A Perceptual Theory of Hope

Philosophy

Ergo AN OPEN ACCESS JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0005.008 203 Contact: Michael Milona <email@example.com> and Katie Stockdale <firstname.lastname@example.com>? A Perceptual Theory of Hope M I C H A E L M I L O N A Auburn University K AT I E S T O C K D A L E 1 Sam Houston State University This paper addresses the question of what the attitude of hope consists in. We argue that shortcomings in recent theories of hope have methodological roots in that they proceed with little regard for the rich body of literature on the emotions. Taking insights from work in the philosophy of emotions, we argue that hope involves a kind of normative perception. We then develop a strategy for determining the content of this perception, arguing that hope is a perception of practical reasons. Our proposal stands in contrast with familiar views on which hope is fundamentally about the good. We conclude by considering the increasingly popular idea that some hopes are nonintentional and thus, by implication, nonperceptual. We reply by arguing that our perceptual theory plausibly generalizes to these instances of hope. Keywords: hope, perception, emotion, moral psychology 1. Introduction The view that hope involves a desire for p and a belief that p's obtaining is possible but not certain has become known as the standard or orthodox account of hope (Martin 2014; Meirav 2009). Some philosophers think that the standard view is sufficient to capture some of our trivial hopes, like the hope that the sun will come out soon (Calhoun in press; Pettit 2004). There is widespread consensus in the literature, however, that the standard account cannot make sense of our most significant hopes, like the hope to be cured of cancer or the hope that a wrongdoer be brought to justice. An increasing number of philosophers have tackled the question of what, exactly, these more significant hopes consists in 1. This paper is the product of full and equal collaboration between authors. 204 • Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 (e.g., Martin 2014; Pettit 2004). Despite these efforts, we believe that an adequate account has yet to be offered. This paper reexamines the issue in a new way. We argue that the shortcomings of recent theories have methodological roots, namely that many of the most detailed treatments of hope tend to proceed with little regard for the rich body of literature on the emotions. By attending carefully to how hope patterns similarly to emotions, we will better understand the nature of hope. In particular, a familiar debate in the philosophy of emotions about the phenomenon of emotional recalcitrance carries over to debates about the nature of hope. We argue that hope can be recalcitrant, and that cases of recalcitrant hope pose a problem for what is arguably the most wellworked out theory of hope: Adrienne M. Martin's incorporation analysis of hope. In light of the problems with Martin's theory, but inspired by her insight that hope involves some kind of normative assessment, we offer a perceptual theory of hope. At a first pass, our proposal is that hope is a normative perception, specifically one as of the hoper's practical reasons. The perceptual theory of hope is not simply another analysis of hope, but plausibly has distinctive epistemological significance. In normative epistemology, many philosophers attempt to demystify how we learn what we ought to do by arguing that normative beliefs are justified by nondoxastic, perceptuallike states with normative content (see Huemer 2005; Oddie 2005). One of the biggest challenges for this approach is to say precisely what these nondoxastic states are (see Mackie 1977: 38). If the perceptual theory of hope is correct, then hope becomes part of an attractive answer to this challenge. This paper thus takes a fresh approach to the "What is hope?" question, and ultimately arrives at a novel theory that raises intriguing possibilities about the role of hope in normative inquiry. 2. Toward a New Approach to Hope We often see the word 'hope' alongside 'optimism,' 'pessimism,' and 'despair.' Philosophers tend to agree that when we are optimistic that p, we are confident that p will occur. It makes sense, for example, to say, "I not only hope that p; I am actually pretty optimistic about p!" where the expression of optimism reveals a greater level of confidence that p will obtain than the hope. It is also possible to be pessimistic that p, but still hope that p. It makes sense to say "you know, I am pretty pessimistic that p but I do still have some hope that p will occur." Despair, in contrast, is at odds with hope. We cannot both despair of an outcome and hope that it will obtain. We take these distinctions between hope, optimism, pessimism, and despair for granted, focusing on the nature of hope as an attitude A Perceptual Theory of Hope • 205 Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 that is compatible with pessimism, embodies less confidence than optimism, and is inconsistent with despair. Virtually everyone agrees that hope involves at least the desire for an outcome and the belief that the outcome is possible but not certain (Day 1969; Downie 1963; Wheatley 1958).2 But recent scholars have argued that this standard account does not quite capture the nature of hope. Although we do not have space to canvass all attempts to revise the standard beliefdesire account, we mention some that seem to us to be among the most promising.3 Luc Bovens (1999), for instance, maintains that hope involves conscious thoughts, or 'mental imaging,' about the desired outcome. The idea is that we only count as hoping if we at least intermittently devote mental energy to thoughts about what it would be like if the desired outcome were to occur. Other theorists maintain that the standard account does capture some of our trivial hopes, but that our most important hopes- hopes in which we are significantly invested, and those we sustain in the face of barriers to success- involve more than belief and desire (Martin 2014; Pettit 2004). Martin offers an example that she calls Cancer Research to illuminate an example of these more significant hopes. The example centers on two hypothetical patients, Alan and Bess, both of whom suffer from terminal cancer and have exhausted standard treatment options. Alan and Bess enroll in an earlyphase clinical trial of an experimental drug; they know that there is a less than one percent chance that they will receive medical benefit from the drug, and they share a strong desire to find a miracle cure. Alan notes that, while he hopes the drug will turn out to be a miracle cure, he has enrolled in the trial primarily to benefit future patients due to the unlikelihood of his hope being realized. Bess, on the other hand, appeals to her hope that she will be the one percent as "what keeps her going," and notes that she has enrolled in the trial primarily because of this possibility (Martin 2014: 14– 15). Martin argues that Bess but not Alan can be described as "hoping against hope": her hope for a miracle cure is strong despite the odds against her. Bess's hope is stronger than Alan's even though both patients assign the same probability estimate to the miracle cure and their desires for a miracle cure are equally strong. This case is meant to show that, to account for the fact that Alan's and Bess's shared hopes differ in strength, there must be some additional feature of hope beyond belief and desire. Given Bovens's mental imaging theory, we might think that the differences in hoping are traceable to differences in the patients' conscious thoughts about the desired outcome. But Martin contends that Alan 2. It is possible to hope for an outcome that is in the past, such as when one hopes that one's friend performed well in her interview hours after the interview occurred. The key is that the hopeful agent must be uncertain about whether something has, or will, obtain. 3. For a critical discussion of other theories not discussed here, see Martin (2014). 206 • Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 and Bess may engage in similar mental imaging yet the differences in hope remain. She finds equally inadequate Philip Pettit's (2004) view of substantial hope as cognitive resolve. According to Pettit, substantial hope involves acting as if the desired outcome will come about, or at least as if it were likely to come about. But if hope involves a kind of cognitive resolve whereby the hopeful person acts as if the desired outcome will obtain, then in hoping, Bess would say something like, "I grant you the chance is only one in a thousand, but don't think about that!" (Martin 2014: 22). Martin points out that this description does not cohere with cancer patients' actual experiences of hope in these cases.4 Instead, patients like Bess who hope for a miracle tend to say things like, "I grant you the chance is only one in a thousand, but it is possible!" (Martin 2014: 21). So it is not that hopeful patients resolve to act as if the drug will be a miracle cure, but that they tend to "hope for the best, plan for the worst" (Martin 2014: 22). Martin defends what she calls the incorporation analysis of hope in an attempt to accommodate attractive features of both Bovens's and Pettit's views, while resolving the difficulties noted above. She points out that that certain activities are characteristically hopeful. Thinking, imagining, and acting in accordance with one's desire are hopeful activities in which people engage, among other hopeful activities including fantasizing, planning, intending, and feeling in certain ways directed toward the desired outcome. Martin argues that these hopeful activities are not necessary and sufficient conditions, but constitutive features of hope as a syndrome. For example, hoping might involve fantasizing about and imagining the fulfillment of our desire (i.e., engaging in hopeful thoughts) as well as anticipating its fulfillment. Martin describes anticipation as a kind of positive feeling about the outcome's obtaining, a feeling that is captured by thoughts such as "wouldn't it be wonderful if . . ." (2014: 33). On the other hand, when we despair (i.e., when we are not at all hopeful), we experience gloomy feelings that lead to thoughts like, "how unfortunate . . . the world is so hard . . . , etc." (Martin 2014: 33). Martin observes that a syndrome analysis runs the risk of being ad hoc, allowing for any and all mental activities to count as part of hope. So she argues there must be some element of hope that unifies the activities constitutive of hope as a syndrome, knitting them together as features of hope and not just a random collection of things. Martin argues that the unifying element of hope is 'incorporation.' More specifically, in hope, we incorporate our desire for an outcome into our rational scheme of ends, judging that there are sufficient reasons to engage in thoughts, feelings, activities, and modes of perception directed toward the fulfillment of one's desire. In other words, hope involves taking the probability 4. The Cancer Research case comes from Martin's encounters with real patientparticipants in clinical trials during her postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Health. A Perceptual Theory of Hope • 207 Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 (however small) of the hopedfor outcome's being realized as nevertheless possible, and as licensing the agent (on grounds of practical reason) to treat her desire for the hopedfor outcome, and the outcome's desirable features, as reasons for engaging in the hopeful activities of thinking, imagining, fantasizing, and so on. What is missing from the beliefdesire account of hope is the idea that "one stands ready to offer a certain kind of justificatory rationale for . . . forms of planning, thought, and feeling" (Martin 2014: 35). Thus, on Martin's view, "to hope for an outcome is to desire (be attracted to) it, to assign a probability somewhere between 0 and 1 to it, and to judge that there are sufficient reasons to engage in certain feelings and activities directed toward it" (2014: 8). All of these analyses of hope have done much to deepen our understanding of the phenomenon. But we maintain that there are important shortcomings with each. In particular, the debate about the nature of hope within analytic philosophy suffers from a methodological shortcoming. The problem is that much of this work has taken place without regard for the rich literature on the philosophy of emotions. This is somewhat surprising, given that many philosophers interested in questions about the value of hope class hope with other emotions. Margaret Urban Walker, for example, suggests that hope is an 'emotional stance' composed of desire and belief, as well as forms of attention, thoughts, and feelings (2006: 48). Victoria McGeer similarly characterizes hope as a 'complex dynamic' involving attitude, emotion, activity, and disposition (2004: 101). Alan Mittleman (2009) argues that hope is an emotion in his Hope in a Democratic Age, then proceeds to defend hope as a civic virtue throughout the book. Interestingly, many philosophers writing in the philosophy of emotions use the example of hope in illustrating their views, and treat it as an emotion without question (D'Arms & Jacobson 2000; de Sousa 1987; Deigh 2004; Goldie 2004; Gordon 1987; Nussbaum 2004; Roberts 2003). Martin (2014: 24 Footnote 27) explicitly notes that she wishes to tackle hope on its own terms, rather than as an emotion, for the nature of emotions is a vexed question and it's not obvious that there is a single, true account of the emotions to be had. Crucially, however, one needn't come down on the question of whether hope is an emotion in order to benefit from insights in the philosophy of emotions. This is because the preceding analyses- especially Martin's own- illustrate that hope is at least similar to paradigm emotions in many key respects. We illustrate in Sections 3 and 4 how philosophers' understanding of hope can be substantially improved by drawing out some of the similarities between hope and paradigm emotions. 208 • Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 3. Recalcitrance Martin's incorporation analysis of hope hits on an important truth, namely that hope involves a kind of normative assessment. But we argue that she mischaracterizes the nature of this assessment, thereby distorting our understanding of hope. The best way to see this is to notice that Martin's error is analogous that made by socalled judgmentalists about emotion. Let's begin by observing a similarity between the incorporation analysis of hope and judgmentalist theories of emotion. On the incorporation theory, hope involves judging that one has sufficient reasons to engage in hopeful activities, standing ready to offer a justificatory rationale for doing so (see Martin 2014: 8). This is a strong form of endorsement: those who hope in the fullest sense believe that their hope is justified. Similarly, judgmentalist theories of the emotions claim that emotions involve not only affect or feeling, but also a characteristic evaluative judgment. For example, Philippa Foot proposes a judgmentalist theory of pride according to which feeling pride requires that one believe that the object of pride is "in some way splendid and in some way one's own" (1978: 76). The similarity between the incorporation analysis of hope and judgmentalist theories of emotion is that the normative assessment involved is a kind of judgment. Philosophers of the emotions now widely reject traditional judgmentalist theories because they struggle to account for the phenomenon of recalcitrant emotions (see D'arms & Jacobson 2003; Greenspan 1988; Roberts 1988).5 Recalcitrant emotions are those which persist despite a conflicting judgment. To take a familiar example, a person who is afraid of flying on a plane despite judging that flying is safe experiences recalcitrant fear. The worry for the judgmentalist is that, for any evaluative judgment that is supposed to be constitutive of the emotion, the agent can apparently experience the emotion while holding the contrary judgment. Of course, a judgmentalist could insist that recalcitrant emotions always involve an agent maintaining contradictory beliefs. But this isn't an attractive move, for the beliefs would often be transparently contradictory. For 5. Some philosophers continue to characterize their views as 'judgmentalist' including, for instance, Robert Solomon and Martha Nussbaum. But both philosophers have a capacious understanding of what counts as a judgment, one which does not obviously contrast with perception. Nussbaum, for instance, is explicit that she uses 'perception' and 'judgment' interchangeably to refer to the normative assessment involved in emotions, and she says that both are a kind of feeling (2001: 60). Solomon speaks of "judgments of the body," which are, unlike many ordinary judgments, affectladen and also often nonpropositional and prelinguistic (2003: 191). In a personal correspondence with Robert C. Roberts, Solomon apparently wrote that what Roberts calls 'perceptual construal' is precisely what he means when he argues that emotions are judgments (Roberts 2014: 15). Thus what we argue here does not contrast with views such as Solomon's and Nussbaum's, as may first appear, although we do believe that the language they use (in terms of judgment rather than perception) can lead to confusion. A Perceptual Theory of Hope • 209 Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 example, an agent who experiences recalcitrant fear of flying would judge both the flying on a plane is dangerous and also judge that it is not. As Justin D'arms and Daniel Jacobson point out, in most such cases, this maneuver will involve a "dubious attribution of peculiarly conflicted beliefs" (2003: 129). If hope, like other emotions, can be recalcitrant, then Martin's incorporation analysis will not be able to account for such cases. Agents with recalcitrant hopes would not treat their desire and desirable features of the hopedfor outcome as justification for engaging in hopeful activities, as Martin's view requires. We believe that hope can be recalcitrant, and examples are readily available in the literature. Bovens describes a case in which a person who goes to a car race finds himself fantasizing about the possibility of a spectacular accident and feels motivated to sit near the part of the track at which an accident is most likely to occur (1999: 679). He hopes for an accident, but is also deeply ashamed that he has the hope. The agent's shame signifies that he does not judge himself to have sufficient reasons to engage in hopeful activities such as imagining and fantasizing about the accident, even though he finds himself hoping for an accident. Similar examples are not hard to come by. A person might find themselves strongly hoping to get back together with an abusive expartner, yet judge that they are not at all justified in their hope- that getting back together with their abusive expartner would be a terrible thing to do.6 In cases of recalcitrant hope, the hoper does not judge that she has sufficient reasons to engage in hopeful activities, nor does she stand ready to offer justification of the sort that the incorporation analysis requires. Of course, Martin might say that this isn't a problem, since hope in the fullest sense requires incorporation. Similarly, a judgmentalist about fear might say that fear in the fullest sense requires endorsement at the level of judgment, even if there is some weaker sense of fear that requires no such endorsement. But it is no accident, we think, that judgmentalists about emotions have never taken this track, for cases of recalcitrant emotions are ubiquitous- and it is unclear why a theory of the emotions would exclude such cases as only quasiemotions, or as not emotions in the fullest sense. As we shall explain momentarily, the strategy of setting aside recalcitrant emotions can also appear especially ad hoc in the face of other ways of characterizing the sense in which emotions involve a normative assessment. 6. One might wonder whether the person really desires to get back together with the abusive ex after all. But it is perfectly conceivable that one might strongly desire and so hope for such an outcome while at the same time judging that doing so would be a terrible thing. This state of affairs makes sense of people who find themselves naturally drawn to reconnect with her expartners, imagining what they are up to, and longing for their presence, yet who at the same time criticize themselves for engaging in such activities. The presence of such hopes thus helps to explain why people sometimes end up scheduling psychotherapy sessions for assistance in eliminating desires they know they ought not to have. 210 • Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 4. The Perceptual Model(s) In the face of the problem of recalcitrant emotions, we might be inclined to give up on the idea that hope involves any normative assessment at all. And there are theories of the emotions that one might lean on as a model (e.g., Whiting 2009). But we agree with Martin that in the Cancer Research case there is a difference in the way that each patient assesses the situation, and that this difference is a function of how they hope. The task in this section is to characterize the nature of the normative assessment involved, once again taking our cue from work in the philosophy of the emotions. Philosophers drawn to the view that emotions involve a normative assessment, but who recognize the possibility of recalcitrant emotions, typically lean on an analogy with perception. Just as a person can perceive that a stick in water is bent even while believing that it is not bent, so too a person can emotionally experience the world as being some way even while believing or judging it to not be that way. So, for example, fear might be thought to involve a perceptuallike experience of the object of fear as dangerous, and anger an experience of having been wronged or of a situation as unfair. The list of philosophers moved by the phenomenon of emotional recalcitrance to the view that emotions are perceptuallike states includes Peter Goldie (2000), Robert C. Roberts (2003), Sabine Döring (2003), Jesse Prinz (2007), and Christine Tappolet (2016), among many others. Our idea is that hope involves a perceptuallike normative assessment. We do not make the claim that hope involves a literal perception, although some philosophers of the emotions do treat emotions as literal perceptions (Prinz 2007). We only commit to the weaker claim that hope involves a nondoxastic normative representation. There are different ways to think about the normative perception involved in hope. Our favored conception begins with Peter Goldie's view of emotions, according to which the perceptual component of an emotion is revealed by careful reflection on emotional feelings. As Goldie explains, "when an emotion is directed toward its object, then this is a sort of feeling toward the object" (2004: 96). The relevant feeling is not a bodily feeling (although it may accompany bodily feelings) like the feeling of one's heart pounding or the feeling of sweaty palms. Rather, it is an emotional feeling, a feeling that is directed toward an object in the world "beyond the bounds of our bodies," a feeling that is bound up with how we take in the world of experience (Goldie 2000: 48). When we experience fear, for instance, an accurate description of what we feel will make reference to some object experienced as dangerous. A natural supplement to a 'feeling toward' perceptual model takes its cue from work in the philosophy of perception and helps to clarify the specific kind of nondoxastic experience we have in mind (Bengson 2015; Chudnoff 2012; PryA Perceptual Theory of Hope • 211 Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 or 2000). Philosophers of perception point out that perception has presentational phenomenology, to borrow a term from Elijah Chudnoff (2012). The idea that in perceptually experiencing the world, the perceiver is presented with things as being a certain way. Beliefs, in contrast, lack presentational phenomenology, for in believing the agent takes a stance on what is true. Thus we are not interested in any kind of nondoxastic experience, but more specifically a nondoxastic experience as of something being presented to the experiencer as true. Incidentally, presentational phenomenology is often taken to be a central part of the explanation of why perception is able to justify beliefs (see Chudnoff 2012: 64). Thus presentational phenomenology bears on an observation with which we started, namely that hope's perceptual dimension may be important for normative epistemology, though we limit our focus here to the moral psychology of hope. These ideas about 'feeling towards' and presentational phenomenology carry over to hope in an illuminating way. Hope has a phenomenology, a "what it is like" to be in a state of hope, at least if we agree with Bovens that hope cannot be entirely unconscious. And like other emotions, part of what it is like to hope is to experience some kind of feeling. In our view, an accurate description of the feelings involved in hope will make reference to a normative way in which the world appears to the agent. And, moreover, we take this representation to have presentational phenomenology: reality presents itself to the person hoping as containing the relevant normative properties. This helps us to understand the sense in which Bess is taking a different normative stance on her situation than Alan in Cancer Research without locating that difference at the level of judgment or belief. But what exactly is this normative perception of? We characterize it in more detail below, but at a first pass, the idea is that in hoping we see the desired outcome that is possible but not certain as encouraging. In our view, then, hope is an attitude that involves: 1. The desire for an outcome. 2. The belief that the outcome's obtaining is possible but not certain. 3. Seeing the possiblebutuncertain desired outcome as encouraging to varying degrees. 4. Hopeful feelings. A proponent of the incorporation analysis may object that, in giving up the element of incorporation, we have lost what unifies the constitutive features of hope as a syndrome. But the perceptual theory unifies these elements in an elegant way. On our view, hopeful feelings are a perception of the possiblebutnot certain desired outcome as encouraging. No element of hope floats entirely free of the others. The perceptual model may mark a surprising return to the standard account 212 • Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 of hope according to which hope involves only a desire that p and belief that p is possible but not certain. Whether it does depends on one's view of desire. A traditional view of desire is that desires are perceptuallike experiences of the good or, alternatively, of reasons (Oddie 2005; Scanlon 1998; Stampe 1987; Tenenbaum 2007). On this view, desires do more than simply motivate behavior; they also have a characteristic phenomenology. As Graham Oddie puts it, "when I desire that P, P has a certain magnetic appeal for me. It presents itself to me as something needing to be pursued, or promoted, or embraced" (2005: 41). Given this view about desire, both the desiderative and perceptual components of hope are naturally taken to be identified with the feeling component of hope. The belief component, then, is part of the (causal) explanation for why the agent sees the outcome (by way of the desire/perception/feeling) as encouraging: because of the belief that it is possible though uncertain (see Milona in press). We do not want to insist on a perceptual view of desire, so we leave it as an open question whether hope involves a sui generis hopeful perception or whether the normative perception involved in hope is reducible to desiderative normative perceptions. Either way, the perceptual theory has the advantages of Martin's, Bovens's, and Pettit's views without the corresponding flaws. First, it accounts for the normative assessment involved in hope (as Martin's view does), while still allowing for the phenomenon of recalcitrant hope. Second, it captures Bovens's idea that hope cannot be unconscious, for perceptuallike experiences cannot be unconscious. But we go further in saying that a hoper must also perceive the content of the relevant images (in light of the probability assignment) as encouraging. Finally, the perceptual view makes sense of Pettit's insight that hopers are especially sensitive to the prospect that the desired outcome might occur, for the probability assignment is part of what they perceive as encouraging. But our account does not require hopeful agents to act as if the probability of the outcome were higher than it is. At this point, we need to clarify some points about our argument. The first is that we do not insist that our perceptual theory of hope (modeled in large part on Goldie's theory of the emotions) is the uniquely best perceptual theory of hope- we haven't the space to argue for this here. Other perceptualist views are possible. Prinz (2007), for instance, maintains that emotions involve nondoxastic normative representations, but unlike our favored approach, he does not hold that an accurate phenomenological description of emotional feelings will make reference to normative properties or relations. It is rather that the best story of what it means for a mental state to represent some content generates this result. Mark Schroeder (2007: 146– 163) defends a broadly similar view about desire according to which desiderative feelings come to have normative content by a process analogous to the way that visual perceptions come to have their contents; but he does not claim that it is part of the nature of desidA Perceptual Theory of Hope • 213 Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 erative feelings that they have such content. One may, then, attempt to model an alternative perceptual theory of hope on Prinz's approach to emotions or on Schroeder's approach to desires. We suspect such an account would have virtues similar to ours.7 By now, some readers may be itching to point out that perceptual theories of emotions are controversial, and thus we can expect a perceptual theory of hope to be equally so. But notice, first, that we are starting from Martin's insight that some kind of normative assessment is implicated in hope; and we believe that the possibility of recalcitrant hope illustrates that this evaluation is best captured by a perceptualist rather than judgmentalist model. Furthermore, a key point often lost in the literature is that many objections to perceptual theories of the emotions are not attacks on the psychological framework of those theories. Michael Brady (2013), for instance, argues that emotions are not like perceptions because, while emotions can be irrational, perceptions cannot be. He uses this observation as part of an argument for the conclusion that perceptions, but not emotions, provide us with reasons to believe that their content is true. But notice that Brady's aim is to draw an epistemological disanology between emotions and perceptions. He leaves the psychological analogy between emotions and perceptions intact, and indeed it plays an important role in his positive view about the value of emotions.8 5. The Content of Perception If hope involves a normative perception, then it is fair to ask what the content of that assessment is. Thus far, we have suggested that in hoping we perceive the possibility that the desired outcome will obtain as encouraging. While we 7. In the emotions literature, there is also an important distinction between views that maintain emotions have normative content and those which locate the normative dimension of emotions outside the content (see Deonna & Teroni 2012). A similar issue arises in the literature on desire (see Schafer 2013). We do not explore this complex debate here, but we note that we have no qualms with those who prefer to locate the normative assessment of hope outside the content of the attitude. 8. Bennett Helm (2015) argues that the phenomenon of emotional recalcitrance tells against a psychological analogy between emotions and perceptions. On his view, recalcitrant emotions are often irrational, in contrast with recalcitrant perceptions which are never irrational. Yet, crucially in this context, recalcitrant emotions are never irrational in the manner of a judgment. Emotional construals are a sui generis kind of representation, importantly different from both judgments and perceptions. One concern about Helm's argument is that is highly questionable whether emotions can ever, strictly speaking, be (ir)rational (see Michael Milona 2016: 903; see also Barry Maguire 2017 for an argument that there are no reasons for affective attitudes). But even if Helm's argument works, it does not provide a framework for vindicating Martin's incorporation theory of hope. It would rather lead to a theory located somewhere between Martin's view and our own perceptualist model. 214 • Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 think this description captures the phenomenology of hope, it is a metaphor, one which it would be desirable to unpack. This might seem a futile task, however, since perceptualists about emotions notoriously struggle to adjudicate between different proposals for what sort of normative assessments are involved in emotions. For example, does fear involve a representation of its object as fearsome, as dangerous, or as something else?9 D'arms and Jacobson (2003: 134) point out that it's not clear how we would begin to adjudicate these different theories. They also think that the difficulty of doing so calls the perceptualist's psychological framework into question, for if emotions are normative perceptions then it must be true that they have certain normative contents. Similarly, perceptualists about desire have struggled to say whether desires represent the good, practical reasons, or something else.10 In this section, we propose an account of the content of the normative perception involved in hope. Among those who think that hope involves a normative assessment, it is popular to claim that hope assesses its object as good. Historically prominent proponents of this view include Augustine (2008: 36) and Aquinas (2007: 760), while more recent advocates include Robert C. Roberts (2007), Charles Pinches (2014), and potentially Jonathan Lear (2006: 103). Depending on how the idea is developed, this thesis might be taken to mean that hope represents its object as good simpliciter, or, alternatively, that it represents it as good for the hoper. By contrast, as we have seen, Martin develops a picture on which hope represents the hoper's practical reasons. In particular, in hoping that p we take desirable features of p and the possibility of p as sufficient reasons for engaging in hopeful activities. In what follows, we suggest a general strategy for adjudicating these different hypotheses. The strategy relies on our judgments about when attitudes are fitting. Fitting emotions, as we conceive of them, are those which accurately represent whatever normative property they are hypothesized to be about. This is a common view among those who believe that emotions involve normative assessments (Döring 2003; Greenspan 1988; Prinz 2007; Roberts 2003; Solomon 1976; Tappolet 2016). For example, if a joke is funny, and if laughter represents the property of being funny, then it is fitting to laugh at the joke. The fact that a joke is immoral may be a reason not to laugh, but its immorality does not necessarily change the view that laughter is fitting (cf. D'arms & Jacobson 2000). Our proposal is that, given a perceptual model of hope, a hypothesis about what hope is a perception of (goodness, reasons) should align with judgments about when hope is fitting. In other words, a fitting hope should also be an accurate perception. 9. On the difference between being fearsome and being dangerous, see Francois Schroeter (2006). 10. Alex Gregory (2013) as well as Michael Milona and Mark Schroeder (2017) have recently argued in favor of the view that desires represent practical reasons rather than goodness. A Perceptual Theory of Hope • 215 Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 In determining whether the fittingness of hope aligns with a given hypothesis about what sort of normative assessment is involved in hope, we should keep in mind more than simply whether the relevant normative property or relation is present. To borrow a metaphor from D'arms and Jacobson, determining the fittingness of an emotion consists in considering both the shape and size of the attitude (2000: 73). An emotion's shape is fitting if the object really does have the evaluative features the emotion represents it as having. But emotions, including hope, might be overblown or experienced too strongly; when this happens, the emotion is not fitting in terms of its size (an important dimension of the overall fittingness of the emotion). For example, on the view that hope represents its object as good, a hope that dinner is tasty plausibly has the right shape, for it is good if dinner comes out tasty. But if the affective intensity of the hope were overwhelming, then it would not have the right size, since it is not that significant that dinner tastes great. In our view, the hypothesis that hope involves perceptions of the good faces serious problems. Return to Martin's example of Cancer Research. In that case, Bess strongly hopes that she be cured of cancer in the face of a one percent chance of a cure. It may initially seem as though the view that hope involves a perception of its object as good makes sense of this case. After all, it would be very good if Bess were to be cured. But we believe that appearances are misleading, and trouble emerges when we notice the relevance of the low probability that the hope will be realized to whether the hope is fitting. Martin stipulates that Bess's hope is based in an accurate estimate that she has a one percent chance of being cured. But we might still doubt whether, given such low odds, it really is fitting for Bess to have such a strong hope to be cured. She might, instead, more fruitfully devote her mental energies elsewhere to make the most of the time she has left. Even if we grant that Bess's hope in the face of a one percent chance is fitting, Bess's hope would not be fitting if the chance of being cured were a trillion to one. Yet this would not make the object of her hope- that she is cured- any less good. In sum, the fact that Bess's hope is far overblown in strength given the probability that her hope will be realized renders her hope unfitting overall, despite the fact that the shape of her hope is correct. The observation here is a simple one: whether an instance of hope is fitting fluctuates with the probability that the hopedfor outcome will be realized. But how good the outcome is does not similarly fluctuate.11 The same goes for a view on which hope represents its object as good for the hoper. How good the realiza11. See Milona and Schroeder (2017) on the view that desires involve perceptions of the good. They argue that such a view leads to systematic inaccurate representations of the good in competitive contexts (e.g., a desire to win a race), and that this systematic inaccuracy tells against the hypothesis that desires involve representations of the good. We believe that our observations about hope and probability may extend to desire, providing further support for Milona and Schroeder's 216 • Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 tion of the hope would be does not typically fluctuate with how likely the outcome is. Intensely hoping, for example, that all forms of social oppression will be eliminated in one's lifetime aims at an outcome the obtaining of which would be extremely good (in general, for the hoper, and for millions of people around the world); but such a hope is not fitting, since it represents the possibility that oppression will end in one's lifetime as far more encouraging than it is. The view that, in hoping, we assess the object of hope as good- a view which traces back to Augustine and Aquinas- appears dubious in light of these considerations. In our view, it is more plausible that hope represents practical reasons. This view squares more easily with the idea that the fittingness of a hope is sensitive to the likelihood of the outcome's obtaining. While the goodness of an outcome may not fluctuate with how likely the outcome is, our reasons to attempt to bring an outcome about certainly do. For example, the weight of Bess's reasons to seek a cure through the experimental drug trial increase as it becomes more likely that the trial will be successful, and decrease as it becomes less likely.12 The view that hope involves a normative perception of reasons fits well with the metaphorical idea with which we started, namely that in hoping we see the desired outcome that is possible but not certain as encouraging. In hoping for a miracle cure, Bess perceives certain facts about what it would be like to be cured- for example, that she would be able to spend more time with her grandchildren- as reasons to seek a cure; and they appear to her as reasons in part because of her representation of the chance she might actually be cured. Borrowing terminology from Jonathan Dancy (2004: 41– 42), we might say that the probability assigned to a desired outcome often functions to intensify or attenuate our apparent reasons to pursue it, making the reasons appear more or less weighty.13 We thus agree with Martin about the content of the normative assessment involved in hope- as one of practical reasons- but disagree about the nature of the normative assessment. In perceiving that one has practical reasons to pursue an end, one does not necessarily judge that one is justified in doing so.14 case. Similarly, their observations about desire may extend to hope; but we do not have space to explore these connections here. 12. Bess may perceive other reasons to participate in the trial that are independent of her hope to be cured through her participation. She might, for instance, recognize the same reasons to participate in the trial as Alan did- namely, to benefit future patients. (The perception of these reasons may even be grounded in a distinct hope to benefit others through her participation.) 13. According to an alternative model, the probabilities become part of complex reasons (cf. Dancy 2004: 3843). It doesn't matter for our purposes how one chooses to characterize the phenomena. 14. One may wonder how our proposal characterizes hopes for outcomes the agent does not see any way to promote. In our view, there is no onesizefitsall answer; it depends on the details of the case at hand (including potentially controversial background judgments about which reasons are in fact present in a given case, if any, as well as the weight of those reasons). In some instances, a hoping agent may see considerations as reasons but also recognize those reasons as A Perceptual Theory of Hope • 217 Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 6 Conclusion: A Complete Theory of Hope? We have defended a perceptual theory of hope according to which hope involves: (i) a desire that p, (ii) a belief that p is possiblebutnotcertain, (iii) perceptuallike experiences of reasons to pursue p, and (iv) an emotional feeling of hopefulness. We remain noncommittal about how these different components relate. On our favored approach, an adequate description of what it is like to experience hopeful feelings makes reference to the normative way in which reality is presented to the hoper. One might also take up the view that desires are a kind of normative perception, in which case one might conclude that the standard beliefdesire account of hope is true, after all. But precisely how one comes down on how these components of hope relate to one another will depend on how one understands affective phenomenology and desire, and we do not settle these issues here. Before closing, we will address one last question about hope: Does the perceptual model fail to capture an important class of hopes? Philosophers have tended to focus on intentional hopes, or hopes that are for some outcome to obtain. But sometimes, we talk of 'having hope' and 'being hopeless' more generally. Matthew Ratcliffe (2013) and Cheshire Calhoun (in press) have recently argued that there is a form of preintentional hope that is a precondition for intentional hopes. If there is such a thing as preintentional hope, then it might not fit into the perceptual model, for perceptions are always about something. Calhoun describes preintentional hope, or what she calls 'basal hope' in the following way: Basal hopefulness is not hope for this or that outcome, but is what Matthew Ratcliffe describes as a nonpropositional, preintentional sense of the future- "a kind of general orientation or sense of how things are with the world"15 or an "experiential backdrop"16 on which particular hopes for this or that become intelligible. (In press) One response to Calhoun's notion of basal hope is to set it aside, insisting that our aim is to analyze intentional hopes. But we believe that the perceptual model, defeated by a lack of control (e.g., a hope oriented to the past). In other cases, an agent may be unsure how to act on the reasons that they see themselves as having, or they may see reasons to cultivate virtuous patterns of thought and feeling that will ready them for concrete action should an opportunity arise (e.g., a hope that Trump lose the 2020 election). Other cases may be exercises of empathetic hoping whereby the hoper sees reasons that are possessed by another agent. 15. Matthew Ratcliffe (2013: 602). 16. Ratcliffe (2013: 600). For additional discussion of preintentional states that involve an affectively laden mode of anticipating the future, see also Matthew Ratcliffe, Mark Ruddell, and Benedict Smith (2014). 218 • Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 as well as some recent work in philosophy of mind, points toward an alternative understanding of the (important) phenomenon that Ratcliffe's and Calhoun's accounts reference. At first glance, basal hopefulness appears to be something like a mood, in contrast with hopes that p, which are more like emotions. It is occasionally said that moods such as elation, irritation, and anxiety are not about anything, though they often give rise to emotions such as joy and anger which do have intentionality. A general feeling of irritation, for instance, seems to involve a distinctive 'raw feel,' but according to some, the feeling does not seem to be about anything in particular (Deonna & Teroni 2012: 4). But the view that moods are wholly nonintentional is now widely doubted, and for good reason (Crane 1998; Goldie 2000: 143– 151; Kind 2013; Mendelovici 2013). For example, a number of philosophers have described many of our moods, including euphoria, depression, and melancholy, "as being directed at both nothing and everything" (see Kind 2013: 120).17 This suggests that we are right to deny that our moods, at least many of them, have particular objects. Yet it seems wrong to conclude that they have no object whatsoever. A tempting solution is to treat the relevant moods as aimed at the entire world (Baier 1990: 3; Lyons 1980: 104). Here is how Robert Solomon expresses the idea: Europhoria, melancholy, and depression are not about anything in particular (though some particular incident might well set them off); they are about the whole of our world, or indiscriminately about anything that comes our way, casting happy glows or somber shadows on every object and incident of our experience. (1976: 173; quoted in Kind 2013: 120) We do not insist that all moods take the entire world as their object, but we think that something along these lines fits well with how Ratcliffe and Calhoun talk about basal hope. Calhoun argues that basal hopefulness involves taking an interest in the future generally or globally, rather than hoping for the fulfillment of specified desires. Basal hope is what agents lose when they become depressed; they are not depressed about some particular thing, but "about the future generally. They lose a globally motivating interest in The Future" (in press). Whereas Calhoun and Ratcliffe understand basal hope as preintentional, we suggest that basal hope is intentional but highly general- its aboutness is directed toward a highly general state of affairs. Basal hope, we think, is similar to Robert Solomon's understanding of happiness as a metaemotion. Solomon 17. Amy Kind identifies a number of philosophers who make this observation, including Peter Goldie (2000: 18), Laura Sizer (2000: 747), Ronald de Sousa (2014). A Perceptual Theory of Hope • 219 Ergo • vol. 5, no. 8 • 2018 argues that the metaemotion of happiness is "an ongoing summary evaluative judgment about our being in the world. It is a kind of allembracing emotion, one that is not just about any particular aspect of our lives but about our lives as a whole" (2007: 265). Basal hope seems similar; it involves a perception that one has practical reasons to continue on living one's life, and following one's desires. Although there may be many seemingly plausible ways of trying to describe basal hope as an intentional state (cf. Ratcliffe 2013: 603), we believe our proposal is especially attractive insofar as it leads to a unified picture of hope, treating basal hope as continuous with paradigmatic intentional hopes. A perceptual theory of hope, according to which hope involves a perception of practical reasons, makes hope an attractive candidate for contributing to agents' ethical outlooks. Our ambition is to have paved the way for investigations into hope's role in guiding practical inquiry. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the John Templeton Foundation for funding this research, and our fellow scholars in the Hope & Optimism: Conceptual and Empirical Investigations Project for lively discussions throughout the 2016– 2017 academic year that helped to inspire our writing. In this regard, we would like to especially thank Luc Bovens, Andrew Chignell, Alex Esposito, and Nicole Hassoun. We also benefitted significantly from discussions with Hannah Tierney. Katie would like to thank Cheshire Calhoun, Chike Jeffers, Greg Scherkoske, Susan Sherwin, and Lisa Tessman for feedback on ideas related to this paper. Michael would like to thank Mark Schroeder for many valuable discussions about desire over the years that would eventually help him to theorize hope. Finally, we would like to thank Ergo's editors and two anonymous referees for helping us strengthen our argument. References Aquinas, Thomas (2007). 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Reliable but not home free? What framing effects mean for moral intuitions

Philosophy

Reliable but not home free? What framing eects mean for moral intuitions* James Andow January 8, 2016 Abstract Various studies show moral intuitions to be susceptible to framing eects. Many have argued that this susceptibility is a sign of unreliability and that this poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. Recently, doubt has been cast on this idea. It has been argued that extant evidence of framing eects does not show that moral intuitions have a unreliability problem. I argue that, even if the extant evidence suggests that moral intuitions are fairly stable with respect to what intuitions we have, the eect of framing on the strength of those intuitions still needs to be taken into account. I argue that this by itself poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. 1 Introduction In recent decades, a number of researchers have reported that moral intuitions are subject to various types of framing eects. These studies have contributed to the much discussed methodological worries about the use of intuitions in philosophical methodology which draw on framing eects and other problematic influences in various philosophical domains (see, e.g., Swain et al., 2008). The typical argument given is that the framing eects demonstrate that the intuitions are unreliable and this puts pressure on the use of intuitions in moral philosophy (e.g., Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008). This challenge has spurred a backlash. For example, it has recently been argued that the relevant evidence does not show that the extent to which moral intuitions fall short of perfect reliability is sucient to cause problems for moral philosophy (e.g., Demaree-Cotton, 2015). It has been argued that we are entitled to assume that moral philosophers' intuitions are reliable even if we concede that ordinary folks' intuitions are unreliable (see my Andow, 2015a). In other words the issue at the heart of this backlash has been reliability. In this paper, I take a step back from the issue of reliability. I will concede that, vis-à-vis reliability, extant evidence of framing eects maybe does not present much of a worry for moral philosophy. I will argue that even if moral intuitions are not suciently unreliable to generate a problem, framing eects nonetheless demonstrate that the use of intuitions in moral philosophy is problematic. The structure of the paper is as follows. §2 reviews the evidence of framing eects, outlines and evaluates the unreliability argument. §3 then argues that the framing eects nonetheless highlight a problem with the role that intuitions play in philosophical methodology. §4 makes a number of remarks in light of the preceding discussion. At the heart of my discussion is a distinction between the intuition one has and the strength of that intuition. It might be helpful to say something to motivate that distinction upfront. Consider your favourite philosophical thought experiment. Suppose you have an intuition about it. You think *This paper is forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology. Please refer to the published version for citations, page numbers, and so on. 1 that p (some proposition concerning the case). My attitude to the same case might be dierent. I might think that not-p. In this case, you would have a dierent intuition to me. But that is not the only way our attitudes might dier. We might agree in polarity (i.e., as to whether p, or not-p) but nonetheless have drastically dierent attitudes in terms of the strength of our intuitions. For example, while I might generally agree with you, my intuition might be fairly weak, suppose, while yours is very strong. Of course, there are various ways in which an intuition might be said to dier in degree from another if not polarity. For example, one intuition might be clearer than another, or more emotionally invested, or more entrenched, or more intellectually compelling, and so on. These are important dierences and the role of such dierences in philosophical methodology is yet to be explored in any detail. However, for my purposes in this paper, I won't be dwelling on these dierences and will instead use the word 'strength' simply to bundle all these potential types of dierence in degree together. What is important for my purposes is the fact that (a) intuitions can dier in degree even if not in polarity, (b) this has significant implications within standard philosophical methodology, and, perhaps most importantly, (c) some such dierences in degree might show up in survey responses. This latter point is worth illustrating with an example. Suppose that a survey measured participants' intuitions on 6-point scales, anchored at either end by '1 – strongly disagree' and '6 – strongly agree'. Suppose that this survey asked participants the same question given two dierent framings. Suppose that for framing A the mean score comes back as 1.2 and for framing B the mean score is 2.5. Suppose that both these means are significantly lower than the midpoint of the scale, 3.5, and that framing A is significantly lower than B. All else being equal, the natural interpretation is that these result reflect the fact that, while participants tend to have the same intuition given each framing, that intuition tends to be stronger in some way given framing A. 2 The unreliability argument Moral intuitions have been claimed by numerous researchers to exhibit framing eects. This means that moral intuitions about cases are sensitive to morally irrelevant dierences in the ways in which those cases are presented. Typically these framing eects are order eects. For example, there are numerous studies which find that participants' intuitions about various cases are sensitive to which cases they considered beforehand (Lanteri et al., 2008; Lombrozo, 2009; Nichols and Mallon, 2006; Petrinovich and O'Neill, 1996; Schwitzgebel and Cushman, 2015; Wiegmann et al., 2012). However, there are other types of framing eects which have been claimed to aect moral intuitions and philosophical intuitions more widely, e.g., how vividly a case is presented (Bartels, 2008), whether a case is high aect or low aect (Nichols and Knobe, 2007), how mechanistically/psychologically cases are described (Nahmias et al., 2007), the presence of unconscious cleanliness cues (Tobia et al., 2013), or even what typeface a case is presented in (Tobia, 2012; Weinberg et al., 2012, who cites the unpublished Gonnerman et al. 2011). (This is not intended to be an exhaustive list.) Are framing eects a sign of unreliability? The answer depends on what we mean by 'unreliable'. The relevant sense of 'reliability' is a measure of how likely an intuition is to be incorrect. If intuitions are liable to say that p (e.g., acting in a certain trolley case is permissible) in around 80% of cases and p is true, then intuitions would be 80% reliable (with respect to that proposition). (Things get a little more complicated when we scale up and ask questions like how reliable are peoples' intuitions generally about moral matters generally, but we don't need to get into that.) But that leaves the question of unreliability unanswered. What is it then for intuitions to be unreliable? Here there are various senses one might have in mind. One relevant sense might be that intuitions are unreliable if they are more likely to be false than true. But framing eects typically don't show that intuitions are this unreliable. Indeed, given 2 that most moral intuitions are about the truth or falsity of some particular claim, there is no way that evidence of framing eects could by itself demonstrate that intuitions were less than 50% reliable (one would need some external source of evidence). However, I take it that no one ever thought that framing eects would have to show that intuitions were unreliable in this sense in order to highlight a reliability problem with moral intuitions. Rather, it seems problematic for moral philosophy even if intuitions are right only 51% of the time. This said, it is not as if any degree of unreliability is a worry for moral philosophers, since very few (if any) philosophers treat moral intuitions as being 100% reliable. So, the relevant sense of 'unreliable', then, must be somewhere between less than perfectly reliable and actually more likely to be wrong than right. Demaree-Cotton (2015) articulates an interesting way to get a handle on the relevant sense of unreliability. The eect of irrelevant factors is worrying, is her thought, when the framing of a scenario is likely to aect which answer we give. For example, one might not be worried about the influence of irrelevant factors if, regardless of framing, one's intuitions gave the same verdict in 99.99% of cases. On the other hand, one might be pretty worried about the reliability of your intuition that p, if in all likelihood you would have had the intuition that not-p given a dierent framing of the relevant question. She surveys a large number of studies which have reported framing eects in moral intuitions and, for each, reports the probability that subjects would have made the same judgment regardless of which frame they were exposed to. The resulting figures cluster at around the 80% mark.1 Demaree-Cotton considers this figure to be quite an optimistic finding for the proponent of the use of intuitions in moral philosophy. Now, I think this optimism might not be completely warranted.2 I am tempted by the thought that this figure actually shows that framing a case one way rather than another, where that dierence is irrelevant to the moral facts, actually seems to be able to push our intuitions around a surprising amount (bear in mind that I antecedently expect that frmaing eects are just one type of a bunch of irrelevant eects on my intuitions). However, it is true that there is a kind of self-doubt which Demaree-Cotton has shown to be unwarranted by the evidence. Given that the probability you would have had a dierent intuition given a dierent framing is only around 20%, one can still be pretty confident that one's answer would have been the same. It is worth noting that there are various reasons one might doubt the claim that the available evidence suggests that intuitions have a reliability problem, in addition to those which DemareeCotton provides. For example, many extant studies use between-subjects designs one might think are non-ideal for the task of investigating the influence of framing eects. But, for my purposes, it is not important to do a complete survey of all the reasons one might doubt whether the relevant evidence shows signs of problematic unreliability. Instead, I want to argue that even if DemareeCotton and other's doubts hold out, and people's intuitive judgments are much more stable (in terms of yes/no answers) than has been claimed, this does not mean that the available evidence presents no methodological challenge to the use of intuitions in philosophy. 1Despite being careful elsewhere, in her conclusion Demaree-Cotton (2015) cites this figure as suggesting that intuitions are around 80% reliable. We should be careful in making this leap. We shouldn't confuse reliability with consistency. It is perfectly possible to give consistently incorrect answers. However, this 80% figure does give us a measure of the causal contribution of framing eects to the instability of intuitions. 2Another reason for some caution is that a number of the 'intuitions' which Demaree-Cotton investigates are either explicitly or implicitly comparative. Haidt and Baron (1996) ask participants for an explicitly comparative assessment of 'An action on the part of a friend is morally worse than on the part of a stranger'. Schwitzgebel and Cushman (2012) ask their participants about two scenarios separately and the figure Demaree-Cotton examines is the proportion of participants who gave the same numerical answer to each (so measuring an 'implicit' comparative judgment). The reason for caution is that there is reason to think that comparative judgments like this would be more resilient to order eects than the precise strength of intuitions about single cases. 3 3 Intuitions are not home free So, it seems that the extant evidence on framing eects in moral intuitions may not be too worrying where reliability is concerned; there may be no great reliability problem per se. Nonetheless, although moral intuitions may be reliable enough (for all the relevant evidence shows), I argue that extant evidence of framing eects still presents a problem for moral philosophers. Indeed, my final observation in the previous section is a sign of the nature of the problem. Intuitions come in dierent strengths. Indeed, philosophers sometime make the strength of certain intuitions explicit, especially when the relevant intuitions play important roles in the relevant debates or dialectic. Here are a couple of examples (in which philosophers variously describe intuitions as strong, weak, and consider the comparative strength of intuitions – my emphasis): There is a strong and sensible intuition that the laws of nature are logically contingent. (Mumford, 1998) According to many philosophers, there is a strong intuition that an agent in a standard manipulation case is not free. . . (Sripada, 2012) We have a strong intuition that a person's moral standing should not be aected by luck. (Brogaard, 2003) . . . the Langton/Lewis analysis of "intrinsic" faces two problems. The first is a straight counterexample-if you believe our weak intuition that being accompanied by a cube is no more natural than being such that there is a cube, their analysis will make the latter intrinsic. The second is that there doesn't seem to be any particular theoretical reason to overthrow that intuition. (Marshall and Parsons, 2001) . . . the strength of the reason created by (negative) desert is not constant across all oenses. The strength of this reason varies with the seriousness of the crime.. . .This characteristic of desert accounts for a (weak) intuition I tend to share and that many philosophers hold to represent the ultimate test of retributive sympathies: the aront to retributive justice many of us would feel if the appropriate institution had the opportunity but failed to give Hitler or Stalin the punishments they deserve. (Husak, 2013) I will conclude, however, by suggesting some factors that must be considered when deliberating over which of the two intuitive beliefs we have more reason to reject. 1. Which belief is stronger? Which is more dicult psychologically to give up? (Sommers, 2009) Nonetheless, I do think that the intuition is much stronger S fails to know when S possesses an intersubjectively evident defeater than when S possesses an intersubjectively opaque defeater. (Cohen, 1987) The fact that intuitions can vary in strength is significant as the eect of framing observed in the empirical studies isn't necessarily just a matter of what intuition participants have. Even when participants would have had the same intuition given each framing, the framing might aect the strength of that intuition. Of course, some empirical studies cannot pick up on the strength of participant's intuitions. If a study uses a form of question which asks participants only to select 'yes' or 'no' to the question 'Is it morally permissible to X?' then the data one obtains would not tell one anything 4 about the strength of intuitions. If on the other hand, as is typically more common in empirical moral psychology, the study uses a form of question which asks participants to indicate to what extent they agree with the statement 'It is morally permissible to X' on a scale from 1 to 7, the data one obtains allows one to make some inferences about the strength of participants' intuitions. I am not denying that framing eects which change the polarity of one's intuitions inspire a certain special kind of methodological worry. I think that studies often rightly make particular note of irrelevant eects which change the modal response (by this I mean cases where the manipulation changes which answer is the most popular) or which, for a study using a scale, move the mean response from one side of the midpoint of the scale to the other (see, e.g., Gold et al., 2014). Rather, my claim is that significant eects in participants' responses on a scale also raise methodological worries regardless of whether the eects threaten to make one's intuition 'agree' rather than 'disagree' or vice versa. To see why, we need to consider some facts about how intuitions factor into moral theorizing. Once we give this a moment's thought, it should be clear that it is not only what intuitions we have (or some relevant population has) but how strong those intuitions are which factor into moral theorizing. Suppose John has a very strong intuition that it is wrong to claim benefits to which one has no legal entitlement and a pretty weak intuition that those with certain disabilities should be provided with financial assistance by the state. Suppose that Jane has a pretty weak intuition that it is wrong to claim benefits to which one has no legal entitlement but a very strong intuition that those with certain disabilities should be provided with state help. John and Jane have the same intuitions. They find the same propositions intuitive and the same negations counterintuitive. And in both their cases, those same intuitions are likely going to factor into their theorizing when they consider what a just organization of the benefits system is going to look like. However, we can foresee that the dierent relative strengths of those intuitions is likely to mean that the upshot of John and Jane's theorizing will be rather dierent. Frequently in philosophical debates one can feel intuitive pulls in multiple directions. The reason moral dilemmas are called moral dilemmas is that we feel at least somewhat torn. Eects of irrelevant factors on the comparative strength of these pulls could have pretty radical eects on our final position. Stratton-Lake (2014) expresses a similar idea when considering evidence of framing eects on intuitions about trolley cases. He expresses doubt that there will be any participants who (a) think that one should push the man under the trolley to save the five bystanders, and yet (b) wouldn't nonetheless agree that the fact that this act will kill someone counts against performing that action. Everyone feels the pull, that's his point. What is important then-what makes the dierence between Kantian and Utilitarian-is the way that the competing pulls stack up against each other (as well as with other considerations which may be in play). Consequently, the influence of morally irrelevant factors on the strength of intuitions is thus very important even if it doesn't change which intuitions one has. It is capable of radically altering the moral position which one ends up endorsing. This might not be obvious; the kinds of manipulation typically used to push people's intuitions around in moral psychology are not generally thought to permanently alter people's intuitions. However, even amomentary eect on the strength of intuitions can have a dramatic eect. Suppose that, as a philosophy student, week-after-week for a whole term, you have the class on intergenerational justice in the case of climate change right after the class on reproductive ethics. Moreover, suppose this framing means that when you first encounter each topic on the course you have weaker (or stronger) intuitions about the demands of future generations on our climate policy decisions. This could radically aect how seriously you take certain objections, how persuasive you find certain arguments, or which positions you simple dismiss-in that class. And the eects of this could well be longlived, even if the direct eect of framing is not. It could aect which ideas one chooses to write on, what one chooses to work on at graduate school, and so on. Likewise, suppose that a key paper in an important debate exploits a certain framing in order to 5 pump intuitions in favour of a particular position. Suppose it doesn't aect what people generally find intuitive, but merely how intuitive they find it while assessing the relevant argument. This is a framing which will potentially aect everyone involved in that particular debate and could have a significant influence on the trajectory of scholarship in that particular field, with many people taking the relevant position more seriously than they would have done had that single paper used an alternative framing. If you are a moral philosopher, evidence that the strength of moral intuitions is sensitive to irrelevant factors should shake you considerably, whether or not which moral intuitions you have is similarly sensitive. So, what does the extant evidence say? Can we quantify the risk that the strength of our intuitions would be rather dierent given a dierent framing (even if the content of our intuitions would not)? Three of the studies Demaree-Cotton examines allow us to do something close:3 1. Nadelhoer and Feltz (2008) report that participants asked to state 'how much control you think [X] has over the outcome' in a standard switch trolley case had a mean response of 4.28 (on a scale from 1 to 7) when the protagonist was 'you' and 5.12 when the protagonist was 'John' (t(83) = −2.217, p = .029).4 We can get a sense of the size of this eect; from the df and t-value we can calculate Cohen's d which reveals this to be a medium sized eect d = .49). 2. Liao et al. (2011) report that participants asked about the statement 'It is morally permissible to redirect the trolley onto the second track' in a Loop trolley case had a mean response of 3.10 (on a scale from 1 to 6) when preceded by a push trolley case and 3.82 when preceded by a standard trolley case (p = 0.029). 3. Wiegmann et al. (2012) report a number of significant eects. All concern responses on a scale from 1 to 6 to 'Karl shouldn't, in terms of morality, [perform the relevant action]'. The two orders were MAF (most agreeable first) and LAF (least agreeable first). The results are in Table 1. Again we can calculate eect sizes – this time from reported means and standard deviations – for all order eects observed. All are large. Table 1: Means and eect sizes for Wiegmann et al. Scenario Mean (MAF) Mean (LAF) Cohen's d Trap 3.24 2.12 .74 Redirect 3.84 2.52 .90 Run Over 3.84 2.52 .90 Standard 4.08 2.68 .95 We can see that whether or not these framing eects make a worrying contribution to what intuitions one has, they threaten to make an appreciable contribution to the strength of one's intuition. Given one framing, one's intuition might be fairly firm; given another, it might be pretty noncommittal. This is no trivial dierence given the way that intuitive judgments factor into moral theorizing. One might resist this idea that framing could make the dierence between having a strong intuition and having a fairly weak intuition. The thought might be that strong intuitions will be less 3Unfortunately, the others either (i) do not report mean ratings in relation to the order eects (Haidt and Baron, 1996), (ii) concern implicitly comparative judgments which do not represent a single answer given by participants (so participants were never asked a question which would allow them to indicate the strength of their intuition) (Schwitzgebel and Cushman, 2012), or else (iii) used 'yes'/'no' questions only (Lanteri et al., 2008; Tobia et al., 2013). 4This is a dierent eect than the one Demaree-Cotton discusses. Nadelhoer and Feltz (2008) measure moral intuitions using a 'yes'/'no' question. 6 susceptible to framing eects on strength. However, there's no positive reason to hold out hope that it is only the weak middle-of-the road intuitions which get pushed around in terms of strength. There is, it is true, some much discussed evidence that more confident/strong intuitions are more stable (Wright, 2013, 2010). Zamzow and Nichols (2009), for example, argue the defender of intuitions may find some relief in the fact that confidence ratings track the extent to which intuitions are sensitive to order eects. However, one must remember the nature of the relevant evidence. The evidence shows that confidence/strength ratings are strong predictors of stability of intuitions in the following sense: they are strong predictors of whether the case participants are considering is a case for which 'yes'/'no' answers are stable or unstable (Wright, 2010). The evidence does not show that framing eects' influence can push the strength of weak intuitions around but not that of strong intuitions. Moreover, if intuitions' susceptibility to framing eects in terms of their strength was uniform (strong intuitions were aected as much as weak intuitions), then one would predict that framing eects in terms of intuitions' polarity would vary between strong intuitions and weak intuitions (because weak intuitions need a smaller change in order to push them over the midline). 4 Final remarks Before closing, let me make three final remarks. Evaluative methodology needs to keep descriptive methodology in mind Because debates about the epistemic standing of intuitions have quite understandably been parsed in terms of reliability, it has been easy for eorts in evaluative methodology to focus on an overly simplified model of the way that intuitions factor into moral theorizing. There is an important sense in which descriptive methodology is properly considered prior to evaluative methodology (as I have argued elsewhere Andow, 2015b). There is a danger that the implications for the evaluation of philosophical methods of empirical studies on moral intuitions and indeed other intuitions will not be properly understood if the working model of intuitions' role in philosophy is one according to which it is only which intuitions participants have that is relevant.5 A suggestion about how to use intuitions unproblematically My main aim in this paper has been to argue that framing eects might show moral intuitions to be problematic even if they don't showmoral intuitions to be problematically unreliable. I do not want to paint a too pessimistic picture of the use of intuitions in moral philosophy, however. The reason is as follows. In the event that intuitions are pretty reliable but have a strength problem there is a natural ameliorative strategy which suggests itself. The strength problem stems from facts about the ways that philosophers actually use intuitions. However, philosophers could change the ways that they used intuitions. There might be better ways to use intuitions which are available. Were it the case that intuitions were unreliable as well, there would be no obvious solution. However, suppose that Demaree-Cotton (2015) is correct that intuitions are not problematically unreliable. If this is the case, we can trade on the fact in order to avoid the strength problem. So the suggestion is this: philosophers stop giving weight to the strength of their intuitions and just rely on the answers that intuition endorses regardless of the strength. There are things we can say to make this sound a little more palatable, e.g, (i) philosophers do not need to rely only on their own intuitions – one can still have a measure of how intuitive a certain proposition is by using experimental ethics which means that one is not at an evidential stalemate every time that intuitions apparently conflict; and (ii) another way to break stalemates is to ask whether 5Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, recent work in descriptive methodology suggests that the role of intuition in philosophy seems likely not to be restricted to evidential use but also play an important explanatory role which raises new issues in evaluative methodology (Andow, 2015b). 7 either of the conflicting intuitions can be explained away, or whether reasons can be given for assigning a certain intuition a lesser weight in the theory choice. A note of caution Even though there is this obvious ameliorative strategy available, there might be some reason to worry that we are not up to the task of putting that ameliorative strategy into action. Although philosophers do sometimes appeal to intuitions and explicitly appeal to their being 'particularly strong', most of the time the ways that the strength of intuitions influences philosophers is more subtle and not part of the explicit reasoning process. It may be that we are rarely consciously aware of factoring in the strength of intuitions. It may be that the weighing up of intuitions of dierent strengths takes place with a certain level of automaticity, meaning that it is dicult to rein in. Nonetheless, even if we are not able to completely bring this use under control, it is still a step forward to exercise greater caution when using intuition in guiding our moral theorizing (if not about the direction in which intuition points, then about the vigour with which it points). 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