The Visual Guide to Morality: Vision as an Integrative Analogy for Moral Experience, Variability and Mechanism

Abstract

Analogies help organize, communicate and reveal scientific phenomena. Vision may be the best analogy for understanding moral judgment. Although moral psychology has long noted similarities between seeing and judging, we systematically review the "morality is like vision" analogy through three elements: experience, variability and mechanism. Both vision and morality are experienced as automatic, durable and objective. However, despite feelings of objectivity, both vision and morality show substantial variability across biology, culture and situation. The paradox of objective experience and cultural subjectivity is best understood through constructionism, as both vision and morality involve the f lexible combination of more basic ingredients. Specifically, both vision and morality involve a mechanism that demonstrates Gestalt, combination and coherence. The "morality is like vision" analogy not only provides intuitive organization and compelling communication for moral psychology but also speaks to debates in the field, such as intuition versus reason, pluralism versus universalism and modularity versus constructionism."I know it when I see it." -Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart (on identifying pornography; Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964) Conversations about morality often reference vision, with laypersons and Supreme Court Justices alike "seeing" an action's wickedness or righteousness. Similarities between morality and vision were first noted by Hume (1777) -who likened moral judgment to aesthetic judgments -and have been echoed by more contemporary scholars, who suggest that moral judgment is more about "seeing-that" than "reasoning-why" (Haidt, 2001;Wilson, 1997). Despite the general acknowledgement that morality is often experienced like vision, we suggest that this analogy is underappreciated and under-explored. Vision captures not only the experience of making moral judgments but also the variability and mechanism of these judgments. We suggest that vision provides an intuitive way to summarize and communicate moral psychology research and also offers perspectives on current debates in the field.Analogies have long played a central role in the development of scientific theory and its dissemination (Glucksberg & Keysar, 1990). In psychology, prominent analogies include Wundt's comparison of psychology to chemistry (Blumenthal, 1975) and Freud's model of the unconscious as an iceberg. Within moral psychology, the mind has been analogized as a camera with easy automatic settings (i.e., emotion) and more difficult manual settings (i.e., cognition; Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008; Greene, 2014), and to an elephant (i.e., emotion) with a rider (i.e., cognition; Haidt, 2012) who erroneously believes herself to be in control.While these analogies are intuitive, they apply to any dual-process account of judgmentwhether moral or not -and capture only one aspect of moral judgment. We suggest that the

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