the overall situation form the morphological background. Morphological rationalism opposes the intuitionist view that reasons or principles are just confabulations, the kind of post hoc juridical style defense of the position that has no genuine impact on its formation. Once as the morphological background chromatic illumination is admitted as a possibility for reasons' influence upon moral judgment, the immediate intuitive grasp of these reasons in judgment explanation becomes a plausible option.
	Here is the summary.	Contrary to intuitionism, morphological rationalism affirms the importance of moral reasons or principles in moral judgment formation and explanation, relying upon the thereby related phenomenological data. It also stresses the importance of morphological, i.e. background procedural mode of reasons' or principles' effectivity upon moral judgment formation and explanation. Reasons involving explanations of moral judgment are thus not some kind of confabulations as intuitionism presumes. They rather involve the ways in which reasons procedurally chromatically illuminate the morally relevant situation, from the morphological background. Morphological rationalism is thus opposed to the reduction of reasons to emotions in moral judgment, and as well to the conscious access of the judger to the explicit representation of moral reasons or principles. Morphological pluralism is similar to morphological rationalism in that it embraces the importance of reasons or principles in moral judgments' formation and explanation, and the morphological background based mode of reasons' effectivity upon moral judgment, in the chromatic illumination manner.
	What is the difference between morphological pluralism and morphological rationalism? Morphological pluralism may be seen as a version of morphological rationalism indeed, just that it explicitly stresses the presence of plurality of reasons and of their underlying principles. One question is what does plurality add to the overall picture. Are there phenomenological arguments that support the need to recognize plurality of reasons inhabiting most cases of moral judgment? Or are there reasons that are connected to normativity? The difference between morphological rationalism and morphological pluralism is in that the first one centers at the psychological dimension of moral judgments, whereas the second one takes both psychological and normative dimensions in its view. Morphological rationalism builds upon the psychological difference between emotions – as intuitionism says – and reasons – as rationalism says – underlying the formation of moral judgments. The normative question – What is the normative justification of moral judgments? – though is only tackled by morphological pluralism. It follows that pluralism, in its view, provides normative justification for moral judgments.
	As far as conscious access to the reasons' effectivity in the judgment formation is concerned, this relates to the third dimension touching moral judgments, besides to the just mentioned psychological and normative dimensions. This epistemic dimension, touching the question of moral judgment's epistemic justification, is not in the center of the difference between morphological rationalism and pluralism. Morphological pluralism distinguishes everyday cases of moral judgments from hard cases of moral dilemmas, where at least in some regard the access to reasons/principles must be conscious since the propositions which they involve must be known intuitively. But this intuitive knowledge does not necessarily involve the quality of moral judgment.
	As we just stated there are psychological, normative and epistemic dimensions of moral judgment. All three of these dimensions are involved into the nature of moral judgment. But the rationalism/intuitionism controversy predominantly just concentrates at psychological dimension, whereas morphological pluralism recurs to the combination of the psychological and normative dimensions.

3.	The difference between morphological pluralism and between what may be called the traditional representational pluralism (Ross 1930, Timmons 2002) is that this last one embraces plurality of reasons and principles in the moral judgment, all in not acknowledging the morphological mode of these reasons exercising effect upon the moral judgment. Representational pluralism sticks to the conscious access in respect to the occurrently represented reasons and their underlying principles in moral judgment formation. At least in some regard the access must be conscious indeed since those propositions must be known intuitively. This is what morphological pluralism denies for easy, spontaneous moral judgment cases. Morphological pluralism builds upon the tension appearing in the moral judgment situation coming from the plurality of involved principles. In opposition to the representational pluralism though, morphological pluralism denies explicit conscious representational approach to this tension, thereby enabling moral judgment formation through morphological background based chromatic illumination mode of effectivity by the involved reasons or principles.
In the previous section, we tried to differentiate morphological pluralism from its morphological peer, the morphological rationalism. The subsequent task is to shortly delineate the specificity of morphological pluralism in respect to the more usual forms of pluralism. In short, the difference is in that standard forms of pluralism, contrary to morphological pluralism, play down the morphological ingredient and thus that they promote the view according to which the plurality of reasons is explicitly forthcoming and is consciously directly accessed by the judger. Reasons or principles underlying the judgment thus tends to be represented, and so we can give the name of representational pluralism to this position (Ross 1930). Morphological pluralism agrees with it in the affirmation of the moral reasons or principles presence in moral judgment. But it disagrees with it in that the representational pluralism sees the mode under which reasons have their impact upon moral judgment as that of consciously accessible representations. Plurality of reasons or principles cares for the tension that is needed in the direction of moral judgment formation. But this tension just lacks judgmental realism if it is forthcoming in the form of explicitly presented and consciously accessed reasons or principles. Chromatic illumination mode of morphological effectivity matches well the explanation of moral dilemmas, their judgmental rootedness, which is not always the case for representational pluralism's treatment of moral dilemmas. Notice though that representational pluralism, although it breaches against phenomenological realism of judgments, still allows for the tension between reasons. So the pluralism provenance of tension between reasons is in the foreground. This then allows for a more realistic account of judgment in respect to the view where the duty to follow just one main reason and its underlying principle at a time gets supported by the explicit awareness of that principle's representation.
4.	
5.	Morphological pluralism may be defended in respect to both consequentialism and to deontology in its account of moral judgment formation and explanation. Consequentialism as a generic monistic approach denies pluralism of reasons or principles such as they are present in morally relevant judgmental situations, trying thereby to eliminate the need for moral judgment by reducing plurality of reasons to one single principle. The constitutive tension between several reasons or principles which enables falling of judgment in morally relevant situations is thereby precluded. Despite of its generic monistic reasons' reduction aim, consequentialism in some of its forms acknowledges the plurality of reasons and the need for judgments.
Morphological pluralism, as we have stated and as it name says, consists of two main ingredients: the plurality of reasons and their morphological mode of effectivity in moral judgment. We believe that morphological pluralism delivers a plausible account of moral judgment. But there are possible views that reject one or the other of morphological pluralism's main ingredients. These views would need a careful specification in our subsequent studies, in respect to how they are elaborated in the literature. As a starting and direction guiding exercise though, they will be portrayed here in their generic form. Bearing this precaution in mind, we can say that the denial of morphological pluralist ingredient of pluralism, for an account of moral judgment, leads to the generically characterized view of consequentialism. As it is really a generic position that we talk about here, you may also call it consequentialism* if you wish. The point that we are getting at is simply that this is a position bashing plurality of reasons as a constitutive ingredient of moral judgment formation. In this case we are talking about monism, although there is still the particularist option that goes against pluralism and that we will care for at some other occasion. Monism, as its name indicates, opts for a single major reason and for a single principle underlying this reason. You can take such principle to be the appeal to maximize utility, to obtain the greatest available good for most of the people, given the situation at hand. Such generic consequentialist* monistic view will thus reduce plurality of reasons in a given situation to a single reason. The upshot will be that in the resulting situation there will be no genuine moral judgment needed anymore at all. This is because the constitutive tension that is introduced into judgment by the plurality of reasons is discharged by monism. You can take the monistic consequentialist*, call him Bentham*, as illustrating well the point that he does away with judgment. Punishing people in the measure that they deserve will be exercised by machines, so that the procedure will be as objective as possible. (Foucault 1975). This is obviously a view that cannot be realistic in the phenomenological manner, given that its aim is to abandon any genuine moral judgment. Given, again, that this is not how moral decisions are really taken, the consequentialist* will need to recur to several manners of reintroducing the judgmental tension in the situation, just that he will not really be able to recognize it as real judgment, at the end of the line.
6.	
7.	Deontology on the other hand tends to promote as its decisive point the denial of the morphological mode of chromatic illumination as the reasons' effectivity in morally relevant situations leading to moral judgment. In this way deontology in its generic form actually again precludes the relevant moral judgment formation, for it does not recognize the constitutive tension between several reasons or principles as its prerequisite. Deontology risks to be a phenomenologically implausible approach, for it precludes the constitutive moral judgment producing tension by deontic requirement of principles' self-evidential representation. Pluralist deontology version (Hill 2000) tries to account for this fact, without appreciating the morphological mode of reasons' effectivity. Morphological pluralism has no problems with this, for it embraces both plurality of reasons and their morphological mode of effectivity in moral judgment.
Morphological pluralism, as we said, consists of the pluralist and of morphological ingredients. We have hinted at how consequentialism* as a monism breaches against pluralism, ending up in denying the need for a genuine moral judgment and being phenomenologically unrealistic in this respect. The second requirement for moral judgment's success, such as prescribed by morphological pluralism, is morphological effectivity of moral reasons such as they appear in moral judgments. We have already seen that representational pluralism argues against morphological effectivity of reasons, requiring them to be consciously accessible by the one who judges and represented by him at the time he falls the judgment. A much more consequent denial of morphological effectivity of moral reasons though is proposed by deontology, the view that we will take here again in its generic form which you may wish to call deontology*. Deontology* breaches against morphological requirement in moral judgment formation. It claims that reasons or better still, principles, have to be self-consciously explicitly represented by the judger at the moment of his falling of moral judgment. For deontologist* this is a precondition for moral judgment to be fallen at all. No background thing here for him, just the explicitly represented rules, for moral judgment to succeed. But this turns out to be wildly implausible given phenomenological data as these are related to moral judgment. Deontologists* will therefore try to find a way out, still sticking to the denial of morphology, for this determines their basic position, but trying to go pluralist, at least (Hill 2000). So we get deontologists* with the human face. In this way deontologists* try to diminish the implausibility of their explicitly duty lead moral judgment, advising them to expose Jews to the Nazis just in order to preserve the never-lie principle. Pluralism helps some, but not a lot. Phenomenology is missing, deontologists* will still be moral zombies. Morphological pluralism has no such hurdles with moral judgments as these are characteristic for consequentialists* and for deontologists*. They namely take both pluralism of reasons and their morphological effectivity on the board of moral judgment account.
8.	

References

Audi, R. 2004. The Good in the Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Foucault, M. 1975. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House.
Haidt, J. 2001. The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review 108: 814–834.
Haidt J. & Bjorklund, F. 2008. Social intuitionists answer six questions about moral psychology. In: W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed), Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 181–217.
Hill E.T. 2000. Respect, Pluralism and Justice: Kantian Perspectives. OUP.
Horgan T. and Tienson, J. 1996. Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology. MIT.
Horgan, T. and Timmons, M. 2007. Morphological Rationalism and the Psychology of Moral Judgment. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10: 279-295.
Horgan, T. and Timmons, M. Forthcoming. Illuminating reasons.
Korsgaard, C. 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity and Integrity. OUP.
Potrč M. 1999. Morphological Content. Acta Analytica 22: 133-49.
Railton P. 2003. Facts, Values and Norms: Essays toward a Morality of Consequence. Harvard UP.
Ross, W.D. 1930. The Right and the Good. Oxford: OUP.
Timmons, M. 2002. Moral Theory: An Introduction. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.