FULL-ACCESS AGENTS AND
MORAL INTUITIONSMoral intuitions are part of our mental dispositions for social interac-
tion. But why are they connected to gods and spirits and ancestors?
To understand how such beings fit with moral understandings, con-
sider two facts that I mentioned earlier. First, our moral intuitions
suggest to us, from the youngest age, that behaviors are right or
wrongby themselves, not depending on who considers them, or from
what point of view. Second, gods and spirits and ancestors are gener-
ally considered interested parties in moral choices and moral judge- [189]
ments, rather than providers of codes and rules. These two facts are
just two aspects of the same mental processes.
Imagine this situation: You know (a) that there is a banknote in
your pocket and remember that you stole it from your friend's wallet.
This situation may produce a specific emotion (guilt). Let me change
the context. You took the banknote from your friend's wallet but also
remember (b) that hestole money from you in the first place. This
new context will probably result in a rather different emotional reac-
tion, perhaps a mixture of reduced guilt, outrage at his behavior and
partly quenched resentment. So your emotions are very much a func-
tion of the information you represent about the situation at hand. But
that is the crucial point: in either case you assume that the emotion
you feel is the only possible one given the situation. A disinterested
third party who knew the facts about (a) would agree that stealing the
money was shameful; whoever knew about (a) and (b) would share
your outrage and your sense of justice done. This at least is what we
assume and why we invariably think that the best way to explain our
behavior is to explain the actual facts. That is why, were your friend (in
situation [b]) to complain about your behavior, you would certainly
explain to him that it was only a just retribution for his own misde-
meanor. Most family rows are extensive and generally futile attempts
to get the other party to "see the facts as they really are"—that is, how
you see them—and by virtue of that to share your moral judgements.
This rarely works in practice, but we do have this expectation.
So we intuitively assume that if an agent has full access to all the
relevant information about the situation, that agent will immediately
have access to the rightness or wrongness of the behavior. When I talk
about "information" I naturally mean "strategic information" since all
WHYDOGODS ANDSPIRITSMATTER?