The Mechanics of Moral Judgment
by Joseph Rowlands

In my view of morality, principles have a different role than they are normally assumed to have. Instead of being methods of judging whether an action is good or bad, they are methods of forecasting the consequences. Moral principles are identifications of causal relationships, and they are used to identify the likely consequences of taking an action. There is nothing within that identification that says whether the consequences are good or bad, moral or immoral. In fact, people with an entirely different morality, such as altruism, could utilize the same principles to forecast results. In other words, moral forecasting is not the same as moral judgment.

Once principles have helped you to identify the expected consequences of your options, you then need to actually compare the options with your moral standard. How exactly is this comparison made? It's not a trivial task, especially when you have options that lead to entirely different consequences, with entirely different values achieved or foregone. The mechanics of moral judgment is a topic of its own, removed from the topic of moral forecasting. The rest of this article attempts to approach the topic, but with no expectation of completeness. Life as the standard is assumed here, although some of the methods could be abstracted and utilized with other moral standards.

We can start with some simple cases that are easy to judge. You are hungry and you are offered poison and food.   Food is clearly the better option. Why is this? Because the poison leaves you worse off than you were, potentially even killing you, while the food leaves you off better than you were. If we think about survival, poison makes us less capable of living, whereas food makes us more capable. This example is easy because the effects are so obviously positive or negative.

How about a more complicated scenario. You have the opportunity to acquire food or clothing. Which should you choose? This is less obvious because both of these are valuable in the right contexts, so both are positives. What you need to do then is find a way of measuring them in some way. Which is more important? To understand that, you need to know the context more. You need to think about them in terms of needs that they satisfy. Which need is more pressing? Which is more significant? Perhaps you already have plenty of food and you need clothing to keep warm. Or maybe you're hungry. So a comparison is made, with life as the standard, by recognizing the needs that are satisfied and the significance of each need.

This creates a need for knowledge if you want to make good judgments. In order to make valid comparisons, you have to be able to connect values to needs, in order to see the objective benefit of each value. This is a skill that needs to be developed. Without understanding the purpose of each value, you can't compare them. Note that this implies that intrinsic values cannot be compared with one another. Without purpose, each value is simply asserted. If you need to make tradeoffs between them, you can't weigh them based on importance because importance implies a common purpose and a specific means to that purpose. Without that, it is arbitrary to say one is better than the other.

You also need to know what kind of needs are possible. This knowledge isn't automatic. Some needs are simple and well-known, like food and shelter. Other needs are more complicated. We have the need to concretize our abstractions, to bring them to the perceptual level. Without that, our abstractions will risk becoming floating abstractions and instead of enabling our lives, they will stymie them. Abstractions can lose clarity, preventing them from being used correctly or confidently. This is a complex need, and not obvious by any means.

Identifying these needs is not a trivial task, and is a topic that can use much more consideration and investigation. There are many different kinds of needs. Examples include a need for self-esteem, a need for certainty, a need for moral principles, a need for understanding the people around you, a need for skills to perform your job, a need for purpose in your life, a need for financial security, a need for relaxation, and a need for figuring out if you can trust someone. The list is endless, as is the number of ways in which you can pursue these various needs. But this kind of knowledge is needed in order to perform moral judgments. Without the connection between values and needs, there would be no way of judging one course of action over another.

While values must be connected to needs, it should go without saying that the needs must be connected to your life, through a standard of survival. Needs are not desires or wants or even goals. They may be thought of as impediments to enhanced living. A lack of food can prevent you from living, and that needs is expressed as hunger. An inability to deal with high-level abstractions can impede your life. An inability to tell who you can trust can impede your life. Each needs is by its nature connected to life by identifying something that is holding you back.

Recognizing the different needs is not enough, though. They need to be compared. It's not enough to know that floating abstractions can hold you back. You need to know how much it will hold you back compared to other needs. You need to see clearly what these needs are preventing you from accomplishing. Even when you've identified that you need something, it is not easy to tell how important it is compared to other values. There is no simple answer. This is an area where you can constantly find improvement, and volumes and volumes of books on this aspect of morality could be written.

Even if you have a good theoretical understanding of the various needs and their potential impact on your life, you need to be able to take into account the context of your own life. Some needs may be more pressing in your life than they might normally be. Or some needs may be less significant. You can imagine that physical laborer will have less of a need to deal with high-level abstractions than someone who deals with ideas for a living. Individual context changes everything. You can identify the various ways needs can affect your life, but you have to apply that knowledge to your own life.

We can now go back to the original example of food and poison, and see that poison can be looked at from the perspective of creating impediments to living, instead of removing them. It can make you sick, prevent you from getting the nourishment you need, and maybe even kill you. So the first example fits into this general method.

To recap so far, the consequences of the options you are choosing between have to be connected to your needs. This is a skill in itself and could benefit from more detail. Once the effects on your needs, whether positive or negative are recognized, you can weigh these impacts by how important the needs are to your life. All of this happens after the moral principles are used to determine the likely consequences. It's when you have the expected consequences that you can attempt to measure and compare.

Obviously there are a lot more details to the process. For instance, many of the principles inform you of possible consequences to your actions. Those aren't guaranteed. If you lie, you might get caught and suffer additional consequences. So part of the consequence is a risk, and you have to consider how risky it is. This is true even in emergency situations, or the classic scenario of the murderer at the door looking for your children. Risk, and probability, add an additional degree of complexity in attempting to weight the options.

This provides an outline of the process, and highlight the kind of knowledge and understanding needed in order to perform moral judgment so you can rationally choose between options using a moral standard.

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