Speciesism, Arbitrariness and Moral Illusions
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Speciesism, Arbitrariness and Moral Illusions Stijn Bruers 1 Received: 8 July 2020 / Revised: 10 September 2020 / Accepted: 7 October 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Just as one line appears to be longer than another in an optical illusion, we can have a spontaneous moral judgment that one individual is more important than another. Sometimes such judgments can lead to moral illusions like speciesism and other kinds of discrimination. Moral illusions are persistent spontaneous judgments that violate our deepest moral values and distract us away from a rational, authentic ethic. They generate pseudo-ethics, similar to pseudoscience. The antidote against moral illusions is the ethical principle to avoid unwanted arbitrariness. Speciesism involves unwanted arbitrariness, and psychological research as well as the problem of wild animal suffering demonstrate that moral illusions such as speciesism can be very persistent. Keywords Discrimination . Speciesism . Animal rights . Wild animal suffering . Judgment
biases . Moral psychology
1 Introduction: The Analogy between Optical Illusions and Moral Illusions We are all familiar with optical illusions. In the Müller-Lyer illusion (Müller-Lyer 1889), one line appears to be longer than the other despite the lines being of equal length. Our senses cannot always be trusted. But what about our intuitions and judgments? Can we always trust them? Or are we susceptible to moral illusions (Harris 2004; Bruers 2016): spontaneous, intuitive, moral judgments that violate our deepest moral values? If you consider a consistent set of your strongest moral values and you have a spontaneous moral judgment that conflicts with that set of values, then you have a moral illusion. Moral illusions are a subset of cognitive biases or cognitive illusions in judgment (Tversky 1986), resulting from spontaneous, intuitive, fast, automatic, unreflective ‘system 1’ thinking (Kahneman 2011). Just like optical illusions are very persistent
* Stijn Bruers [email protected]; [email protected]
1
Department of economics, Naamsestraat 69 - bus 3565, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
Philosophia
(Pylyshyn 1999) – the lines still look different even after you have accurately measured their lengths multiple times – moral illusions are also characterized by their persistency. This makes them particularly more dangerous than merely moral mistakes. Moral mistakes are easily correctable in the mind once you understand the mistake. Compare it with mathematical mistakes: once someone explains where you made a calculation error, you can simply correct it. But the persistence of moral illusions makes them dangerous in the sense that we can repeatedly and unconsciously make the same moral error. These illusions constantly distract us away from a rational, authentic ethic. An authentic ethic is in line with our deepest moral values, i.e. our most preferred values after deep reflection, where we have the most accurate beliefs to choose the most effective means to reach for our most valuable and consistent e
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