This document provides an overview of the dual-system model of human cognition and its implications for ethics. It argues that behavioral psychology has identified two systems of thought - System 1 (fast, intuitive thinking) and System 2 (slow, reasoned thinking). This discovery constitutes a paradigm shift that challenges the traditional view of humans as primarily rational agents. The document contends that situational access - the level of environmental sensitivity and feedback available - is a key factor in ethical decision-making. It proposes a three-tiered model of ethics accounting for different levels of situational access. The goal is to develop a more realistic and applicable understanding of ethics informed by insights from behavioral psychology.

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Robbie Blasser
5/5/14
Social Phil
Master’s Paper
The Three Levels of Behavioral Ethics
I. Introduction
Philosophy is a broad, complex, and abstract intellectual endeavor and, while the word
itself literally means “love of wisdom,” there are obviously many differing interpretations of
what that wisdom is and, perhaps more importantly, the optimal ways of attaining it. In the world
of academia, this has typically—though not exclusively—taken the form of scholarship, where
contemporary students study the works of the great minds of the past and then apply those works
to the issues of their particular day.
But this is, of course, not the only way to approach the discipline, and it is, by no means,
the model always employed by those aforementioned great minds of the past. Thomas S. Kuhn’s
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, posited that the model of acquiring
empirical scientific knowledge for humans is neither streamlined nor coherent, but rather
consists of periodic breakthroughs which irrevocably shift whatever the current paradigm of
scientific thought may be at the times in which they occur. In this model, once standard views
and forms of conventional thinking are overthrown—after their inadequacy was sufficiently
revealed, that is—by these revolutionary discoveries, creating new standard views and a new
form of conventional thinking, which are also overthrown in time as well.
And while Kuhn’s work was specifically targeted at the sciences, the fallout of the model
it establishes nonetheless affects philosophy as well, as it too has had its share of conventional

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thinking and periodic overthrows of that conventional thinking from time to time. Interestingly
enough, these philosophical paradigm shifts often seem to go part and parcel with their scientific
counterparts; the discipline has, over time, been repeatedly challenged and pushed forward by
these kinds of advances. As examples, it was not philosophy that discovered the notion of
necessary truths way back in ancient Greece, but rather mathematics; the Copernican shift and
Newtonian physics had a profound effect on many of modernity’s questions, in the general sense,
and every facet of Immanuel Kant’s thorough and impressive attempts to answer these questions,
in particular; and, in the not too distant past, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had an utterly
devastating impact on the principle of sufficient reason. These scientific breakthroughs (as well
as others, of course) did, as Kuhn asserted, create paradigm shifts, and forced both scientist and
philosopher alike to reconsider and even reformulate what they knew, how they came to know it,
and the tools they use in working their way through it all.
I contend that we’re currently in the middle of one of these paradigm shifts, brought forth
by one of these revolutionary scientific breakthroughs. In the last few decades, behavioral
psychologists have identified a more accurate interpretation of human consciousness than the
traditional philosophical versions, in what they refer to as the dual-system model, which is1
comprised of what they’ve also labeled to be System 1 and System 2 thinking, respectively. And
this breakthrough has profound implications for not only our sense of human identity but, more
importantly, how we both assess and execute human behavior as well. And this applies most
precisely to the branch of ethics.
These traditional versions include, but are certainly not limited to, Augustine’s “soul,” Locke’s “self,” and1
Freud’s three levels of consciousness.

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So keeping this new model of consciousness well at hand throughout, I will present the
case that the two most important aspects of ethical decision-making are environmental sensitivity
and feedback, which come together to comprise an ethical agent’s level of situational access to2
both the contextual ingredients of what goes into these moments (covered by the former) as well
as a nuanced understanding of what comes as a result from his or her ultimate decision (covered
by the latter). This level of situational access is the crucial determining factor of not just how
we’re to respond in a given moral dilemma but, also, what kind of response is effective or even
applicable. In other words, in order to ascertain how we should best approach an ethical issue,
we first need to know what level of situational access we’ll be privy to as the events play out
because, in cases where our access to environmental sensitivity and feedback is both abundant
and clear, ethics in the conventional sense can work quite well but, in cases where the access is
scarce and murky, this standard form becomes much more difficult and, oftentimes, practically
irrelevant, given what we now know about the dual-system model, the two systems of thought
themselves, and how they affect our ability to make moral judgments.
The seminal thrust here is that this cognitive and moral position we find ourselves in
requires ethics to be seen more behaviorally and cognitively—rather than merely intellectually or
even emotionally—and that our working sense of ethics must be tiered so as to allow the varying
degrees of environmental sensitivity and feedback to be acknowledged and channeled
appropriately, thereby creating more realistic norms that can be grounded more authentically as
well as more readily applied. Indeed, one should never approach distant or global problems that
he or she has little situational access to with nuanced, contextual responses; it’s simply the wrong
Both “environmental sensitivity” and “feedback” are borrowed terms, already found in much of the2
psychological literature. “Situational access,” however, is my own.

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tool for the job. And of course, it works the same the other way: it would be morally obtuse to
approach intimate ethical problems with broad and generalized rules or policies; the court of
public opinion or a set of legal rulings on international justice are not wisely brought to bear on
our more personal issues.
So in the pages that follow, I will establish all three of these levels in detail, but first I’ll
obviously need to provide a rough sketch of the dual-system model of consciousness we’ll be
working with, what exactly it is that makes situational access so crucial, and how it all applies to
the three fields of ethics. This will consist of four basic arguments: 1) The discovery of the two
systems of human thought constitutes a scientific breakthrough worthy of a paradigm shift in
moral theorizing; 2) In the branch of ethics, the greatest lesson from this breakthrough is the
importance of situational access (i.e. environmental sensitivity and feedback) in both individual
decision-making as well as social policy-making; 3) This scenario prompts the need for three
levels of ethics, each distinguished from the others based upon their particular amount of
situational access, and which must be applied to their appropriate corresponding situations in
order to yield more positive—and more consistent—ethical results; and 4) It is in the service of
philosophy to incorporate these findings into its classic questions, so as to see which historical
theories hold up well in this new light and which do not, as well as simply provide the discipline
with additional and possibly even more accurate and comprehensive lenses to view its subjects.
In order to accomplish all this, I will be leaning on the work of multiple behavioral and moral
psychologists, including but not limited to Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt, and Paul Slovic,
as well as that of behavioral economist Richard H. Thaler and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein.

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However, it also needs to be made abundantly clear here that the point of this paper is not
to attack or marginalize the work of philosophical scholarship; the historical and academic
aspects of the discipline are not to be undervalued; they are prominent and undeniable elements
of philosophy’s social and intellectual worth. The purpose here is rather to create a larger amount
of in addition to with this newer information and these fresher perspectives, not create a sense of
instead of. Just like in the empirical sciences, new advances do need to be factored into the old
constructs of philosophy. However, unlike in the empirical sciences, it is incumbent upon
students of this particular discipline to not forget the older models themselves, even when they
get disproven, overthrown, or just plain move out of favor. They constitute not only a historical
account of our emotional and intellectual progress over the generations, but also a tremendous
level of insight into how we view ourselves and approach our world even today.3
II. The Dual-System Model
The first of the two is System 1 (S1), our capacity for fast thinking, which is most often
referred to as our intuition but also includes our perception. This system works through instant
and reflexive assessments of our current surroundings along with whatever that external stimulus
unconsciously elicits from the associative machine of memories this system has also, over the
course of our lives, established within the brain. This allows us to navigate our environments
efficiently, to make the quick decisions and do the kind of multitasking necessary to perform
It is also important to note here that one of the basic working assumptions I used in this introduction,3
and will continue to use throughout the paper, is that the prospective reader of this piece, along with any
example I employ, is already invested in ethical issues and wishes to improve his or her behavior in this
regard because, if they did not, the very ideas of situational access, environmental sensitivity, and
feedback probably wouldn’t matter to them in the slightest. Now, in the day-to-day reality of the world we
share, of course, this assumption is clearly overly-optimistic but, within the context of this paper, it is a
necessary one. So to reiterate, this work is not an attempt to persuade readers to broaden their sense of
morality and/or want to improve their ethical decision-making; it presumes its reader already values these
and wishes to gain greater insight into their many facets and challenges on a behavioral level.

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even the most basic tasks of a given human day, like simultaneously walking and conversing
with a friend or preparing lunch while going over the rest of that day’s schedule. In order to
achieve this, S1 creates mental shortcuts and uses resemblance far more than information. It is
also incapable of being shut off. “The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a
model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. ”4
System 2 (S2), our capacity for slow thinking, is most commonly referred to as our
reason. This process isn’t constantly activated like our S1 and is only called upon when that
system has hit an impasse it can’t negotiate with the tools currently at its disposal. When it is
called in to help, it’s only job is to focus on and handle whatever the specific problem is at that
moment; it does not multitask. It is also considerably lazy and inclined to put in only as much
effort as required to deal with the problem in front of it; then it retires to rejuvenate, before being
called upon again. An insightful way to think about this is that our S2 has a limited budget of
sorts and, from this, we pay attention. Thus, “overdrawing” from it constitutes a significant5
mistake on our part; expecting S2 to function beyond its capabilities leads to cognitive failure.
The key takeaway from all this is that S1 is our primary interpreter of and actor in the
world around us. While we’re far more inclined to identify with our S2 abilities of reason and6
reflection, it’s really the first system that mainly guides our behavior and influences the course of
our lives on that day-to-day level because it’s where we spend the majority of our time and take
most of our actions. And this system isn’t at all concerned with the burdens of reason or logic; its
Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, page 714
Kahneman uses this exact metaphor on page 23.5
Even if we somehow did manage to make our System 2 reason our primary interpreter and actor, it6
would be overloaded by the avalanche of information it’d need to process in a matter of seconds. The
division of labor between the two systems is what makes human living, in all its permutations, possible.

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only job is to move us through the world safely and swiftly, using whatever is in front of us along
with whatever it can grab quickly from our memory to get that done. So in fast thinking, views
never have to be consistent and beliefs don’t ever have to make sense. Since safety and efficiency
are its primary charges, it has systematic biases and fallacies that it’s prone to use in certain
circumstances in order to facilitate those charges; being “right” or “wrong,” in the traditional
sense of these words, is simply beside the point. Thus, it’s not prone to doubt. It isn’t the
business of S1 to care whether it’s mistaken unless we instantly suffer for those mistakes; then it
sits back and lets S2 handle the problem until solved. If it turns out to have been a random
aberration, S1 forgets the problem entirely and, if it doesn’t turn out to be that, S1 alters it’s pre-
existing model just enough to accommodate it and then moves on almost as if it never happened.
Again, and I must be entirely explicit here, these are the cognitive processes of your
brain; they’re how it’s wired to operate. They aren’t two distinct “selves” in any metaphysical
context and their proclivities and capabilities are not uniform across the board. So this isn’t about
universalism. Some people’s S2’s are more potent than others and that system can be improved
through training, just like most other human abilities. In other words, our brain’s wiring is
elastic, so the aggregate implications of the dual-system model are not essentialist. All of this is7
more properly viewed as merely the breakdown of our thinking tools, the physical materials used
to do our associating and reflecting. And of course, the tools alone are never the whole story; it’s
also about how an individual uses them (and was conditioned to use them by their cultural,
communal, and familial environments, especially during his or her formative years). Moreover,
the work of behavioral psychology should never be seen as absolute, but rather as well-verified,
Certain features are essentialist, however. As in how, at any given moment, our associative machine7
only represents active ideas; what it isn’t accessing might as well not even exist, as far as it’s concerned.

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quite common, and highly influential tendencies that we’re susceptible to in ways and at degrees
we typically don’t find comfortable. So the point isn’t to say these inclinations are inevitable; it’s
just that they can’t be ignored and yet are so often and easily underestimated.
Rationality, then, is simply one of the mental attributes our dual-system offers us, and it
too is limited and flawed. But as just stated in the previous paragraph, it can also be broadened
and honed; people can become more or less rational—and do so quite frequently—throughout
the course of their lives, depending on both the situation they currently find themselves in and
the amount of work they do or do not elect to put into the development of this capacity. However,
the dual-system model and the preponderance of research data that went into its establishment
stipulate that, no matter how often we place ourselves in situations that are conducive to this
capacity or how much we develop it, it is fallacious to claim that we are ever primarily rational
(i.e. that it’s our true nature, which we should live up to), even though this is the very assumption
that many, especially those in philosophy, tacitly or even unequivocally work with.
Therefore, the central claim of this paper when it comes to rationality is as follows: The
dual-system model of human thinking and the accumulated research which established it do not
deny our rational capacity; they simply show that it’s not nearly as influential and reliable as
we’ve come to assume it is. This means the celebrated and idealized rational-agent model which
began with Plato and was later expanded and reinforced throughout following generations—most
notably during The Enlightenment—is inaccurate; it presumes a reality that’s not actually the
case and is more correctly seen as the rational-agent fallacy. And to be clear, the traditional8
definition of rationality I’m addressing here is threefold: 1) It is chiefly concerned with
The specific term Jonathan Haidt uses for this is “the rationalist delusion”, found on page 28 of his The8
Righteous Mind.

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discovering that which is factually accurate; 2) It is predominantly bound by the rules of logic
and reason, if not exclusively so; and 3) It is humanity’s primary attribute.9
To paint a more thorough understanding of this model, specifically the relationship
between the two systems, I offer Daniel Kahneman’s most complete and insightful summary:
“System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and
feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into
voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of
System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires,
and that is fine—usually. ”10
One of these exceptions though, which really helps expose the rational-agent fallacy,
comes from moments when we’re primed to react in certain ways without our explicit permission
or often even our basic awareness. In technical terms, priming refers to an increased sensitivity
to certain stimuli due to recent experience. An illuminating example of this would be asking
someone about his or her current relationship status before asking how happy they are with the
state of their life as a whole: how they answer the second question will invariably be affected by
how they answered that first one, in ways they more than likely will not comprehend at that
moment. Whether you ask it or not, the reality of their life will be unchanged, of course, but
asking will dramatically impact their current mindset, which wields a tremendous amount of
influence while they’re assessing the state of their life. And the important part to keep in mind is
that this isn’t a direct retrieval or an intentional switch; it’s actually unconscious. “Studies of
priming effects have yielded discoveries that threaten our self-image as conscious and
autonomous authors of our judgments and our choices. ”11
“Most distinct attribute” would have been a more accurate way of saying this, for Plato and others.9
Kahneman, page 2410
Ibid, page 5511

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Notice how the previous sentence did not read “discoveries that threaten us,” only
“threaten our self-image.” The rational-agent model we use is that self-image, and it assumes—
whether passively or actively—that we’re always consciously in complete control of the views
we hold and the decisions we make, even though this has now been scientifically shown to not
always, or even consistently, be the case. And since we very much do find these results
threatening, given our covert or overt acceptance of the rational-agent model (or fluid
combination of both), we often underestimate their implications, especially when it comes to
how much they apply to us personally; they simply do not align with how we’re trained, and thus
also prefer, to view ourselves as individuals. As Kahneman states:
“You do not believe that these results apply to you because they correspond with nothing in your
subjective experience. But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2
tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious
access to them. ”12
What’s most significant here is that no matter how unpleasant or uncomfortable we may
find this discovery or its implications to be, it doesn’t get to be viewed as something we have an
authentic option of disbelieving. Kahneman and many other researchers have demonstrated13
time and time again that this is a plain reality of human living, whether we wish to accept that or
not. “The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced,
much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment. ”14
Moreover, when we are solely using S1, which is most of the time, not only are we not
primarily rational, but the idea of rationality itself is completely irrelevant to our S1, so much so
Ibid, page 5712
Earlier on page 57, Kahneman even explicitly states, “Disbelief is not an option.”13
Ibid, page 12814

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that the idea of thinking or behaving rationally or irrationally doesn’t even occur to us. Only
when we are deliberating with our S2 does the concept itself even come up, and then it is all we
can see. But in the light of the dual-system model, this is more properly viewed as an instinctive
overestimation, one that allows us to mistakenly overvalue our reason and tell ourselves the story
of how we are mostly rational agents—a story which will disappear as soon as we go back to our
more common S1 state, and then reappear the second we call it back with our S2. A helpful
metaphor to keep in mind with this difficult-to-grasp state of affairs is the idea that the object you
are currently looking at is only there when your eyes are open and, the instant you close them, it
disappears entirely; and your eyes are closed the majority of the time. But since it is, in fact,
always there when you open them, you have been trained to believe that it’s always there, and
the idea it might not be feels absurd. Simply put, you are offered no reason to doubt its constant15
existence, so you rarely do. And this is precisely how it actually works when we “measure” the
reach and prowess of our sense of rationality.
And finally, it is critical to note this isn’t the only area where we see circumstances
inaccurately and then instinctively narrativize to create a sense of coherence; we don’t just do
this when it comes to constructing our own identity or assessing our lives. We actually do it quite
frequently, and it’s not a deliberate choice in most cases; our brains are simply better wired for
the purpose of processing elaborate stories than it is for the task of observing and retaining basic
information. As Kahneman states:
“Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The
explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a
I suppose we can refer to this as “The Problem of the Rational World.”15

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larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that
happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. ”16
III. The Importance of Situational Access
As established back in the introduction, situational access is our level of both S2 and S1
apprehension of everything that leads up to and results from any moral judgment we make. Our
level of this is what provides us with the context and specific details of a given ethical dilemma
so, when it is abundant and clear on both ends of the decision itself, direct ethical decision-
making becomes easier. In these situations, body language, facial reactions, tone, depth of setting
familiarity, et cetera, all play significantly into our appraisals and judgment, informing them in
ways that we may not even notice, let alone describe.17
A great example of this high level of situational access is found in familial or communal
conflicts, those in which we have a strong cognitive grasp of the world we’re currently inhabiting
as well as the persons we’re conflicting with, thus leading to great environmental sensitivity and
a receptive vantage point for feedback. If, for instance, you were to marry into a family that18
valued sensitivity and softness when speaking to one another, while also just so happening to
come from one that instead valued direct and unfiltered honesty, you would have a daunting
ethical challenge on your hands. (Note: I strongly hold that this situation falls under the rubric of
an ethical matter, even though many would instead view it as a personal and more emotional
problem. My reasoning is it involves both awareness of one’s actions in a challenging situation
Kahneman, page 19916
This is why immersion is still and probably will always be the best way to learn languages and cultures.17
My initial assessment of this level’s cap, in terms of the amount of people it could be applied to, is one18
hundred and fifty. This is the number that behavioral psychologists and others have set as the maximum
when it comes to the human brain’s ability to create, foster, and maintain direct relationships. It is known
as the Rule of 150.

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as well as a social impetus to curtail or augment those actions in order to accommodate affected
others. So while this may, in fact, be a highly intimate ethical situation, it’s an ethical situation
nonetheless.) However, you would have a notable advantage in facing that challenge, since you’d
also be in a position to attain a strong familiarity with all the ins and outs of this new emotional
network; you’d be able learn their backstory and they yours; you’d have a front row seat for
assessing the fallout of the behaviors you exhibit in all its subtle complexity; you’d be able see
and, more importantly, feel the social habitat affected by the choices you do or do not make. This
is, therefore, the most elementary of all moral situations to find oneself in; it’s ethical decision-
making in a world where situational access is both obvious and immersive.
But when situational access is lacking, on either end, we are too, in a manner of speaking.
For instance, affect is an S1 function, and it’s what gives any sensory information we receive its
initial social and ethical meaning; it’s the difference between witnessing an injustice happen in
real time versus hearing about it the next week versus reading about it ten years later. Each step
further away from the immediate act creates an increased amount of diminished sensitivity,
inhibiting our ability to feel the proper emotions in moral judgment. In the society we currently
inhabit, this more detached apprehension is typically how the enfranchised come to learn about
the oppression of others and, in a more specific example, how a man so very often becomes
aware of the inequalities faced by women and the concept of “the patriarchy.” He seldom sees it
working as it happens; he’s rarely in a position conducive to gaining a genuine understanding of
what goes into it or how its consequences have already influenced a given woman in his life; his
view of the situation is lacking in affect, along with other things.

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However, the ramifications of the oppression are not a world away; they’re often amongst
him; and so he occasionally has to deal with them. The amount of situational access in these
moments is thus mostly limited to outputs; it offers only a stunted, un-nuanced form of feedback
and an almost total lacking of environmental sensitivity. He is confronted just with the effects of
the oppression without knowing what went into them on a palpable level, in a way that affects his
personal, deeply engrained interpretation of the world directly. This places him in an odd middle
ground of sorts that many people often have a tough time negotiating: a social issue he both can’t
fully comprehend and yet can’t ignore either.
The next situational access scenario is best described as the “no level of situational access
scenario.” It occurs when we don’t have any genuine access to either the inputs or the outputs —
when we’re totally lacking in both environmental sensitivity as well as feedback. This is found in
circumstances where a choice we make has its ramifications on not just people we haven’t met
but, also, people we often don’t even know are being affected at all. An insightful example of this
would be the passive and often wasteful consumer habits of those of us who inhabit the affluent,
developed world while, at the same time, extreme global poverty ravages and even ends the lives
of millions in the developing world. And this is even further exacerbated by how, in this ever-
globalizing greater world beyond our own, we oftentimes find ourselves making consumer
decisions that actually participate in the squalor and exploitation being inflicted upon these
utterly vulnerable people, and are either only casually aware of this or not aware of it at all; the
victims are just too geographically far away from us while also having no socio-political say in
global matters and policy. And without this necessary access to the horrendous reality, the notion
that we’ll prioritize it or feel the proper emotions regarding it—so much so that they’ll transfer

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over to that day-to-day, behavioral level—is simply not feasible, no matter how much we may
“know better” or feel guilt in those rare cases when our S2 is prompted to finally reflect on the
matter. (And regardless of however we may feel about this when reading the above sentence.)
So in sum, these three wildly variant ethical situations (which will be taken up later in
much greater length and detail, of course) all require a certain amount of deliberation and action,
obviously, but they also require separate and distinct forms of that deliberation and action; not
only can they not be handled in the same way, they cannot really even be approached in the same
fashion; they are just too qualitatively different as far as the wiring of our brains is concerned.
But recognizing this is an extreme challenge for most, also because of how our brains are
wired along with the specific narratives we’re prompted by this wiring to tell ourselves about,
say, how we “care for all people the same” or how “every life is equally precious” to us, in either
an emotional or theoretical way. We mean these things when we say them, of course, but only in
rare and isolated instances will we be inclined to behave differently in order to accomplish
whatever ethical motivation we’re currently feeling or reasoning. As Kahneman states:
“The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything
that comes your way. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not
completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend. ”19
IV. Metaethical Grounding, Norm Formulation, and Application
In order to ground my ethical assertions, I will be relying on moral psychologist Jonathan
Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory for three specific reasons: 1) It grounds our sense of morality
within human cognitive processes; 2) It factors in the dual-system model; and 3) It accounts for
Kahneman, page 9719

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the diversity of moral systems and the variance found in ethical decision-making without
resorting to the logically invalid argument of moral relativism.20
In his book, The Righteous Mind, Haidt presents these foundations as receptors in the
human brain, likening them to the distinct taste receptors found in the tongue, and thus portrays
our sense of morality as analogous to our sense of taste. The foundations (and their counterparts)
are as follows: Care vs. Harm, Liberty vs. Oppression, Fairness vs. Cheating, Loyalty vs.
Betrayal, Authority vs. Subversion, and Sanctity vs. Degradation. Now, not all cultures will focus
on all six foundations evenly—and may even only focus on two or three exclusively—when
constructing their structure of morality, the norms that result, or the number and specific values
that are then developed to facilitate them, but this is the pool they’ll inevitably draw from;
certain foundations will be focused on much more and so certain values will be celebrated above
all others. This means another significant advantage of Haidt’s theory is it also accounts for the
reality of human disagreement.
For example, in the case of the Liberty foundation and a culture that elevates it above all
the others, that culture will come to value and celebrate shows of autonomy while discouraging
and rejecting displays of deference. However, in another culture—one that instead elevates the
Authority foundation above all others—these actions would be seen in an entirely opposite
manner: displays of autonomy would now be seen as threatening by the culture, while deferential
acts would be encouraged and rewarded. This kind of disagreement also applies to different21
sub-cultures within a greater society, and explains why the celebrated attitudes found in a city
The statement “moral relativism is true” cannot hold logically because, if all moral considerations are20
relative, then nothing in morality can be considered as definitively true, including that very statement.
Haidt addresses this tension specifically on page 173 of The Righteous Mind.21

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like San Francisco, for example, clash with those more prevalent in Salt Lake City, even though
both are parts of the greater U.S. society.22
A basic description of this theory begins with the idea that, in the greater world beyond
our personal worlds—that is, the unique S1 models of “reality” we’ve each been cultivating all
our lives and are, to a tremendous degree, influenced by the surroundings we were arbitrarily
born into and/or raised in—there is no singular morality, but rather a collection of coexisting,
competing, and/or even combatting moralities, each derived and specifically alchemized from
the six moral foundations we’re all propped up and inhibited by; and that this is a fluid and
never-ending process which adapts with social and environmental changes, and so is perpetually
open to revision (though usually not too easily). In other words, there is no “one” anything in
ethics or philosophy as a whole, just as there is no comprehensive rulebook (or guidebook23
even) ever created that directly applies to all people in all situations.
The key aspect of Haidt’s theory to grasp, however, is his claim that these foundations are
innate understandings, though he makes sure to clarify just what exactly he means when he says
“innate.” Since their introduction during The Enlightenment, the concept of innate ideas has
been hotly contested and, in its more traditional notions, it was eventually mostly refuted. But
Haidt contends that it’s not the ideas themselves that are innate; it’s rather our cognitive
machinery, which contains these moral receptors that were steadily formed through human
behavior and interaction, and then further developed in that same vein over time. His point with24
These are admittedly extreme examples, but that’s also what makes them useful for the specific point22
being made here: while this level of variation is present, on at least some level, in all distinct regions of
the country, it’s only in the extreme comparisons that they become readily apparent.
This is a comforting myth dating all the way back to Parmenides.23
This is more in line with Leibniz’s conception of innate, as opposed to that of Descartes.24

18. Blasser 18
this is that our brains may not be hardwired for morality, but they are pre-wired for it. This is,
again, an elastic capability, allowing for environmental factors to also play a large role in shaping
how we, as members of a given culture, consider ourselves ethical and it’s in this pre-wiring
where he ascribes our metaethical basis for human morality, giving us this analogy:
“The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No
chapters are complete at birth and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood.
But not a single chapter—be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality—consists of blank
pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. ”25
He goes on to cite neuroscientist Gary Marcus: “Nature provides a first draft, which
experience then revises... ‘Built-in’ does not mean unmalleable; it means ‘organized in advance
of experience.’ ” In other words, the foundations of ethics are the human being’s innate and26
fluid proclivities to six moral foundations in order to direct and appraise human behavior within
some kind of larger whole, be it social or cosmic. I hold that this interpretation of metaethics is27
immensely advantageous because it posits a form of grounding that can not only actually be
substantiated but, moreover, can far more readily lead to the formulation of norms that are better
suited to work with our mental tools, since they are more authentically derived from those mental
tools. Furthermore, the routine challenges of applied ethics are also better addressed in this
interpretation because it reasonably follows that norms which factor in our cognitive flaws and
limitations are thus more equipped to anticipate and counter those flaws and limitations.
However, I do need to take some time here to address more in depth the highly probable
criticism this particular version of ethical grounding appears open to: it leads to moral relativism.
Haidt, page 13025
Ibid, page 13126
Even if “social” means a collection of autonomous individuals, a morality is then developed so as to27
direct and appraise the behavior of members in order to make sure they’re enhancing their own autonomy
while respecting the autonomy of their fellow individuals.

19. Blasser 19
This is not so. Haidt’s theory is more about the acceptance of moral pluralism—the simple
admission that there is more than one way of perceiving an ethical quandary or constructing a
moral system—which is descriptively accurate. Haidt even addresses this in his book:
“Neither [Richard] Shweder nor I am saying that ‘anything goes,’ or that all societies or all cuisines are
equally good. But we believe that moral monism—the attempt to ground all of morality on a single
principle—leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane
because they ignore so many other moral principles. ”28
So in my view, the different ways to alchemize and execute the moral foundations do not
exist in a vacuum, and they are not free from appraisal or judgment on either the individual or
collective levels. Individually speaking, assessment comes down to internal consistency (i.e. how
often and how well a person lives up to and follows through on the sense of morality they hold)
as well as external consistency (i.e. his or her willingness to keep themselves accountable to this
sense of morality just as readily as they do others). And Kahneman holds this view as well, albeit
in a far more general context and with a much more technical approach: “In decision theory, the
only basis for judging that a decision is wrong is inconsistency with other preferences. ”29
This model of appraisal and judgment I endorse also applies to and within a particular
society: the way to assess the policies and actions of its collective body is by determining how
consistently these hold with what that community or society values—that is, how well the body’s
rulings correspond to the specific moral system that particular group derived from the
foundations they’ve elevated. And from there, it becomes a question of how well those values
and standards meet the needs of the people they represent, meaning that an ethical society is
therefore both consistent with and between its priorities, policies, and actions, as well as open to
Haidt, page 11328
Kahneman, page 37829

20. Blasser 20
revising those priorities and policies—should this ever become necessary—so that future actions
taken will better serve the interests of those they both come from and are applied to, while also
still being anchored by and consistent with these now updated priorities and policies.
Finally, this model also applies to ethical dilemmas existing between distinct societies in
this increasingly interconnected and globalized world, one in which we are perpetually further
entering a more prominent state of competition between differing cultures and their moral
systems. Appraisal and judgment in these situations becomes a question of which moral system,
or any one of its norms, works better—that is, leads to optimal results for the greatest majority of
people—when addressing contemporary cross-cultural ethical problems. Now, the ease with30
which that sentence was written and read should not obscure the level of supreme difficulty
inherent in these kinds of appraisals and judgments, of course, but they are legitimately possible
and, more importantly, still open to that necessary ability to be revised.
As examples, entities like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were
originally designed in the closing years of World War II to increase the ease and frequency of
global economic transactions and thereby create a more interconnected and, hopefully, more
peaceful world; and, in some ways, these organizations have most definitely achieved this goal
while, in others, they most certainly have not. Despite much success amongst the Western
nations that founded them, moral issues of fairness (which obviously speaks to the Fairness
foundation), transparency (which speaks to the Liberty foundation), and even exploitation (which
speaks to both, along with the Care foundation) often plague their policies and actions when it
comes to the far less wealthy developing nations who don’t have any level of comparable
I concede I’ve basically just endorsed utilitarianism here, but only in regards to this particular situation.30

21. Blasser 21
representation and influence in those policies and actions. However, if these ethical issues were
to ever be addressed and improved upon —that is, if the amount of benefit for the greatest31
amount of people, including those in the mostly impoverished developing world, was to be
increased—the state of global economic affairs would, in fact, get demonstrably better and these
entities would assuredly become more ethical. (But again, this simple sketch should not suggest,
in any way, that such reforms would come easy.)
V. Level 1 Ethics: Abundant and Clear Situational Access
Level 1 Ethics, as mentioned earlier, is the easiest to understand and explain; it’s the best
known and most assumed; it’s the one in which we have that high amount of both environmental
sensitivity and feedback; it allows for the most pervasive and lasting of changes to our ethical
views and behavior. Curiously enough, it also has a highly analogous traditional philosophical
counterpart that’s one of the oldest of all ethical theories: Aristotelian virtue ethics. Though there
are obviously a number of differences, the Aristotelian approach provides the closest classical32
parallel because it stresses both practicality and right action for the improved living of one’s life
and the greater harmony of his or her society, as well as provides a plurality of different virtues
to be found and honed in order to make this individual and social flourishing happen. So it works
with the dual-system model in a way that strict interpretations of Mill’s utilitarianism, Kant’s
deontology, or Moore’s open-question argument don’t, because these approaches exclusively
favor narrow, excessively conceptual stances that also over-rely on our flawed ability to reason.
And according to philosopher Thomas Pogge, a demonstrative relenting in Western protectionism, an31
end to the practice of structural adjustment, as well as the termination of both international resource and
borrowing privileges, would go a long way to achieve this kind of ethical reform in and of themselves.
Like the idea that any virtue is or could ever be proven as truly “universal,” for example.32

22. Blasser 22
In an excerpt that was a part of his original manuscript—but unfortunately needed to be
removed from the final book for space constraints—Haidt even specifically asserted the
relevance of virtue ethics over those other interpretations for the reasons listed above:
“If any ethical theory can claim to be the natural, normal, default way in which human beings think about
morality, it is virtue ethics. The reason for its dominance, I suspect, is that it fits so well with what we now
know about moral psychology. First... only virtue ethics addresses the whole mind. Virtues can be defined
in many ways, but most approaches treat them as character traits that a person needs in order to live a
good, praiseworthy, or admirable life. Virtues are social skills. To acquire a virtue is to fine-tune your
perceptual abilities such that you detect the relevant signals, then feel the right emotions, and then act in
the right way...
This is why virtue theories always emphasize the importance of practice, training, and habit. Aristotle and
Confucius even hit upon the same metaphor independently: learning to be virtuous is like learning to play
a musical instrument. Both kinds of “virtuosity” require years of practice and studious attention to role
models until the ear is educated and the hands move easily, almost on their own.
A second important feature of virtue ethics is that it is a buffet. Virtues are excellences of character that
equip people to play their roles in society. There are many roles and many kinds of interaction, so there
are many virtues. A good soldier should not cultivate the virtues of a priest; a good daughter should not
cultivate the virtues of a father. And it's not just variety within each culture; each culture has its own buffet
table. The virtues on display in a rice-farming culture (which requires extraordinary cooperation) differ
from those held out to children in a sheep-herding culture (which requires more masculine toughness to
guard one’s flocks), which in turn differ from those of an urban trading culture (emphasizing contracts and
voluntary exchange). So virtue theories are pluralistic—they can’t be reduced to a single master virtue.
Because people live in many different climates, economic orders, and political systems, they end up with
diverse sets of moral ideals. ”33
A specific scenario in Level 1 Ethics is the one brought up back in Sec. III: when a
person is about to marry into a family where sensitivity and indirectness are the valued virtues,
while he or she comes from one where direct honesty is the valued virtue. Again, this would be
an immense challenge for anyone to take on because it requires the mental acquisition and
behavioral assimilation of an entirely new communication approach and style, and this kind of
recalibration does not come easy. However, since the person in question here will have a great
amount of situational access, they also have a great advantage as well. So, while this may not
come easy, it still will eventually come, as long as it gets sufficient time and effort to do so.
Obviously, this quote will not be found in his book, but Haidt posted the excerpt to a webpage on the33
book’s website: http://righteousmind.com/about-the-book-2/figuresnotesrefs/

23. Blasser 23
Kahneman’s highlighting of the associative elements of S1 thinking is what unlocks the
secret of how to consistently improve our behavior on this level. His work not only demonstrates
the inclinations and capacities of each system separately, it also shows the relationship that exists
between them and, in the case of developing virtues, how S2 can actually reprogram S1 so that
its associative network will come to automatically access more environmentally conducive—and
therefore more virtuous—reactions, thus eventually enabling a person to intuitively behave more
ethically in this initially difficult world without having to put forth the never-ending and tedious
effort of consciously having to remember to do it all the time. In our particular example, our
more verbally direct new addition to the sensitive family she’s about to marry into can fully train
herself to consistently behave more sensitively as well, not just act like it.
Calling back a previous quote, “The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update
a model of your personal world [i.e. the associative network mentioned above], which represents
what is normal in it.” The model is constructed by what, over time and with a sufficient amount
of frequency, becomes unconscious associations that intuitively link our conceptions of
circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes—that co-occur with regularity—to our immediate
environment; and this vast and complex network most definitely includes what we come to
instinctively consider virtues and the behaviors that best align with them. And as this network is
unceasingly formed and strengthened, it “comes to represent the structure of events in your life,
and it determines your interpretation of the present as well as your expectations of the future. ”34
Your S2 capacity for reason, on the other hand, has the ability to monitor and regulate
this network; it can supervise S1 processes and detect any associations or intuitions which have
Kahneman, page 7134

24. Blasser 24
become undesirable and/or problematic in situations you currently inhabit, and then caution you
to distance yourself from them while identifying more situationally desirable and effective
replacements. In other words, it is our S2’s occasional, well-timed, well-executed, and followed-
through-on interventions in the constant formation and reformation of this associative network
which is capable of training our S1 reactions. And both Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein agree
with Kahneman in this regard: “The Automatic System [i.e. the S1 associative network] can be
trained with lots of repetition—but such training takes a lot of time and effort. ”35
The way this process works, on a behavioral level, is that when our new-addition-to-the-
family’s S1—from here on we’ll call her Mia—comes across an external set of social stimuli, her
associative network instantly becomes aware of an attraction or concern and, through affect, even
makes an automatic ruling as to which it is before her S2 ever knew it was there; in most cases,
S2 has no idea what’s going on with S1 because it doesn’t need to. But when it comes to being
deficient in the given virtue of sensitivity the family Mia’s joining holds, this unconscious ruling
becomes a thorny prospect, especially once she gets her detailed feedback—that is, once her S2
becomes intimately aware of how the blunt behavior she’s currently exhibiting with her S1
reactions is causing her to be looked upon unfavorably by established members of the family.
Once these situational vices or even mere virtue-failings are exposed and apparent to it,
S2 must then take a more invested role in S1’s unconscious inclinations, but this effort is not
effectively made right away in one’s day-to-day living. Going back to Mia, she’s most definitely
not setting herself up for success by waiting until Thanksgiving dinner to begin addressing these
challenges and trying to reform her associative network. At that table the challenges will more
Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge, page 2135

25. Blasser 25
than likely come quick and come hard, and her S1 is going to react immediately with what it was
trained to do for years out of both habit and as a basic security measure. If her S2 tries, in this
moment, to train or even guide S1 more towards the situationally virtuous path identified, it’ll
almost assuredly fail because these instinctive S1 reactions are too powerful to be directed in this
defensive condition; the feedback becomes emotionally and physiologically overwhelming. So36
all that’s left for S2 to do, then, is justify those S1’s reactions to the rest of the group, to
rationally defend itself from the unfavorable judgments it knows it’s receiving.
But when removed from these challenging and oftentimes intimidating situations—that
is, while in the emotional safety of our familiar environments—S2 can introduce the new virtue
more easily to our associative network and can even begin the process of training that network to
react differently to the potential challenges. A month or so before Thanksgiving, Mia can start
reconditioning her fast thinking by first initiating that necessary S2 awareness, follow up by
repetitiously practicing more preferable responses to the predictable stimuli with her future
husband and longstanding member of the family (who’ll obviously have much nuanced feedback
to offer and so can help her fine-tune these responses), keep monitoring this practice and noting
the feedback with her more deliberate S2, and thus be far more prepared for the challenging
situation prior to facing the challenging situation. This is slow, long, and methodical work but it
is possible and actually even inevitable; as far as our associative network is concerned, it really is
just a matter of time and effort, as Thaler and Sunstein stated.
However, it should again be noted that our S2 is not a limitless well of energy and
attention; it is naturally lazy, easy to strain, and incapable of multitasking. This means it really
As Kahneman states on page 51: “Cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your36
brain.”

26. Blasser 26
only works in addressing and reconditioning our S1 one issue at a time; any more than that and it
will almost certainly become overloaded and thus lead to failure. Our ethical flaws, then, must be
prioritized and this is yet another reason why Aristotelian virtue ethics is the most descriptively
applicable of all the traditional philosophical interpretations: instead of identifying a singular
abstract principle or standard for all behavior to be filtered through and judged by, which is
utterly implausible, each virtue can be worked on separately and then moved on from to the next
once it’s fully assimilated. So first, our reason recognizes the chief character deficiency of the
specific scenario and identifies the most applicable virtue needed to remedy it (which is
analogous to the Aristotelian notion of epistêmê) and then, second, it supervises the requisitely
constant training of the intuition in order to eventually make the virtuous conduct unconscious
(which parallels the Aristotelian notion of technê).
This utterly simple and yet supremely difficult two-step process within the dual-system
model is what allows for truly transformative and enduring behavioral change (so long as it is
fully followed through on, that is) but, more than that, it also demonstrates how our reason and
intuition are not just distinct and uniformly linked attributes: S2 can ensure and further develop a
better relationship between them. Once S1 has a solid grasp of the new cues, S2 can bring that
grasping to the still foreign and immersive day-to-day environment and supervise it more closely,
looking out for situations that would trigger the old ways before the new ones have had enough
time and training to totally take over, and thus brace S1 before it has the chance to associatively
react and S2 loses its higher level of influence. In our example, Mia’s S2 could recognize that the
dinner table conversation is moving towards the assessment of another family member’s life
choices and then get herself mentally ready to conduct herself appropriately as it happens, while

27. Blasser 27
also keeping a close eye on any and all feedback she receives. In this state, her S2 is much more
influential because it’s no longer fighting her S1 associative network; it’s now reminding it, using
the subsequent feedback as reinforcement. This is more interactive than the initial training but it
still takes time; it too is part of the necessary technê for total reconditioning.
Ultimately though, the cues will become fully engrained and retained and the associative
network will be reprogrammed, developing an intuitive grasp of environmental sensitivity to the
once foreign situations, instantly reacting more preferably to them, and doing so without needing
S2’s direct oversight. After awhile, the more sensitive—and, in this setting, more virtuous—
reactions will come as natural to Mia as the more blunt reactions that came before. And these
will hold up during future, unforeseen tests because her intuition was trained to automatically
reply aptly in this environment, and these immediate responses also apply to the unexpected.
The basic rule of thumb for genuinely lasting and transformative personal change is this
(and it works with far more than just our current subject, make no mistake): Want the change
until you make the choice to act upon that desire, keep deliberately making that choice until
you’re able to just do it more instinctively, and then keep acting on that developing instinct until
it becomes an inherent aspect of who you are—that is, an entrenched piece of your associative
network which you’ll then be able to rely on without having to think about. Or in more concise
words: Want it until you choose it... Choose it until you do it... Do it until you are it.
And what makes all of this not just possible but realistically so is the specific nature of
Mia’s ethical situation (i.e. it easily falls into the realm of Level 1 Ethics), because it’s both about
something as important to our immediate S1 world as family dynamics—so therefore we’re far
more likely prioritize it and follow through on our intentions—and it provides that optimal level

28. Blasser 28
of situational access, which will allow for more abundant and clear environmental sensitivity and
feedback, even if this needs to be developed with effort over time. These conditions combine to
let us genuinely reform our moral habits and even refine our ethical decision-making, which is
what makes this level as available and potentially metamorphic as it is.
VI. Level 2 Ethics: Absent Environmental Sensitivity and Diminished Feedback
This is where ethical situations begin to get a little more complicated, however. Level 2
Ethics occurs when we only have a conscious S2 understanding of the fallout to our ethical
failings, but to a much less comprehensive and contextualized degree in the absence of S1
support, and without any sufficient level of S2 or S1 understanding of the lead up. The37
situational example of this level we’ll be using again goes back to what was introduced earlier in
Sec. III: when someone who unknowingly benefits from something like gender oppression must
later contend with the general outputs of that oppression, while having no real understanding of
what goes into it or a nuanced grasping of the consequences.
My overall goal with this second level is to initially establish three key admissions and,
eventually, three basic strategies. Each of the admissions are at least a little familiar by this point
(the first, especially, has been driven home routinely throughout the paper) but they need to be
listed here again, in order to both refresh memory and set up the strategies that will come later in
the section.
Admission 1: Human cognition, specifically the ability to reason, is much more limited and
flawed than traditional philosophy seems to want to accept. In accounting for these limitations
I have elected to ignore the opposite situation—where we have a blunt understanding of the lead up37
without having any for the fallout—because it simply doesn’t occur with any kind of regularity. An ethical
situation where we are linked to the build up, make our decision, and then have nothing to do with the
aftermath just isn’t common enough.

29. Blasser 29
and flaws, the dual-system model is far more representative of human behavior and equipped to
deal with our larger scale socio-ethical problems.
Admission 2: Much of what we take for granted in ethics is the result of arbitrary placement in
certain environments and our arbitrary possession of certain favorable or unfavorable features
within these environments, neither of which we have any direct say in. (This admission is38
consistent with Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, in that we take our particular moral systems
and their values for granted because they’re the ones we’re exclusively brought up with, which
means we’ll not only naturally favor them but, moreover, we’ll also intuitively apply them to
others, even when these people do not share them and even when our S2 knows better while
deliberating on the matter because this deliberation only occurs a fraction of the time.)
Admission 3: We all live in personal worlds, to a certain degree. These worlds are made up of
our distinct associative network that includes our memories, intuitions, emotions, and values that
no one else will have 100% access to; and thus the rules and expectations of these worlds
literally apply fully to no one else but us.
One of Haidt’s points, borrowed from psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, is that the most
sophisticated form of moral reasoning tends to come from a person imagining an approximate
representation of someone else’s S1 world with his or her own S2, and then viewing that other
person’s situation from this perspective. And as far as our distant Level 2 relationships are39
concerned, this practice is far easier to do when they’re more egalitarian because, pragmatically
speaking, if we’re equals on at least a few rungs of the greater social ladder we both fall on, then
This admission’s closest strictly philosophical counterpart is Marxist and/or Feminist Standpoint Theory.38
Kohlberg refers to this as role-taking, but it’s more commonly known as the ability “to get over yourself.”39

30. Blasser 30
I’ll have at least some level of genuine access to your S1 world to build my approximate
representation off of and you with mine; I’ll be able to better imagine your opinions and connect
with your perspectives without too much cognitive strain, which corresponds to the amount of
effort my brain is wired to favor. But the more distant relationships we share that are rooted in
hierarchies of status and influence, on the other hand, often lead to us having no real level of
access to the S1 worlds of those on variant rungs, thus resulting in an increased amount of mental
effort needed to establish even a sense of basic familiarity that we are, again, not inclined to put
in unless given an urgent reason to do so, which doesn’t often present itself. Noted examples of40
this include an affluent person telling an impoverished one to just “get a job”—not realizing how
much more difficult or complicated this can be for someone not in his or her position—and it’s
also what lies at the heart of the classic “Management vs. Front Line” feud found in so many
workplaces (easily summed up as the “So what do you do all day?” debate).
But here’s a quote that both accurately describes and brings meaningful insight to the
problem: “It’s a truism that people act worse in groups than they do as individuals... this truism is
mostly untrue. Most of the time people act better in crowds than they do as individuals; it’s just
that when this is true, we take it for granted, and when it is not true, we notice it. ” This speaks41
directly to the inherent and inextricable flaws within our unceasing S1 perceptions as well as the
limitations of our S2 deliberations in Level 2 Ethics for this reason: The stimuli we are most
prompted to recognize is grossly incomplete because we’re wired to recognize the minority and
let the majority blow by us without paying attention. In other words, we typically don’t notice
Haidt goes into this with more detail on pages 8 and 9 of The Righteous Mind.40
This is a quote from famed statistician Bill James, found in this article: http://grantland.com/features/41
the-connection-fan-inmate-behavior/

31. Blasser 31
those on wildly disparate rungs of the social ladder than ourselves, unless they do something
while in our company we don’t really comprehend, which intuitively leads us to the conclusion
that they’re extremely or even entirely different from us, even in situations when this is not the
case. Therefore, we not only don’t have a level of access to the environmental sensitivity, but the
feedback we get from the outputs is almost always distorted and, oftentimes, just flat out wrong.
Within our specific example of social oppression, what this means is that we’re cut off
from the detailed realities and contextual decision-making of those in (what seems to us like)
qualitatively different situations and environments, whether these persons lie above or below us
on the hierarchy. And this leads to an unfortunate social predicament: In the more abstract
manner we so often encounter it, the ways in which an enfranchised person comes to view and
feel towards social oppression, along with their subsequent stated positions on it, are not always,
or even usually, consistent with their actual choices and behavior in moments when they must
actively or passively contend with the effects of that oppression. And this isn’t primarily because
he or she is a hypocrite or secret villain but rather because, when facing the difficult questions of
oppression, they’re really answering different ones without realizing it. In psychology, this is
called a heuristic, which is “a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect,
answers to difficult questions. ” The most common form of this is switching the difficult42
question with an easier one, and not really knowing we just did that. In this light, a concern
heuristic emerges, which really places a spotlight on the rational-agent fallacy when it comes to43
this level of ethics, in general, and the issue of the unaware beneficiary’s unintended role in
Kahneman, page 9842
Neither Kahneman nor Haidt use this exact term. Like “situational access” before, it is my own.43

32. Blasser 32
social oppression, in particular. In short, the question “How much do I care about the plight of
this oppressed demographic?” unconsciously becomes “How bad do I feel about their plight
right now, for the moment I’m being prompted to consider it?” The latter is the specific question
we’re probably answering, but it convincingly feels to us like it’s the answer to the former.
Our hope then, on a reflective moral level, becomes that our more rational S2 will engage
so we can see the oppression more intently, become more willing to accept whatever passive (or
even covertly active) role we have in perpetuating it, and then glean an effective and morally
sound course of action to ending both... but this is also not typically the case. Moral reflection
and self-criticism are S2 functions, yes, but in the context of the associative attitudes we hold and
the behaviors we’ve already done, S2 is still an apologist for S1 much more than it’s a critic; as
far as our emotions and histories are concerned, it’s more an “endorser rather than an enforcer. ”44
Remember, our S2 only gets called in to deal with an immediate problem and, in the case of the
concern heuristic, that problem is often our guilt for the existence of the oppression and any role
we may have in it, not the oppression or our role themselves; this is what our ability to reason is
trying to satisfy, like a lawyer defending a client.45
Attempting to fix the actual problem eliciting the guilt, on the other hand, requires a
substantial increase of awareness and effort in our day-to-day living, which combine to create a
massive level of work for us that we are, quite simply, not in a feasible position to put in, given
our more personal and intuitive responsibilities of family, career, community, et cetera. And since
that enormous amount of work means we’re more than likely not going to make the necessary
Kahneman, page 10344
Haidt uses this exact metaphor on page 67 of The Righteous Mind.45

33. Blasser 33
changes in our behavior to address the guilty feelings, our S2’s job becomes justifying our
present course in order to assuage those feelings so we can get back to our genuine priorities as
fast as possible and without distraction. We can resist these powerful tides, of course, but this is a
long and tiresome process; this too requires a lot of work. And again, our S2 is lazy and limited.
For the third time, I call on one of the seminal quotes of this entire paper: “The main
function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents
what is normal in it.” These are indeed personal worlds, complete with those aforementioned
intuitive priorities, and this is crucial to keep in mind with this second level of ethics because it
highlights the central dilemma inherent to it: This personal world is our main lens when viewing
the greater one we all share—it’s the primary mechanism interpreting and assigning relevance
and meaning to what we’re encountering beyond our own private realities—while it applies to
literally no one else than us. Now, the reason why this isn’t as much of a problem in Level 1
Ethics is because, again, when you’re sharing an immediate environment with others, the effects
of this dilemma get mitigated by your similar lenses/experiences but, when you don’t, the effects
often lead to serious collective problems, especially when two people from disparate settings find
themselves disagreeing on a greater social issue that affects their worlds differently.46
“Most of society’s arguments are kept alive by a failure to acknowledge nuance. We tend
to generate false dichotomies, then try to argue one point using two entirely different sets of
assumptions, like two tennis players trying to win a match by hitting beautifully executed shots
from either end of separate tennis courts.” This particularly revelatory quote on our social—and
The gun control debate is perhaps the greatest example of this, in that it usually affects those from rural46
and suburban settings one way and those from urban settings in a wholly different fashion. And yet we
still live in a national society that requires one set of laws to apply fully to both barely related scenarios.

34. Blasser 34
then oftentimes ethical—predicament comes from musician and comedian Tim Minchin, stated
during his commencement address at the University of Western Australia back in 2012, and I47
believe it amply highlights the “my S1 world vs. your S1 world” impasse sketched in the
previous paragraphs. What it directly speaks to is that, given this cognitive reality the great
majority of us are subjected to, the reason why the preponderance of these social debates, with
overwhelming consistency, end up going nowhere is actually rather simple: You cannot debate48
life experiences and what they come to mean to the individual.
And speaking for myself, as a straight white male in contemporary American society, this
is what makes the notion of social privilege so difficult for me to grasp, let alone readily accept.
The phrase refers to sets of built-in advantages a person is automatically given for the living of
their life from the greater social environment they inhabit, simply because they arbitrarily happen
to be a member of some societally-favored demographic within that environment—advantages
those outside this demographic will be given no amount of access to, and typically cannot even
earn over time. However, as previously demonstrated, these privileged persons are rarely
prompted to notice their privilege, because it is already an engrained part of their associative
network; the invisibility is, to a certain extent, an inevitable byproduct of S1 world construction
for someone in their position.49
It can be viewed in its entirety here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoEezZD71sc47
Note: That once in a while moment when these failures don’t occur is when one person reaches a48
genuine insight into the other’s world. And to be perfectly clear, I am not downplaying the importance of
these moments; they exist and are often incredibly emotionally powerful when they occur. They’re also,
however, the exception to the rule; they do not occur in most cases and with any level of consistent
regularity. And that’s what this paper is concerned with: gaining a certain amount of consistent regularity.
I would also argue that this invisibility is an inherent component to the privilege itself. When privilege49
becomes apparent, it usually turns into guilt.

35. Blasser 35
As a parallel example, the presence of the word trauma in our vocabulary is the result of
an immense level of privilege. To experience one means the affected person has lived a life
where the great majority of it was so consistently positive that a singular supremely damaging
event is now standing out to them in a psychologically unshakeable way; it was so outside the
norm and terrible in comparison to his or her routinely pleasant life thus far that it has negatively
imbued their psyche to a depth that’ll take years to work out, if ever at all. Conversely, there are
other people in other areas of our society and world—and especially in earlier times—that would
instead perceive what we call “traumas” to be the basic, day-to-day living of their lives; the word
itself isn’t even in their vernacular. This is why it’s such a privilege for us to be able to use it,
even when describing the awful experiences of our past; in this respect, we in the 21st century
developed Western world are fortunate to get to have traumas in our lives.
But of course, if you were to say that to someone in this situation, who’s just undergone
one of these major traumas... well... how do you think that would go? How do you imagine he or
she would receive this perspective on what just happened to them? Telling someone the horrible
thing they just endured, which shook his or her entire sense of reality to its very foundation, was,
in large part, a product of social privilege simply isn’t empathetically or respectfully feasible.
And to presume for a second that you’ll be able to convince them of this is rather ridiculous.
That’s the main reason why many in the “straight white male” demographic (or anyone
else who’s got two or even one of the three) often get so upset or defiant when their privilege is
pointed out or even argued for: in any person’s S1 world, they’ll assuredly have difficulties
they’ve experienced and challenges they’ve overcome and, when you tell them they’re socially
privileged, you’re, in a way, telling them those difficulties weren’t real or those challenges

36. Blasser 36
weren’t actually all that challenging, which almost none of their subjective experience could
even be able to corroborate. And on an emotional level, you’re also basically telling them that
what they went through was fake; that what seemingly felt so hard wasn’t; and, following the
previous analogy, that their traumas weren’t really that bad.
As an exercise, I want you to take a moment here to really imagine what this would feel
like: to be told your experiences aren’t what you thought they were; that whatever you’ve gone
through doesn’t matter as much as you believe; that any sense of hardship you encountered was
no big deal. How would this not, at least partially, undermine your sense of accomplishment or
cheapen how you feel about your life itself? I submit there’s no one who’s instinctively going to
take any of this well; it’s quite threatening. Moreover, it’s also an impotent argument, far more
often than not, because, again, we can’t intellectually debate our life experiences and what
they’ve come to mean to us with another and expect it to go anywhere. S1 worlds just count for a
lot more than even the most abundant evidence and rigorous reasoning, given our wiring.
Of course, this isn’t intended to be an excuse for participating, even indirectly, in the
oppression of others either; it’s not saying inaction in the face of widespread and systemic social
inequality is now made totally acceptable; it’s merely sketching out the common situation many
of us find ourselves in a descriptively accurate way. The purpose is to show the nature of the
problem and why genuine steps to remediation are so elusive—that is, why it seems like people
almost never see their incredibly advantageous position or take compensatory action on these
matters—despite what many will routinely and sincerely claim when asked (unless they are
somehow personally affected by the systemic oppression in question).

37. Blasser 37
But of course, we ethically-inclined persons will still tell ourselves our more subjectively
representative stories about how much we care and how important ideas like “Justice and
Fairness For All!” really are to us when we’re actively considering them with our S2. And this is
also part of our wiring; it’s not simply that willful delusion or rank hypocrisy it’s so often painted
as. I call your attention back to another important quote mentioned earlier in this paper:
“Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The
explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a
larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that
happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.”
This means, on a literal level, the part of you that behaviorally experiences the day-to-day
living of your life is not the same part that reflects on those experiences later on, and it’s most
definitely not the same part that explains and justifies those experiences to others. In the social50
arena, this is perhaps the great ramification of our dual-system brain: It allows for two clearly
counterintuitive, but still totally genuine, realities to reside within us at the exact same time,
usually without us ever realizing it. And it’s why Admission 1 cannot be overstated enough.
Which brings us to the strategies—strategies that, again, can only be employed correctly
once we’ve thoroughly made all three admissions, because each of the strategies addresses these
admissions. And this is most notable with the first.
Strategy 1: The trick with understanding the actions and perspectives of those to whom you
seemingly can’t relate is in training yourself to assume there’s an ocean behind every stream;
that every singular behavior you observe or opinion you hear probably has a mountain of
Kahneman even named this phenomenon on page 381 of his book, referring to them as our50
experiencing self and our remembering self, respectively; the former is the part of us that voicelessly
works us through our day-to-day lives, while the latter decides on and develops our memories of those
experiences. But again, just as before in our establishment of S1 and S2 thinking, it needs to be noted
that these two “selves” are not metaphysical entities; they too are derived from our cognitive wiring and
processes.

38. Blasser 38
context, experience, and information behind it, to which you will initially have no real level of
access.
Again, in Level 2 Ethics, our S1 is not in a position to have a sufficient level of working
associative familiarity with these contexts, experiences, and bodies of information, and our S2
will not be inclined to notice and/or consider them properly on the infrequent occasions when
they unexpectedly come across our path. Therefore, we have to condition ourselves to assume
their existence while accepting that we don’t have any genuine level of access to them.
Another thing we need to keep in mind and incorporate with this trained assumption is it
applies to everyone—not just people from foreign countries, not just the homeless, not just
marginalized groups. It applies to every human being we encounter in every scenario, no matter
how uncomfortable, offensive, or even grotesque we may find it; it’s just those we know and
share environments with will be less inclined to exhibit these inherent and inevitable variances to
us at notable degrees, so the problems that would otherwise probably be derived are mitigated in
these cases. (And we’ll also have Level 1 Ethics to apply to them.)
So the first thing that should be done in Level 2 situations is learn to make this attitude
our “default setting.” We must train ourselves, our S1 associative networks, to assume the greater
world around our private one in this way, and most especially in social situations where we have
the least amount of access to environmental sensitivity. And this training can and needs to be
done in the exact same manner we employ when developing a new virtue in Level 1 Ethics (i.e.
Want it until you choose it... Choose it until you do it... Do it until you are it.); it’s the bridge
between the two. We have to accept that, in this level of ethics, we’ve already been passively
trained by the incomplete and inaccurate stimuli of our situational/subjective experiences, and

39. Blasser 39
then use both that knowledge and the repetition our associative network requires to sufficiently
counter it in that truly lasting and transformative manner we’ve established.
Strategy 2: You must also train yourself, in the exact same manner as in the first, to take more
time with these situations—as much as you can, where and when you can.
Part of our brain’s wiring is that it’s heavily inclined to jump to conclusions, and this is
one of those S1 shortcuts which can be quite helpful for us in certain situations. As Kahneman
states: “Jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the
costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. ” But when it comes to understanding and conducting51
ourselves around those from backgrounds to which we don’t have a substantial level of access,
this isn’t a wise course of action, especially the more unfamiliar the situation and the higher the
stakes. What this means for us is that, much of the time, the most ethical thing to do in these
moments—when we have the option open to us, that is—is nothing. Sit and listen; soak it in; get
acclimated. In Level 2 Ethics, the proper moral judgment is often no judgment at all.
An insightful analogue to this is found in economics: research and deliberation are not
necessary when it comes to going to the dry cleaners or buying a sandwich, as examples; these
are frequent experiences that we therefore have much information about and aren’t all that
consequential. So when we see a $20 sandwich or hear that we need to wait two weeks for our52
clothes, we’ll immediately know something is up and easily take our business elsewhere. But
when it comes to decisions on a retirement plan or a home loan, however, these are choices we’ll
only make maybe once or twice in a lifetime, involve a complex world we don’t have much
Kahneman, page 7951
This analogy is taken from Chapter 4 of Thaler’s and Sunstein’s Nudge.52

40. Blasser 40
experience with, and have huge stakes for the security of our economic futures. So these are the
situations where we need to train our associative network to both recognize when they occur—
giving us the opportunity to bring in our more careful and thorough S2—and also just flat out
assume there’s far more going on here than we’re in a position to realize and understand.
This is referred to in psychology as framing, and it has many different elements which
have everything to do with what we’ve discussed throughout this paper: the amount of
familiarity with the environment, the details of the specific situation, and the level of access to
the consequences, especially. And it also has everything to do with what we’re in an epistemic
position to know, how we come to view, and the ways in which we conduct ourselves around
diverse social groups to whose backgrounds we do not have much access.
As someone who was raised Catholic in a 21st century U.S. environment, for example,
I’m in a position to know the ins and outs of Christianity but “Islam” is mostly just a word to me,
one I’m cognitively inclined to fill with unverified meaning by dumping all the distant, un-
nuanced, and decontextualized stories I hear about this religious practice. And what’s critical to
grasp here is that, given our wiring and S1 functions, I can’t consciously stop this process from
happening. I can’t turn off my S1 system; I can’t authentically place myself in a position to really
learn this lifetime’s worth of information and context while still honoring the intuitive priorities
of my immediate S1 world; I can’t quickly assimilate this mountain of data and understanding
into my associative network, or even likely wrap my reason sufficiently around it, in a certain
situation just because I may really want to. But I can train myself to recognize it’s there and that
I’m just a person who’s not in an epistemic position to know it, and then take more time on the
rare occasions when I do come across it.

41. Blasser 41
These first two strategies are thus primarily concerned with each of us as individual
knowers of and actors in the greater world around us, and with good reason: improved ethical
living almost always begins with a change in how we conduct ourselves in the greater society
around us (because those who wait for external circumstances to align more with what they’re
already doing are not all that prone to see these undesirable behaviors become desirable in their
lifetimes; in statistical terms, it’s a low-percentage shot). However, leaving the matter entirely
there would be inadequate because this second level of ethics is still about social interactions,
even if they’re usually limited to brief output encounters. And moreover, as we’ve already seen,
the fact that they are limited in this way is precisely what makes them so challenging.
Case in point, as I’ve further developed this approach and shared it with others for the
purposes of getting my necessary feedback, I came across people who expressed difficulties in53
accepting it, and this was especially true for those I spoke with who felt strongly that they’d been
marginalized by the society we share. For them, the very idea of having to train themselves to be
aware of the backgrounds and contexts of those they felt were oppressing them was deeply
offensive, and was even considered by a few to be insulting. And I understand this but,54
nevertheless, the extreme probability remains that if we refuse to speak to diverse people in their
own metaphorical language (or even their own literal language, for that matter) on any level, or
even attempt to, we will talk past or overwhelm them, and they’ll eventually tune us out or just
plain shut down conversationally; their S1 associative network—their primary interpreter and
actor—simply will not be in a position to comprehend the interaction and their S2 will only be
Practice what you preach, of course.53
Rather, I understand that I don’t understand.54

42. Blasser 42
able to try translating for so long before the cognitive strain involved exhausts its limited
capacity.
Cross-culturally speaking, the trap of thinking we’re oftentimes placed in, of “you don’t
know what my reality is like and never presume you could ever learn because that’s arrogant,”
may be technically true, but it’s also unhelpful; by definition, it keeps us exactly where we are
and prevents us from making any kind of inter-cultural ethical progress, other than the basic
acceptance that we all have distinct and unique backgrounds that must be respected. To create a
more harmonious society, and thus pave the way for increased human flourishing, we will
eventually need to make at least some kind of effort with those we don’t normally or easily
connect with socially, even if this effort is made from our disparate and limited points of view,
and even if this involves those we have justifiable reasons for resenting; we still need to be able
to share what we’ve intuitively come to value and believe, as well as create opportunities for
others to do the same with us, even if—and especially when—it results in disagreement. Without
this, that reveal of more cross-culturally conducive social norms and values mentioned back in
Sec. IV is not plausible, and any reasonable chance of consciously improving the greater society
we share will mostly dissolve away. This brings us to our third and final strategy.
Strategy 3: Within the typical parameters of day-to-day societal living, avoid direct conflicts55
whenever possible in output-only social interactions, and provide respect, openness, and even a
sense of emotional warmth to those you disagree with when these conflicts do occur; the trick
here is to make them feel safe so they don’t instinctively put up their embodied S1 defenses.56
Obviously, egregiously violent or destructive actions need to be exempt from this.55
This strategy was lifted from pages 48 and 49 of Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.56

43. Blasser 43
And while this may, at first glance, seem like your basic, garden-variety request for
people to be nicer to each other, it most definitely isn’t; given the dual-system model we’ve been
using, in general, and the three key admissions with this level of ethics, in particular, it’s more of
a pragmatic necessity. Make no mistake, while this does have profound emotional implications,
it’s a basic strategy, posited here for the purpose of effectiveness when dealing in these kinds of
situations by providing improved human interaction amongst those without much access to each
other’s subjective realities. And as a basic strategy, it supersedes the potential issue of indirectly
condoning any view or behavior we’ve taken great exception with, so the possibility that we may
find the opinions or actions of another abhorrent isn’t to be ruled out; it’s just that the strategy
still holds if we wish to address and try to persuade our subject to replace those opinions or
behaviors, and/or prevent them from spreading to others.
The bottom line is that even personal paradigm shifts are almost never successful when
that person is in S1 defense mode, even though that is so easily where our bodies and minds will
take us when we are challenged, and especially when it comes to the merits of our culture, the
values we’ve been conditioned to hold, or the threatening idea that our trials and tribulations are
a figment of our privileged imaginations. In Level 2 Ethics, what we have to keep in mind is that,
no matter how good our points are or how skilled we are at delivering them, if we close off our
targets with hostility and/or a refusal to meet them on their level, we simply will not be able to
get anything through; their S1 will be in that reactive or stunted state, and their S2’s primary job
in those situations is merely to justify whatever position it’s holding on so tightly to, using
anything it can to do so. The plain fact of our cognitive wiring is that the optimal way to get any
given person to see your views and even adopt your means is by demonstrating to him or her that

44. Blasser 44
these views and means are better than, or at least preferable to, their own. And the odds of this
happening when they’re feeling misunderstood, judged, and/or attacked are incredibly low.
This is precisely why we shouldn’t handle or even approach these situations in the same
direct and nuanced manner that we do in Level 1 Ethics. While this error is both easy to make as
well as understand, it is almost always a case of us failing to recognize our incomplete and
inaccurate perceptions and attitudes, and thus consistently sets the table for social and even
ethical mistakes and/or oversights on our part, even when we’re fueled by the best of intentions.
And while we can’t really blame someone for succumbing to their cognitive shortcomings in
ethical situations which don’t amply allow for that person to significantly improve upon them,
we can, however, hold them responsible for “believing they can succeed in an impossible task. ”57
So if we were instead to take that well-intentioned fuel and apply it more appropriately...
if we were to admit our cognitive flaws and limitations to ourselves, accept that what we take for
granted can and often does fail to apply to others, and realize everyone we come across has their
very own distinct S1 world just like we do... and if we were then willing to train ourselves to
assume there’s so much more to those other private models than we’re even capable of realizing,
take as much time as we can to let them at least sink in some when it’s available to us, and treat
even their most disagreeable of opinions and offensive of behaviors with openness, empathy, and
respect ... then consistent socio-ethical advancements—those that are legitimately progressive58
as well as realistic—could be arrived at with much greater success and regularity.
Kahneman, page 24157
Just as with the development of virtues in Level 1, each of these strategies will need to be developed58
mostly one at a time, however, in order to accommodate our easily taxed and incapable-of-multi-tasking
S2. That’s why I numbered them in the order of what I’ve determined to be the most crucial to the least;
this too is a matter of priority.

45. Blasser 45
VII. Level 3 Ethics: The Total Lacking of Situational Access
The third level of ethics is, not surprisingly, the most difficult to grasp in any kind of
intuitive or emotional fashion—and the only one of the three that provides little opportunity for
any kind of significant training—because it offers almost no amount of situational access
whatsoever, either in the lead up or fallout to our moral judgments and actions. This is the level
we have to employ in ethical matters that are so far removed from our day-to-day living that
we’re either totally unaffected by them or allowed—and sometimes even prompted—to feel that
way.
The applicable example for this level brought up back in Sec. III was that of extreme
poverty in the developing world, and it works quite well for our purpose of illustrating Level 3
Ethics because it both has no substantial amount of influence on our S1 associative network (for
those of us in the industrialized/affluent Western world, that is) and its direct consequences are
almost never brought to our doorstep, so our S2 will rarely be activated by even decontextualized
social outputs. However, it also constitutes a stunningly egregious moral failing on all our parts
to allow this to go on year after year after year, especially because it is, in large part, something
we actually tacitly participate in, due to our passive consumer habits and how they incentivize,
and thus reinforce, the economic policies in place that result in the deaths of millions of people—
which includes millions of children under the age of five—every single one of these years. In
other words, it’s an issue we assuredly possess a sense of normative obligation towards while,
simultaneously, have little in the way of policies in place or even suggestions available for
guiding our ethical decision-making, resulting in the great majority of us taking almost no action
to satisfy those normative obligations. This calls back the great ethical predicament of our dual-

46. Blasser 46
system brain we established in the previous section: it allows for two counterintuitive but still
genuine realities to be found within us at the exact same time, usually without us realizing it.
Paul Slovic perhaps most understands why we fail to connect our actions and institutional
policies to the horror of systemic global poverty, in that he is generally considered the leading
researcher on the psychology of affect. In both his original solo piece Psychic Numbing and
Genocide as well as his later and expanded collaborative effort with David Zionts, Andrew K.
Woods, Ryan Goodman, and Derek Jinks called Psychic Numbing and Mass Atrocity, he explains
that, in affectively distant ethical situations like genocide and world poverty, our odds of having
the proper kinds of emotional responses—that is, ones that are genuinely reflective of the
obligations we’re so certain we hold and care deeply about—actually be elicited are really very
low; there just isn’t enough awareness on our part for what occurs or any sufficiently notable
consequences for our failure to prioritize it (on our end, of course).
S2, remember, is only called in when necessary and, when assessing far off atrocities that
have no visible bearing on our day-to-day living, it’s just not necessary. According to Slovic, in
order for affect to be optimally influential on our ethical decision-making, we need to be directly
paying attention to our subject, and there’s simply no urgent reason for us to pay attention to the
suffering of those who are thousands of miles away, regardless of how severe that suffering is.
Our stated virtuous intentions will claim we do when directly asked, of course, but we’ve already
seen how those claims don’t generally line up with our behaviors; this is almost always the
concern heuristic in action.
And in the case of mass atrocity, without that direct need to pay attention, a need to not
pay attention, oddly enough, emerges: in order for us to live in the psychologically unfettered

47. Blasser 47
manner we’ve grown accustomed to in the Western world, the distressing knowledge of mass
suffering in far less fortunate places is better swept under the cognitive carpet, especially when
we find ourselves indirectly involved in it. For Slovic, this means we “retreat to the twilight
between knowing and not knowing ” and, while this retreat can feel quite troubling when we’re59
initially prompted to consider it, it does help explain why our seemingly horrendous indifference
in the face of so much destitution and death continues to roll on; indeed, “the foibles of imagery
and attention impact feelings in a manner that can help explain apathy toward genocide. ” To60
put it simply, we can’t feel millions of lives or deaths, no matter how brutal those deaths might
be; we can’t even comprehend them. There’s that unavoidable diminished sensitivity to our
psychophysical functions: the higher the magnitude of death, the more difficult it becomes to
detect changes or value the preservation of one, two, or even a thousand or so more.
Slovic reappropriates Kahneman’s economic model of prospect theory in order to make
his points, specifically in how it diverges from what was, until the point of its creation, the
standard model of utility theory. In doing so, he creates a kind of prospect morality, to be
similarly juxtaposed to our conventional utility morality, as represented by the fallacious but61
still commonly accepted rational-agent model. And as with Kahneman’s original theory, this new
focus is no longer on how we, as ethical agents, should view things like the value of human life
but rather in how we typically do. “A major element of prospect theory is the value function,
which relates subjective value to actual gains or losses. When applied to human lives, the value
function implies that the subjective value of saving a specific number of lives is greater for a
Slovic, Psychic Numbing and Genocide, page 8359
Ibid60
Just like with the use of “situational access” and “compassion heuristic” earlier, these are my terms.61