Further Methodological Troubles for the Moralometer

[This post draws on ideas developed in collaboration with psychologist Jessie Sun.]

If we want to study morality scientifically, we should want to measure it. Imagine trying to study temperature without a thermometer or weight without scales. Of course indirect measures are possible: We can't put a black hole on a scale, but we can measure how it bends the light that passes nearby and thereby infer its mass.

Last month, I raised a challenge for the possibility of developing a "moralometer" (a device that accurately measure's a person's overall morality). The challenge was this: Any moralometer would need to draw on one or more of four methods: self-report, informant report, behavioral measures, or physiological measures. Each one of these methods has serious shortcomings as a basis for general moral measurement of one's overall moral character.

This month, I raise a different (but partly overlapping) set of challenges, concerning how well we can specify the target we're aiming to measure.

Problems with Flexible Measures

Let's call a measure of overall morality flexible if it invites a respondent to apply their own conception of morality, in a flexible way. The respondent might be the target themselves (in self-report measures of morality) or they might be a peer, colleague, acquaintance, or family member of the target (in informant-report measures of morality). The most flexible measures apply "thin" moral concepts in Bernard Williams' sense -- prompts like "Overall, I am a morally good person" [responding on an agree/disagree scale] or "[the target person] behaves ethically".

While flexible measures avoid excessive rigidity and importing researchers' limited and possibly flawed understandings of morality into the rating procedure, the downsides are obvious if we consider how people with noxious worldviews might rate themselves and others. The notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann, for example, appeared to have thought highly of his own moral character. Alexander "the Great" was admired for millennia, including as a moral exemplar of personal bravery and spreader of civilization, despite his main contribution being conquest through aggressive warfare, including the mass slaughter and enslavement of at least one civilian population.

I see four complications:

Relativism and Particularism. Metaethical moral relativists hold that different moral standards apply to different people or in different cultures. While I would reject extreme relativist views according to which genocide, for example, doesn't warrant universal condemnation, a moderate version of relativism has merit. Cultures might reasonably differ, for example, on the age of sexual consent, and cultures, subcultures, and social groups might reasonably differ in standards of generosity in sharing resources with neighbors and kin. If so, then flexible moralometers, employed by raters who use locally appropriate standards, will have an advantage over inflexible moralometers which might inappropriately import researchers' different standards. However, even flexible moralometers will fail in the face of relativism if they are employed by raters who employ the wrong moral standards.

According to moral particularism, morality isn't about applying consistent rules or following any specifiable code of behavior. Rather, what's morally good or bad, right or wrong, frequently depends on particular features of specific situations which cannot be fully codified in advance. While this isn't the same as relativism, it presents a similar methodological challenge: The farther the researcher or rater stands from the particular situation of the target, the more likely they are to apply inappropriate standards, since they are likely to be ignorant of relevant details. It seems reasonable to accept at least moderate particularism: The moral quality of telling a lie, stealing $20, or stopping to help a stranger, might often depend on fine details difficult to know from outside the situation.

If the most extreme forms of moral relativism or particularism (or moral skepticism) are true, then no moralometer could possibly work, since there won't be stable truths about people's morality, or the truths will be so complicated or situation dependent as to defy any practical attempt at measurement. Moderate relativism and particularism, if correct, provide reason to favor flexible standards as judged by self-ratings or the ratings of highly knowledgeable peers sensitive to relevant local details; but even in such cases all of the relevant adjustments might not be made.

Incommensurability. Goods are incommensurable if there is no fact of the matter about how they should be weighed against each other. Twenty dollar bills and ten dollar bills are commensurable: Two of the latter are worth exactly one of the former. But it's not clear how to weigh, for example, health against money or family versus career. In ethics, if Steven tells a lie in the morning and performs a kindness in the afternoon, how exactly ought these to be weighed against each other? If Tara is stingy but fair, is her overall moral character better, worse, or the same as that of Nicholle, who is generous but plays favorites? Combining different features of morality into a single overall score invites commensurability problems. Plausibly, there's no single determinately best weighting of different factors.

Again, I favor a moderate view. Probably in many cases there is no single best weighting. However, approximate judgments remain possible. Even if health and money can't be precisely weighed against each other, extreme cases permit straightforward decisions. Most of us would gladly accept a scratch on a finger for the sake of a million dollars and would gladly pay $10 to avoid stage IV cancer.  Similarly, Stalin was morally worse than Martin Luther King, even if Stalin had some virtues and King some vices. Severe sexual harassment of an employee is worse than fibbing to your spouse to get out of washing the dishes.

Moderate incommensurability limits the precision of any possible moralometer. Vices and virtues, and rights and wrongs of different types will be amenable only to rough comparison, not precise determination in a single common coin.

Moral error. If we let raters reach independent judgments about what is morally good or bad, right or wrong, they might simply get it wrong. As mentioned above, Eichmann appears to have thought well of himself, and the evidence suggests that he also regarded other Nazi leaders as morally excellent. Raters will disagree about the importance of purity norms (such as norms against sexual promiscuity), the badness of abortion, and the moral importance, or not, of being vegetarian. Bracketing relativism, then at least some of these raters must be factually mistaken about morality, on one side or another, adding substantial error into their ratings.

The error issue is enormously magnified if ordinary people's moral judgments are systematically mistaken. For example, if the philosophically discoverable moral truth is that the potential impact of your choices on future generations morally far outweighs the impact you have on the people around you (see my critiques of "longtermism" here and here), then the person who is an insufferable jerk to everyone around them but donates $5000 to an effective charity might be in fact far morally better than a personally kind and helpful person who donates nothing to charity -- but informants' ratings might very well suggest the reverse. Similar remarks would apply to any moral theory that is sharply at odds with commonsense moral intuition.

Evaluative bias. People are, of course, typically biased in their own favor. Most people (not all!) are reluctant to think of themselves as morally below average, as unkind, unfair, or callous, even if they in fact are. Social desirability bias is the well-known phenomenon that survey respondents will tend to respond to questions in a manner that presents them in a good light. Ratings of friends, family, and peers will also tend to be positively biased: People tend to view their friends and peers positively, and even when not they might be reluctant to "tell on" them to researchers. If the size of evaluative bias were consistent, it could be corrected for, but presumably it can vary considerably from case to case, introducing further noise.

Problems with Inflexible Measures

Given all these problems with flexible measures of morality, it might seem best to build our hypothetical moralometer instead around inflexible measures. Assuming physiological measures are unavailable, the most straightforward way to do this would be to employ researcher-chosen behavioral measures. We could try to measure someone's honesty by seeing whether they will cheat on a puzzle to earn more money in a laboratory setting. We could examine publicly available criminal records. We could see whether they are willing to donate a surprise bonus payment to a charity.

Unfortunately, inflexible measures don't fully escape the troubles that dog flexible measures, and they bring new troubles of their own.

Relativism and particularism. Inflexible measures probably aggravate the problems with relativism and particularism discussed above. With self-report and informant report, there's at least an opportunity for the self or the informant to take into account local standards and particulars of the situation. In contrast, inflexible measures will ordinarily be applied equally to all without adjustment for context. Suppose the measure is something like "gives a surprise bonus of $10 to charity". This might be a morally very different decision for a wealthy participant than for a needy participant. It might be a morally very different decision for a participant who would save that $10 to donate it to a different and maybe better charity than for a participant who would simply pocket the $10. But unless those other factors are being measured, as they normally would not be, they cannot be taken account of.

Incommensurability. Inflexible measures also won't avoid incommensurability problems. Suppose our moralometer includes one measure of honesty, one measure of generosity, and one measure of fairness. The default approach might be for a summary measure simply to average these three, but that might not accurately reflect morality: Maybe a small act of dishonesty in an experimental setting is far less morally important than a small act of unfairness in that same experimental setting. For example, getting an extra $1 from a researcher by lying in a task that transparently appears to demand a lie (and might even be best construed as a game in which telling untruths is just part of the task, in fact pleasing the researcher) might be approximately morally neutral while being unfair to a fellow participant in that same study might substantially hurt the other's feelings.

Sampling and ecological validity. As mentioned in my previous post on moralometers, fixed behavioral measures are also likely to have severe methodological problems concerning sampling and ecological validity. Any realistic behavioral measure is likely to capture only a small and perhaps unrepresentative part of anyone's behavior, and if it's conducted in a laboratory or experimental setting, behavior in that setting might not correlate well with behavior with real stakes in the real world. How much can we really infer about a person's overall moral character from the fact that they give their monetary bonus to charity or lie about a die roll in the lab?

Moral authority. By preferring a fixed measure, the experimenter or the designer of the moralometer takes upon themselves a certain kind of moral authority -- the authority to judge what is right and wrong, moral or immoral, in others' behavior. In some cases, as in the Eichmann case, this authority seems clearly preferable to deferring to the judgment of the target and their friends. But in other cases, it is a source of error -- since of course the experimenter or designer might be wrong about what is in fact morally good or bad.

Being wrong while taking up, at least implicitly, this mantle of moral authority has at least two features that potentially make it worse than the type of error that arises by wrongly deferring to mistaken raters. First, the error is guaranteed to be systematic. The same wrong standards will be applied to every case, rather than scattered in different (and perhaps partly canceling) directions as might be the case with rater error. And second, it risks a lack of respect: Others might reasonably object to being classified as "moral" or "immoral" by an alien set of standards devised by researchers and with which they disagree.

In Sum

The methodological problems with any potential moralometer are extremely daunting. As discussed in December, all moralometers must rely on some combination of self-report, informant report, behavioral measure, or physiological measure, and each of these methods has serious problems. Furthermore, as discussed today, a batch of issues around relativism, particularism, disagreement, incommensurability, error, and moral authority dog both flexible measures of morality (which rely on raters' judgments about what's good and bad) and inflexible measures (which rely on researchers' or designers' judgments).

Coming up... should we even want a moralometer if we could have one?  I discussed the desirability or undesirability of a perfect moralometer in December, but I want to think more carefully about the moral consequences of the more realistic case of an imperfect moralometer.