Moral Psychology

Answer the following questions based on the enclosed (attached) readings:

1. What is the issue the author is concerned with and the main point the authors are trying to make about that issue? What are the reasons the authors give for thinking that this point is worth serious consideration?

Don't use plagiarized sources. Get Your Custom Essay on

Moral Psychology

Just from $13/Page

Order Essay

2. What do they agree or disagree about?

3. Identify an example from the news, controversial issue, or personal experience that the reading(s) made you think about. How does it relate to the reading and/or illuminate the issues the reading raises?

4. What do you find interesting or confusing about the reading(s)?

5. How do you think, in the light of the evidence presented, intuitive/affective and rational processes interact in the ways people make moral judgments and decisions?

6. What insights about the structure and social functions of moral judgments, can we learn from their similarities with the structure (grammar) and social functions of language?

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 1 of 26

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press,
2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.
Subscriber: University of Central Florida; date: 15 February 2021

The Moral Psychology Handbook
John M. Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group

Print publication date: 2010
Print ISBN-13: 9780199582143
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001

Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Fiery Cushman
Liane Young
Joshua D. Greene

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter argues for a synthesis of two recent projects in moral psychology.
One has proposed a division between “emotional” versus “cognitive” moral
judgments, while another has proposed a division between “automatic” versus
“controlled” moral judgments. These appear to describe the same underlying
psychological systems: one that appears to give rise to automatic, rapid, and
emotionally forceful moral intuitions, and another that appears to use controlled,
effortful cognition to apply explicit moral principles. These psychological
systems can explain a lot about the basic form of competing philosophical
normative theories. Some core philosophical deontic principles are mirrored in
ordinary people’s emotional intuitions; meanwhile, people often use controlled
cognitive processes to think about moral problems in utilitarian terms. The
chapter concludes by arguing that this division is not hard-and-fast. There is
evidence for reasoning from explicit deontic principles in ordinary people;
meanwhile, utilitarian thought must depend on some underlying affective
currency. This analysis is used to motivate several new questions facing the field
of moral psychology.

Keywords: dual process theory, emotion, cognition, utilitarianism, deontology, intuition, reasoning,
moral judgment

In the field of moral psychology, a number of theoretical proposals that were at
one time regarded as unconnected at best—and, at worst, contradictory—are
showing signs of reconciliation. At the core of this emerging consensus is a

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=dual process theory

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=emotion

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=cognition

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=utilitarianism

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=deontology

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=intuition

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=reasoning

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=moral judgment

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 2 of 26

recognition that moral judgment is the product of interaction and competition
between distinct psychological systems. Our goal is to describe these systems
and to highlight directions for further inquiry.

Recent research in moral psychology has focused on two challenges to the long‐
dominant cognitive development paradigm conceived by Piaget and nurtured by
Kohlberg (Kohlberg, 1969; Piaget, 1965/1932; Turiel, 1983, 2005). The first
challenge claims that moral judgment takes the form of intuition, accomplished
by rapid, automatic, and unconscious psychological processes (Haidt, 2001;
Hauser, 2006: 1; Mikhail, 2000; Schweder & Haidt, 1993; see also Damasio,
1994: 165–201), contra the cognitive developmentalists’ assumption that moral
judgment is the product of conscious, effortful reasoning. A central motivation
for this challenge comes from studies demonstrating people’s inability to
articulate a rational basis for many strongly held moral convictions (Haidt, 2001;
Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006; Hauser, Cushman, Young, Jin, & Mikhail,
2007; Mikhail, 2000). The second and related challenge claims that moral
judgment is driven primarily by affective responses (Blair, 1995; Damasio, 1994;
Greene & Haidt, 2002; Schweder & Haidt, 1993), contra the cognitive
developmentalists’ focus on the deliberate application of explicit moral theories
and principles to particular cases. Evidence for the role of affect is largely
neuroscientific (Shaich Borg, Hynes, Van Horn, Grafton, & Sinnott‐Armstrong,
2006; Ciaramelli, Muccioli, Ladavas, & di Pellegrino, 2007; Damasio, 1994;
Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen, 2004; Greene, Sommerville,
Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Koenigs et al., 2007; Mendez, Anderson, &
Shapria, 2005), but also includes behavioral studies of moral judgment using
affective manipulations (Valdesolo (p.48) & DeSteno, 2006; Schnall, Haidt,
Clore, & Jordan, 2008; Wheatley & Haidt, 2005).

The evidence that moral judgment is driven largely by intuitive emotional
responses is strong, but it does not follow from this that emotional intuition is
the whole story. Concerning the role of intuition, the research of Kohlberg and
others indicates a truly astonishing regularity in the development of explicit
moral theories and their application to particular dilemmas (Kohlberg, 1969).
Recent studies show that while people cannot offer principled justifications for
some of their moral judgments, they are quite able to do so for others (Cushman
et al., 2006), and that people alter some moral judgments when asked to engage
in conscious reasoning (Pizarro, Uhlmann, & Bloom, 2003) or presented with
appropriate opportunities (Lombrozo, 2008). Others studies implicate reasoning
processes in moral judgment using brain imaging (Greene et al., 2004) and
reaction time data (Greene et al., 2008). Together, these studies seem to capture
an important and relatively common experience: deliberation about right and
wrong, informed by an awareness of one’s explicit moral commitments.

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-203

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-213

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-222

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-223

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-189

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-193

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-209

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-217

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-177

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-189

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-193

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-194

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-209

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-171

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-177

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-184

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-217

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-215

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-173

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-177

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-187

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-188

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-202

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-208

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-224

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-216

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-226

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-203

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-175

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-214

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-205

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-187

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-186

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 3 of 26

In fact, the claim that moral judgment depends on affective responses at all has
been met with skepticism, for instance by champions of “universal moral
grammar” (Huebner, Dwyer, & Hauser, 2008; Hauser, 2006; Mikhail, 2000). They
observe that moral judgment requires computations performed over
representations of agents, intentions, and causal relationships in order to output
judgments of “right” and “wrong.” Information processing of this sort
necessarily precedes an affective response, the argument goes, and thus it must
be that moral judgment leads to affect, not the other way around.

Reconciling these apparent alternatives—intuitive versus rational,1 affective
versus cognitive2—is therefore a focal point of research. In our view, the most
successful attempts share a common insight: moral judgment is accomplished by
multiple systems. Here, we pursue a dual‐process approach in which moral
judgment is the product of both intuitive and rational psychological processes,
and it is the product of what are conventionally thought of as “affective” and
“cognitive” mechanisms. As we shall see, a dual‐process model of moral
judgment can explain features of the data that (p.49) unitary models cannot:
dissociations in clinical populations, cognitive conflict in healthy individuals, and
so on.

The new challenge we face is to understand the specific features of distinct
systems and the processes of integration and competition among them. In this
chapter, we begin by reviewing the evidence in favor of a division between a
cognitive system and an affective system for moral judgment. Next, we argue
that the cognitive system operates by “controlled” psychological processes
whereby explicit principles are consciously applied, while affective responses
are generated by “automatic” psychological processes that are not available to
conscious reflection. Thus, we suggest, the cognitive/affective and conscious/
intuitive divisions that have been made in the literature in fact pick out the same
underlying structure within the moral mind. Finally, we consider a set of
Humean hypotheses according to which moral principles deployed in conscious
cognition have affective origins.

The present chapter focuses exclusively on two psychological systems that shape
moral judgments concerning physically harmful behavior. Psychological
researchers have often noted, however, that the moral domain encompasses
much more than reactions to and prohibitions against causing bodily harm
(Darley & Shultz, 1990; Gilligan, 1982/1993: 19; Haidt, 2007; Schweder & Haidt,
1993). Other sub‐domains of morality might include the fair allocation of
resources, sexual deviance, altruism and care, respect for social hierarchy, and
religious devotion, for instance. Several authors have suggested that
independent psychological systems are responsible for judgments in several of
these domains, and we regard such conjectures as plausible. Our focus on two
systems that are important for judgments concerning harm is not presented as a
complete account of moral psychology. On the contrary, we hope that the dual‐

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-195

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-193

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-209

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-178

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-181

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-190

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-217

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 4 of 26

process model explored here will eventually be understood as part of a larger
constellation of psychological systems that enable the human capacity for moral
judgment.

1. A Dual‐Process Model of Moral Judgment

Moral dilemmas come in many flavors, and a perennial favorite in moral
philosophy forces a choice between harming one person and letting many people
die, as in the classic trolley dilemmas (Foot, 1967; Thomson, 1985). In a case
that we shall call the switch dilemma, a runaway trolley threatens to run over
and kill five people. Is it morally permissible to flip a switch that will redirect the
trolley away from five people and onto one person instead, (p.50) thus saving
five lives at the cost of one? In a large web survey, most people said that it is
(Hauser et al., 2007.) This case contrasts with the footbridge dilemma. Here, one
person is standing next to a larger person on a footbridge spanning the tracks,
in between the oncoming trolley and the five. In this case, the only way to save
the five is to push the large person off of the footbridge and into the trolley’s
path, killing him, but preventing the trolley from killing the five. (You can’t stop
the trolley yourself because you’re not big enough to do the job.) Most people
surveyed said that in this case trading one life for five is not morally permissible.
It appears that most ordinary people, like many philosophers, endorse a
characteristically consequentialist judgment (“maximize the number of lives
saved”) in first case and a characteristically deontological judgment (“harm is
wrong, no matter what the consequences are”) in the second. (For a discussion
of why we consider it legitimate to refer to these judgments as
“characteristically deontological” and “characteristically consequentialist,” see
Greene, 2007.) This pair of dilemmas gives rise to the “trolley problem,” which,
for decades, philosophers have attempted to solve (Fischer & Ravizza, 1992;
Kamm, 1998, 2006). What makes people judge these cases differently?

Greene and colleagues’ dual‐process theory of moral judgment (Greene et al.,
2001, 2004; Greene, 2007) attempted to characterize the respective roles of
affect and controlled cognition in people’s responses to these dilemmas (Greene
et al., 2001). Specifically, Greene and colleagues proposed that the thought of
harming someone in a “personal” way, as in the footbridge dilemma, triggers a
negative emotional responses that says, in effect, “That’s wrong, don’t do it!”
According to their theory, this emotional alarm bell overrides any
consequentialist inclination to approve of the five‐for‐one trade off. In contrast,
people tend to say that redirecting the trolley in the switch case is morally
permissible because the “impersonal” nature of this action fails to trigger a
comparable emotional response. In the absence of such a response,
consequentialist moral reasoning (“Five lives are worth more than one”)
dominates the decision. The core insight of this proposal is that our discrepant
judgments in the switch and push cases may not come from the operation of a

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-180

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-221

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-194

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-183

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-179

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-197

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-198

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-188

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-187

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-183

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-188

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 5 of 26

single psychological system, but rather from competition between two distinct
psychological systems.

Putting this proposal to the empirical test, Greene and colleagues examined the
neural activity of people responding to various “personal” and “impersonal”
moral dilemmas. As predicted, they found that brain regions associated with
emotion (and social cognition more broadly) exhibited increased activity in
response to “personal” moral dilemmas such as the footbridge case. These brain
regions included a region of the medial prefrontal cortex (Brodmann’s (p.51)
area 9/10) that was damaged in the famous case of Phineas Gage, the
nineteenth‐century railroad foreman whose moral behavior became severely
disordered after a tragic accident sent a metal tamping iron through his eye
socket and out of the top of his head (Damasio, 1994: 3; Macmillan, 2000). In
contrast, and also as predicted, Greene and colleagues found that brain regions
associated with controlled cognitive processes such as working memory and
abstract reasoning exhibited increased activity when people were responded to
“impersonal” moral dilemmas such as the switch case.

Building on this finding, Greene and colleagues conducted a second study
(Greene et al., 2004). Whereas their first study identified patterns of neural
activity associated with the kind of dilemma in question (“personal” vs.
“impersonal”), the second study identified patterns of neural activity associated
with the particular judgments people made (“acceptable” vs. “unacceptable”).
They focused their analysis on difficult dilemmas in which harming someone in a
“personal” manner would lead to a greater good. Here is an example of a
particularly difficult case, known as the crying baby dilemma:

Enemy soldiers have taken over your village. They have orders to kill all
remaining civilians. You and some of your townspeople have sought refuge
in the cellar of a large house. Outside, you hear the voices of soldiers who
have come to search the house for valuables. Your baby begins to cry
loudly. You cover his mouth to block the sound. If you remove your hand
from his mouth, his crying will summon the attention of the soldiers who
will kill you, your child, and the others hiding out in the cellar. To save
yourself and the others, you must smother your child to death. Is it
appropriate for you to smother your child in order to save yourself and the
other townspeople?

Subjects tend to take a long time to respond to this dilemma, and their
judgments tend to split fairly evenly between the characteristically
consequentialist judgment (“Smother the baby to save the group”) and the
characteristically deontological judgment (“Don’t smother the baby”). According
to Greene and colleagues’ dual‐process theory, the characteristically
deontological responses to such cases are driven by prepotent emotional
responses that nearly everyone has. If that’s correct, then people who deliver

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-177

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-207

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-187

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 6 of 26

characteristically consequentialist judgments in response to such cases must
override their emotional responses.

This theory makes two predictions about what we should see in people’s brains
as they respond to such dilemmas. First, we would expect to see increased
activity in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which,
in more dorsal subregions, reliably responds when two or more incompatible
behavioral responses are simultaneously activated, i.e. under conditions of
“response conflict” (Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001). For
example, if one is presented with the word “red” written in green (p.52) ink,
and one’s task is to name the color of the ink, then one is likely to experience
response conflict because the more automatic word‐reading response (“red”)
conflicts with the task‐appropriate color‐naming response (“green”) (Stroop,
1935). According to this dual‐process theory, the aforementioned difficult
dilemmas elicit an internal conflict between a prepotent emotional response that
says “No!” and a consequentialist cost–benefit analysis that says “Yes.”
Consistent with this theory, Greene and colleagues found that difficult
“personal” dilemmas like the crying‐baby case elicit increased ACC activity,
relative to easier “personal” dilemmas, such as whether to kill your boss because
you and others don’t like him, in which reaction times are shorter and judgments
are more overwhelmingly negative. Second, we would expect to see increased
activity in a part of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
(DLPFC). This part of the brain is the seat of “cognitive control” (Miller &
Cohen, 2001) and is necessary for overriding impulses and for “executive
function” more broadly. Once again, if the characteristically deontological
judgment is based on an intuitive emotional response, then giving a
characteristically consequentialist response requires overriding that response, a
job for the DLPFC. As predicted, Greene and colleagues found that
consequentialist judgments in response to difficult “personal” dilemmas
(“Smother the baby in the name of the greater good”) are associated with
increased activity in the DLPFC relative to the activity associated with trials on
which deontological judgments were made.

These neuroimaging results support a dual‐process theory of moral judgment in
which distinct “cognitive” and emotional processes sometimes compete. But a
consistent association between neural activity and behavior cannot provide
conclusive evidence that the neural activity is a cause of the behavior. To provide
stronger evidence for such causal relationships, one must intervene on the
neural process. In a recent study, Greene and colleagues (2008) did this by
imposing a “cognitive load” on people responding to difficult “personal” moral
dilemmas like the crying‐baby dilemma. People responded to the moral
dilemmas while simultaneously monitoring a string of digits scrolling across the
screen. The purpose of this manipulation is to disrupt the kind of controlled
cognitive processes that are hypothesized to support consequentialist moral
judgments. They found, as predicted, that imposing a cognitive load slowed

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-172

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-219

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-211

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 7 of 26

down characteristically consequentialist judgments, but had no effect on
characteristically deontological judgments. (Deontological judgments were in
fact slightly faster under cognitive load, but this effect was not statistically
significant.)

A complementary tactic is to manipulate the relevant emotional responses,
rather than the capacity for cognitive control. Valdesolo and DeSteno (2006) (p.
53) did this by presenting either comedic video clips or affectively neutral video
clips to two groups of subjects who then responded to versions of the switch and
footbridge dilemmas. They reasoned as follows: if people judge against pushing
the man in front of the trolley because of a negative emotional response, then a
dose of positive emotion induced by watching a short comedic sketch from
Saturday Night Live might counteract that negative response and make their
judgments more consequentialist. As predicted, the researchers found that
people who watched the funny video were more willing to endorse pushing the
man in front of the trolley.

Yet another method for establishing a causal relationship between emotion and
moral judgment is to test individuals with selective deficits in emotional
processing. This approach was first taken by Mendez and colleagues (2005) in a
study of patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a disease characterized
by deterioration of prefrontal and anterior temporal brain areas. FTD patients
exhibit blunted emotion and diminished regard for others early in the disease
course. Behavioral changes include moral transgressions such as stealing,
physical assault, and unsolicited or inappropriate sexual advances. Mendez and
colleagues presented FTD patients with versions of the switch and footbridge
dilemmas and found, as predicted, that most FTD patients endorsed not only
flipping the switch but also pushing the person in front of the trolley in order to
save the five others. Mendez and colleagues suggest that this result is driven by
the deterioration of emotional processing mediated by the ventromedial
prefrontal cortex (VMPC). Since neurodegeneration in FTD affects multiple
prefrontal and temporal areas, however, firm structure–function relationships
cannot be ascertained from this study.

To fill this gap, moral judgment has since been investigated in patients with
more focal VMPC lesions—that is, lesions involving less damage to other
structures. Like FTD patients, VMPC lesion patients exhibit reduced affect and
diminished empathy, but unlike FTD patients, VMPC lesion patients retain
broader intellectual function. Thus VMPC patients are especially well suited to
studying the role of emotion in moral judgment. Koenigs, Young, and colleagues
(2007) tested a group of six patients with focal, adult‐onset, bilateral lesions of
VMPC to determine whether emotional processing subserved by VMPC is in fact
necessary for deontological moral judgment. In this study patients evaluated a
series of impersonal and personal moral scenarios, used by Greene and
colleagues in the neuroimaging work discussed above. VMPC patients responded

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-224

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-208

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-202

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 8 of 26

normally to the impersonal moral scenarios, but for the personal scenarios the
VMPC patients were significantly more likely to endorse committing an
emotionally aversive harm (e.g. smothering the baby) if a greater number of
people would benefit. That is, they were (p.54) more consequentialist. A second
lesion study conducted by Ciaramelli and colleagues (2007) produced consistent
results. Thus these lesion studies lend strong support to the theory that
characteristically deontological judgments are—in many people, at least—driven
by intuitive emotional responses that depend on the VMPC, while
characteristically consequentialist judgments are supported by controlled
cognitive processes based in the DLPFC.

It is worth noting that this dual‐process theory, and the body of evidence that
supports it, run counter to the traditional philosophical stereotypes concerning
which normative positions are most closely allied with emotion vis‐à‐vis
controlled cognition. Historically, consequentialism is more closely allied with
the “sentimentalist” tradition (Hume, 1739/1978), while deontology is more
closely associated with Kantian (1785/1959) rationalism. According to the dual‐
process theory, this historical stereotype gets things mostly backwards. The
evidence suggests that characteristically deontological judgments are driven
primarily by automatic emotional responses, while characteristically
consequentialist judgments depend more on controlled cognition (Greene, 2007).
Of course, this association between emotion and deontology, on the one hand,
and consequentialism and controlled cognition, on the other, is bound to be
overly simple. In what follows, we present a more nuanced picture of the
interactions between cognition and affect that support both characteristically
consequentialist and characteristically deontological moral judgments.

2. Intuition and Affect: A Common System?

The division between affective and cognitive systems of moral judgment
proposed by Greene and colleagues is by now well supported. Several critics
have noted, however, that early formulations of the theory left many details of
the affective system unspecified (Cushman et al., 2006; Hauser, 2006: 8; Mikahil,
2007). Taking the specific example of the trolley problem, what is it about the
footbridge dilemma that makes it elicit a stronger emotional responses than the
switch dilemma? As Mikhail (2000) observed, this question can be answered in
at least two complementary ways. On a first pass, one can provide a descriptive
account of the features of a given moral dilemma that reliably produce
judgments of “right” or “wrong.” Then, at a deeper level, one can provide an
explanatory account of these judgments with reference to the specific cognitive
processes at work.

A natural starting point for the development of a descriptive account of our
moral judgments is the philosophical literature, which in the last half‐century
has burgeoned with principled accounts of moral intuitions arising from (p.55)
hypothetical scenarios (e.g. Fischer & Ravizza, 1992). The most prominent

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-173

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-196

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-199

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-183

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-175

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-193

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-210

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-209

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-179

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 9 of 26

philosophical account of the trolley problem is a moral principle called the
“Doctrine of Double Effect,” or DDE. According to proponents of the DDE, the
critical difference between the switch and footbridge cases is that the large man
in the footbridge case is used to stop the train from hitting the five, whereas the
death of the victim in the switch dilemma is merely a side‐effect of diverting the
trolley away from the five. In its general form, the DDE states that it is
impermissible to use a harm as the means to achieving a greater good, but
permissible to cause a harm as a side‐effect of achieving a greater good. Setting
aside its validity as a moral principle, we may ask whether the DDE is an
accurate descriptive account of the moral judgments of ordinary people.

The characteristic pattern of responses elicited by the trolley problem provides
some evidence for this view, but the DDE is certainly not the only account for
subjects’ judgments of these cases. Another obvious distinction between the
footbridge and switch cases is that the former involves physical contact with the
victim, while the latter occurs through mechanical action at a distance
(Cushman et al., 2006). At a more abstract level, the footbridge case requires an
intervention on the victim (pushing the large man), while the bystander case
merely requires an intervention on the threat (turning the trolley) (Waldman &
Dieterich, 2007).

In order to isolate the DDE from these sorts of alternative accounts, Mikhail
(2000) tested subjects on a modified version of the switch dilemma. Both cases
involve a “looped” side track that splits away from, and then rejoins, the main
track (Figure 2.1). Five people are threatened on the main track, and they are
positioned beyond the point where the side track rejoins. Thus, if the train were
to proceed unimpeded down either the main track or the side track, the five
would be killed. In the analog to the footbridge case, there is a man standing on
the side track who, if hit, would be sufficiently large to stop the train before it
hit the five. In the analog to the switch case, there is a weighted object on the
side track that, if hit, would be sufficiently large to stop the train before it hit the
five. However, standing in front of the weighted object is a man who would first
be hit and killed. These cases preserve the distinction between harming as a
means to saving five (when the man stops the train) and harming as a side‐effect
of saving five (when an object stops the train and a man dies incidentally).
However, neither involves physical contact, and both require a direct
intervention on the trolley rather than the victim.

Mikhail found that subjects reliably judged the looped means case to be morally
worse than the looped side‐effect case, although the size of the effect was
markedly smaller than the original switch/footbridge contrast. These results
suggest that the DDE is an adequate descriptive account for at least (p.56)

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-175

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-225

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-209

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-figureGroup-4

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 10 of 26

Figure 2.1.

some part of the moral distinction
between the fat man and
bystander cases. A follow‐up study
involving several thousand
subjects tested online replicated
this effect, and found it to be
remarkably consistent across
variations in age, gender,
educational level, exposure to
moral philosophy, and religion
(Hauser et al., 2007). While the
specific wording of Mikhail’s
“loop” cases has been criticized
(Greene et al., 2009; Waldman &
Dieterich, 2007), subsequent
research has demonstrated use of
the DDE across multiple
controlled pairs of moral dilemmas
(Cushman et al., 2006).
These initial studies establish
that DDE is at least part of an
accurate description of subjects’
moral judgments, but leave
open the explanatory question: how is the means/side‐effect distinction
manifested in the psychological systems that give rise to moral judgment?
Several related proposals have been offered (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, in
preparation; Greene et al., 2009; Mikahil, 2007), but we will not discuss these in
detail. In short, all three share the claim that when harm is used as the means to
an end it is represented as being intentionally inflicted to a greater degree than
when harm is produced as a side‐effect. Cushman and colleagues (in
preparation) provide evidence that that this relationship holds even in non‐moral
cases. That is, when somebody brings about a consequence as a means to
accomplishing a goal, participants are more likely to judge that the effect was
brought about intentionally than (p.57) when somebody brings about a
consequence as a foreseen side‐effect of their goal. Many details remain to be
worked out in providing a mechanistic account of the DDE in producing moral
judgments, but it is likely to involve representations of others’ mental states.

Several studies have explored another dimension of the cognitive processes
underlying the DDE: specifically, whether they operate at the level of conscious
awareness. Hauser et al. (2007) selected a subset of participants who judged
killing the one to be impermissible in the loop means case but permissible in the
loop side‐effect case and asked them to provide a justification for their pattern of
judgments. Of twenty‐three justifications analyzed, only three contained a
principled distinction between the two cases (e.g. “the man’s death is a by‐
product rather than direct goal of trying to save the five men”). Subsequent

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-194

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-185

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-225

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-175

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-185

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-210

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-194

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 11 of 26

research has replicated this result with a much larger group of participants,
demonstrating the general inability of a majority of individuals to provide a
sufficient justification for a variety of double effect cases (Cushman et al., 2006).

These results illustrate a phenomenon that Haidt has termed “moral
dumbfounding” (Bjorklund et al., 2000). Moral dumbfounding occurs when
individuals make moral judgments that they confidently regard as correct, but
then cannot provide a general moral principle that accounts for their specific
judgment. One example is the moral prohibition against incest among
consenting adults. Haidt and Hersh (2001) told subjects about a brother and
sister who make love, but who use highly reliable contraception to avoid
pregnancy, are rightly confident that they will suffer no negative emotional
consequences, are able to keep their activities private, and so on. Presented with
such cases, subjects often insist that the siblings’ actions are morally wrong,
despite the fact that they cannot provide more general justification for this
judgment.

Haidt and colleagues argue that these difficult‐to‐justify moral judgments are
generated by rapid, automatic, unconscious mental processes—in short,
intuitions. Moreover, research indicates that these intuitions are supported by
affective processing. For instance, subjects’ moral judgments are harsher when
made in a physically dirty space (Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008). It
appears that subjects’ feelings of disgust brought about by the dirty space were
misattributed to the moral vignettes they judged, implicating disgust as an
affective contributor to intuitive moral judgments. In another study, Wheatley
and Haidt (2005) hypnotized subjects to experience disgust when they heard a
key target word, such as “often.” When subjects were told apparently innocent
stories that contained this word—for example, a story about cousins who often
visit the zoo, or a student council officer who often picks discussion topics—
some made moralistic allegations against the protagonists, saying (p.58) for
instance, “It just seems like he is up to something,” or that the he is a
“popularity‐seeking snob.”

In summary, there is research suggesting that the DDE characterizes patterns of
moral intuition, and research suggesting that affective responses underlie
certain moral intuitions. This raises a clear question: does contemplating harm
used as the means to an end trigger an affective response that in turn generates
moral judgments consistent with the DDE? We suggest that the answer is yes:
although the DDE alone cannot be fashioned into a complete descriptive account
of the conditions under which affective processes are engaged in moral
judgments of harmful acts, there are good reasons to suppose that it captures
part of the story. The DDE is among the features that distinguish “personal”
from “impersonal” dilemmas used to validate the dual‐process model (Greene et
al., 2001; Koenigs et al., 2007; Mendez et al., 2005; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2006).
A subsequent study by Shaich Borg and colleagues (2006) also revealed

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-175

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-170

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-191

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-216

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-226

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-188

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-202

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-208

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-224

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-215

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 12 of 26

increased neural activity in brain regions associated with emotion, such as the
VMPC, during the judgment of cases involving the use of harm as a means to a
greater good. These data suggest that the use of harm as a means may play a
specific role in engaging affective processes of moral judgment. However, the
stimuli used have often not been sufficiently well controlled, leaving room for
multiple interpretations.

We draw several conclusions from this collective body of data. First, the
processes that shape moral judgment often operate below the level of conscious
awareness, in the sense that individuals are often unable to articulate the basis
for moral judgments derived from them. Second, these unconscious mechanisms
operate over representations of agents and actions, causes and intentions, and
so on, in ways that can be captured by fairly general principles such as the DDE.
Third, although aspects of these unconscious mechanisms may involve the
processing of information without emotional valence, evidence suggests that
emotion plays some causal role in generating the ultimate moral judgment.
Finally, the very sorts of features that seem to guide intuitive moral judgments
also seem to guide affective moral judgments. A parsimonious account of these
data clearly stands out: the research programs into the affective basis of moral
judgment and research programs into the intuitive basis of moral judgment have
been investigating the same kind of psychological process.

3. Reasoning from Deontological Principles

While the research described above associates conscious, principled reasoning
with characteristically consequentialist moral judgment and emotional intuition
(p.59) with characteristically deontological moral judgment, other evidence
suggests that this pattern need not hold in all cases. Consider, first,
deontological philosophy. It seems that philosophical reasoning can lead to
judgments that are not consequentialist and that are even strikingly
counterintuitive. (See, e.g., Kant’s [1785/1983] infamous claim that it would be
wrong to lie to a would‐be murderer in order to save someone’s life.) Even when
intuitions inspire putative deontological distinctions, reasoning can then
determine their actual role in a normative theory, determining whether and the
extent to which we should take them seriously. To adapt a dictum from
evolutionary biology: intuition proposes, reason disposes.

But philosophers aren’t the only ones providing evidence of non‐consequentialist
reasoning that appears to be conscious, principled, and deliberate. Let’s return
briefly to the patients with emotional deficits due to VMPC damage (Koenigs et
al., 2007). The sketch we provided of their performance on personal scenarios
was just that—a sketch. The full picture is both richer and messier. The personal
moral scenarios on which VMPC patients produced abnormally consequentialist
judgments could in fact be subdivided into two categories: “low‐conflict” or easy
scenarios and “high‐conflict” or difficult scenarios. Low‐conflict scenarios
elicited 100% agreement and fast reaction times from healthy control subjects;

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-200

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-202

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 13 of 26

high‐conflict scenarios elicited disagreement and slow responses. All high‐
conflict scenarios featured a “consequentialist” option in which harm to one
person could serve to promote the welfare of a greater number of people. Low‐
conflict scenarios, by contrast, typically described situations in which harm to
one person served another person’s purely selfish ends, for example, throwing
one’s baby in a dumpster to avoid the financial burden of caring for it. In these
cases, the VMPC patients judged the actions to be wrong, just as normal
individuals do.

How do VMPC patients arrive at the “appropriate” answer on low‐conflict or
easy personal moral scenarios? One proposal is that low‐conflict scenarios pit a
strong emotional response to the harmful action against a weak case for the
alternative. According to this proposal, VMPC subjects could have generated the
normal pattern of judgments on low‐conflict scenarios because they retained
sufficiently intact emotional processing to experience an aversion to the harm.
This proposal isn’t entirely plausible, however, in light of the fact that the VMPC
subjects tested show abnormal processing of even highly charged emotional
stimuli.

According to an alternative proposal, VMPC patients reasoned their way to
conclusions against causing harm. The difference between low‐conflict and high‐
conflict scenarios is driven by the absence of conflicting moral norms in the low‐
conflict scenarios and the presence of conflicting moral norms in the (p.60)
high‐conflict scenarios. As described above, high‐conflict scenarios described
situations that required harm to one person to help other people. The decision of
whether to endorse such harm presents participants with a moral dilemma, in
the sense that they have distinct moral commitments demanding opposite
behaviors. Regardless of the decision, either a norm against harming or a norm
against not helping is violated. Low‐conflict scenarios, on the other hand,
typically described situations that required harm to one person in order to help
only oneself. Thus it is possible that an uncontested moral norm against harming
someone purely for self‐benefit guides judgment. Alternatively, the VMPC
patients could be applying the same utilitarian principles that they applied to the
high‐conflict cases, judging, for example, that the financial benefits to the young
mother are outweighed by the harm done to her infant.

There were some low‐conflict dilemmas featuring situations in which harm to
one person was required to save other people. These scenarios, however, feature
actions that violate widely understood moral norms, for instance norms against
child prostitution, cannibalism, and the violation of a patient’s rights by his
doctor. The pattern of data thus suggests that patients with compromised
emotional processing are able to use their intact capacity for reasoning to apply
clear moral norms to specific situations.

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 14 of 26

Finally, ordinary people appear capable of bringing explicit moral principles to
bear on particular cases in service of moral judgment. In contrast to the
distinction between intended and foreseen harm, which appears to be intuitively
generated and then justified post hoc, the distinction between killing and letting
die (or, more generally, between action and omission) may commonly be
consciously deployed in the first place. Cushman and colleagues (2006) asked
people to justify patterns of their own judgments that were consistent with these
two distinctions. They found that many people were able to explicitly produce a
version of the action/omission distinction, while very few were able to explicitly
produce a version of the distinction between intended and foreseen harm. Thus
it is at least possible that ordinary people engage in moral reasoning from some
version of the action/omission distinction, just as some philosophers do. Even
more revealing is a reanalysis of that data showing that participants who were
able to articulate the action/omission distinction showed significantly greater use
of the distinction in their prior judgments. This link between having a principle
and using that principle provides stronger evidence that explicit moral reasoning
can play a role in the process of moral judgment.

Further evidence for the role of moral reasoning—albeit a limited role—comes
from a study by Lombrozo (2008). Participants were asked (p.61) several
questions designed to reveal whether they adhered to a more consequentialist or
more deontological moral theory. For instance, they were asked whether it is
“never permissible” to murder (Lombrozo designated this a deontological
response), “permissible” if it would bring about a greater good
(consequentialist), or “obligatory” if it would bring about a greater good (strong
consequentialist). They were also asked to make a moral judgment of two
specific cases: the “switch” and “push” variants of the trolley problem. Subjects’
general commitments with their judgment of particular cases, but this effect was
limited in a revealing way. As predicted, subjects whose general commitments
were consequentialist exhibited greater consistency in their moral judgments of
the “push” and “switch” cases. This effect only emerged, however, when the
“push” and “switch” cases were judged side by side. When specific judgments
were made sequentially, there was no effect of subjects’ general moral
commitments. This suggests that moral reasoning can be triggered in some
specific contexts, but not in others.

We expect that further research will uncover further evidence for conscious,
principled reasoning in moral judgments. The examples offered here serve to
support its potential role in non consequentialist moral judgments—adding
important detail to the dual‐process model.

4. The Pervasive Role of Affect

So far we have considered the general properties of two different processes that
shape moral judgment: a deliberate, effortful process that reasons about specific
cases from explicit abstract principles, and a rapid, automatic process of moral

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-175

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-205

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 15 of 26

judgment that generates affective responses to specific cases on the basis of
mental processes inaccessible to conscious reflection. We have also begun to
characterize these systems at a more computational level, specifying the content
of their moral rules: a general principle favoring welfare‐maximizing behaviors
appears to be supported by controlled cognitive processes, while a principle
prohibiting the use of harm as a means to a greater good appears to be part of
the process that generates intuitive emotional responses. We conclude by
turning to a crucial, unanswered question: how do these principles get into our
heads?

Elsewhere Greene has suggested that some of our emotionally driven moral
judgments have an innate and evolutionarily adaptive basis (Greene & Haidt,
2002; Greene, 2003, 2007). Recent research demonstrating sophisticated social
(p.62) evaluation in preverbal infants has begun to lend credence to this view
(Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). At the very least, it points the way towards
research paradigms that could support a nativist hypothesis. While we look
forward eagerly to progress on this front, here we will not pursue the question
of the developmental or adaptive origins of the principles at work on the
intuitive emotional side of the dual‐process divide.

Our aim in this section is instead to consider the origins of the cognitive
commitment to a utilitarian principle favoring welfare‐maximizing choices
(hereafter, the “welfare principle”). We explore the Humean (1739/1978)
hypothesis that utilitarian judgment, despite its association with controlled
cognition (Greene et al., 2004) and its prominence in the presence of emotional
deficits (Mendez et al., 2005; Koenigs et al., 2007; Ciaramelli et al., 2007), itself
has an affective basis. Put simply, we suggest that affect supplies the primary
motivation to regard harm as a bad thing, while “cognition” uses this core
statement of value to construct the utilitarian maximum that we ought to act so
as to minimize harm. The result is the welfare principle. Below, we sketch out
two versions of this hypothesis in greater detail.

They begin with a proposal by Greene (2007) distinguishing two kinds of
emotional responses: those that that function like alarm bells and those that
function like currencies. This distinction is meant to capture the difference
between deontological intuitions and utilitarian reasoning, but it is also offered
as a broader distinction that operates beyond the moral domain. The core idea is
that alarm‐bell emotions are designed to circumvent reasoning, providing
absolute demands and constraints on behavior, while currency emotions are
designed to participate in the process of practical reasoning, providing
negotiable motivations for and against different behaviors. For example, the
amygdala, which has been implicated in responses to personal moral dilemmas,
reliably responds to threatening visual stimuli such as snakes and faces of out‐
group members (LeDoux, 1996: 166; Phelps et al., 2000). Thus the amygdala is a
good candidate for a region that is critical for supporting at least some alarm‐

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-184

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-182

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-183

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-192

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-196

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-187

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-208

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-202

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-173

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-183

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-204

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-212

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 16 of 26

bell emotions. In contrast, Knutson and colleagues (2005) have identified a set of
meso‐limbic brain regions that appear to represent expected monetary value in a
more graded fashion, with distinct regions tracking a stimulus’s reward
magnitude, reward probability, and expected value. These regions, in a rather
transparent way, support currency‐like representations.

Above, we argued that strongly affective deontological intuitions are triggered
when types of harms occur, perhaps those that involve physical contact and use
harm as a means to accomplishing a goal. The emotional response is like an
alarm bell because it is designed to make a clear demand that is extremely
difficult to ignore. This response can be overridden with substantial effort (p.63)
(cognitive control), but it is not designed to be negotiable. The prohibition of
certain physical harms seems to be just an example of a broader class of alarm‐
bell emotions. For instance, research on “protected values” (Baron & Spranca,
1997) and “sacred values” (Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, & Lerner 2000) in
moral judgment suggests that people sometimes treat harm to the environment
as non‐negotiable as well. Outside the moral domain, the strong disgust
response to eating contaminated food also seems to have an alarm‐like
character: most people are not willing to negotiate eating feces.

Whereas alarm‐bell emotions treat certain types of physical harms as non‐
negotiable, it is precisely the defining feature of the “welfare principle” that
harms are negotiable. One person’s life counts for one‐fifth as much as five
people’s lives, and the relative costs and benefits of lives, among other
outcomes, are weighed against each other to determine the best course of
action. Here, again, the case of moral decision‐making is presumed to be one
case of a much broader phenomenon. The desire for ice cream on a hot summer
day is an example of a currency emotion: it supplies a reason to pursue the Good
Humor truck, but this reason can be traded off against others, such as
maintaining a slim poolside profile. Currency‐like emotions function by adding a
limited measure of motivational weight to a behavioral alternative, where this
weighting is designed to be integrated with other weightings in order to produce
a response. Such emotional weightings say, “Add a few points to option A” or
“Subtract a few points from Option B,”, rather than issuing resolute commands.

Above, we suggested that affect supplies the primary motivation to regard harm
as bad. Once this primary motivation is supplied, reasoning proceeds in a
currency‐like manner. But we still must explain the origin of the primary
motivation to regard harm as bad. Is it located in the alarm‐bell response to
personal harms, or in an independent currency response? Each hypothesis has
pros and cons.

According to the “alarm‐bell” hypothesis, the primary motivation not to harm is
ultimately derived from the alarm‐bell emotional system that objects to things
like pushing a man in front of a train. When people attempt to construct general

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-201

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-169

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-220

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 17 of 26

principles that account for their particular “alarm‐bell” moral intuitions, one of
the first things they notice is that their intuitions respond negatively to harm.
This gives rise to a simple moral principle: “harm is bad.” Combined with a
general cognitive strategy of minimizing bad things (i.e. practical reasoning), the
result is the welfare principle. Represented as such, the welfare principle can
become a basis for controlled, conscious processes of reasoning. Critically,
reasoning on the basis of an explicit welfare principle can occur in a currency‐
like manner. The alarm‐bell hypothesis locates the origins (p.64) of the welfare
principle in a process of theory‐construction over alarm‐bell responses, but
maintains the view that the operation of the welfare principle occurs in a
currency‐like manner that engages controlled reasoning processes.

According to this hypothesis, the welfare principle takes hold not because it
offers a fully adequate descriptive account of our intuitive moral judgments
(which it does not), but because it is simple, salient, and accounts for a large
proportion of our intuitive judgments (which it does). Ultimately, the same
mechanism can also give rise to more complex moral principles. For instance,
Cushman and colleagues (in preparation) have explored this hypothesis in the
particular cases of the doctrine of double effect and doctrine of doing and
allowing.

The principle virtue of the alarm‐bell hypothesis is its parsimony: by explaining
the origins of the welfare principle in terms of an independently hypothesized
alarm‐bell aversion to harm, it can provide a motivational basis for controlled
cognitive moral reasoning without invoking any additional primary affective
valuation. It can also explain why utilitarian moral judgment is preserved in
individuals who experience damage to frontal affective mechanisms: the welfare
principle has already been constructed on the basis of past affective responses.
But one shortcoming of the alarm‐bell hypothesis is that it leaves unexplained
how a theory of one’s own moral intuitions gives rise to practical reasoning.
When an individual regards her own pattern of moral intuitions and notes, “I
seem to think harm is bad,” will this lead automatically to the conclusion “Harm
is a reason not to perform a behavior”? At present, we lack a sufficient
understanding of the interface between cognition and affect to answer this
difficult question. It seems plausible that a descriptive theory of one’s
motivations could become a motivational basis for practical reasoning, but it also
seems plausible that it might not.

Philosophers will note that the alarm‐bell hypothesis paints an unflattering
portrait of philosophical utilitarianism because it characterizes the welfare
principles as a sort of crude first pass, while characterizing deontological
principles as more subtle and sophisticated. People’s intuitive judgments are
often consistent with the welfare principle, but it is clear that in many cases they
are not—for instance, in the footbridge version of the trolley problem. If the
welfare principle is designed to capture our intuitive moral judgments as a

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 18 of 26

whole, then it would receive about a B+, getting things descriptively right much
of the time, but getting things descriptively wrong much of the time, too.

The currency hypothesis is more friendly toward utilitarianism/consequentialism
as a normative approach. According to the currency hypothesis, we are
furnished with certain currency‐like affective responses independently (p.65) of
our alarm‐bell responses. For instance: harm is bad, regardless of who
experiences it. Benefits are good, regardless of who experiences them. More
harm is worse than less harm. More benefits are better than fewer benefits.
Small harms can be outweighed by large benefits. Small benefits can be
outweighed by large harms. And so on.

Notice that these premises assign a valence to outcomes (harm is bad), and even
ordinal relationships among outcomes (more harm is worse), but they do not
assign cardinal values to particular outcomes. Thus they specify the general
structure of utilitarian thinking, but do not specify how, exactly, various harms
and benefits trade off against one another. According to the currency process,
utilitarian thinking is the product of a rational attempt to construct a set of
practical principles that is consistent with the constraints imposed by the
aforementioned premises. It is an idealization based on the principles that
govern the flow of emotional currency. One might say that it is a union between
basic sympathy and basic math.

Note that the operational mechanisms upon which the currency hypothesis
depends—the math, so to speak—overlap substantially with the mechanisms
upon which the alarm‐bell hypothesis depends. Both accounts posit that explicit
utilitarian principles arise from a combination of abstract reasoning and affect.
The key difference is the source of the affect: generalization from alarm‐bell
responses prohibiting harm versus an independent set of currency‐like
valuations of harms and benefits.

The principal virtue of the currency hypothesis is that utilitarian cost–benefit
reasoning looks very much like cost–benefit reasoning over other currency‐like
responses. The welfare principle functions very much as if there were a
negotiable negative value placed on harm—and, for that matter, a negotiable
positive value placed on benefits. Also, in contrast to the alarm‐bell hypothesis,
it is apparent how the currency‐like weighting of costs and benefits directly and
necessarily enters into practical reasoning. This tight fit comes with a slight
expense in parsimony, however. The currency hypothesis demands two separate
types of affective response to harm of independent origin: an alarm‐bell
response to a select set of harms, and a currency‐like response to a larger set of
harms. It also implies that currency‐like responses are preserved in individuals
with frontal‐lobe damage, since they continue to reason from the welfare
principle.

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 19 of 26

As noted earlier, the currency hypothesis is more friendly toward philosophical
utilitarianism. According to this view, utilitarians are not simply doing a poor job
of generalizing over the body of their alarm‐bell moral intuitions. Instead, their
judgments are based indirectly on a distinct set of currency‐like emotional
responses. Is it better to rely on currency‐like emotions to the (p.66) exclusion
of alarm‐like emotions? Perhaps. The alarm‐like emotions that drive people’s
non‐utilitarian judgments in response to trolley dilemmas appear to be sensitive
to factors that are hard to regard as morally relevant, such as whether the
action in question involves body‐contact between agent and victim (Cushman et
al., 2006). Taking the charge of bias one step further, Greene et al. (2009)
hypothesizes that the DDE is a by‐product of the computational limitations of the
processes that govern our intuitive emotional responses. Borrowing some
computational machinery from Mikhail (2000), he argues that the controlled
cognitive system based in the DLPFC has the computational resources necessary
to represent the side‐effects of actions, while the appraisal system that governs
our emotional responses to actions like the one in the footbridge dilemma lacks
such resources. As a result, our emotional responses have a blind spot for
harmful side‐effects, leading us to draw a moral distinction between intended
and foreseen harms, i.e. the DDE.

Although the alarm‐bell and currency hypotheses vary in detail, they both reject
philosophical moral rationalism in that they (a) require a specification of
primitive goods before practical reasoning (including utilitarian reasoning) can
proceed and (b) locate these primitives in our affective responses. Moreover,
these hypotheses are not mutually exclusive: the welfare principle may be
supported both by theory‐building based on alarm‐bell responses as well as a
distinct set of currency responses. As we argued above, there is ample evidence
that a distinction between cognitive and affective processes of moral judgment is
warranted. We strongly suspect, however, that when the origins of the cognitive
process are understood, we shall find a pervasive influence of affect.

5. Conclusion

As we hope this chapter attests, it no longer makes sense to engage in debate
over whether moral judgment is accomplished exclusively by “cognition” as
opposed to “affect,” or exclusively by conscious reasoning as opposed to
intuition. Rather, moral judgment is the product of complex interactions between
multiple psychological systems. We have focused on one class of moral
judgments: those involving tradeoffs between avoiding larger harms and causing
smaller ones. Cases such as these engage at least two distinct systems: an
intuitive/affective response prohibiting certain kinds of basic harm, and a
conscious/cognitive response favoring the welfare‐maximizing response. The
underlying psychology of moral judgment in these cases helps to explain why
they strike us as particularly difficult moral dilemmas: we are forced to reconcile
the conflicting output of competing brain systems. (p.67)

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-175

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-185

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-209

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 20 of 26

We have also identified several aspects of this account that are in need of further
investigation. First, there is much to be learned about the evaluative processes
that operate within each of the systems we have identified. In the case of the
intuitive/affective system, we have suggested that one component of the
evaluative process mirrors the doctrine of double effect. But the evidence is not
conclusive on this point. Moreover, this single principle alone cannot account for
the full pattern of data associated with intuitive/affective moral judgments. In
the case of the conscious/cognitive system, the data strongly suggest that
ordinary people typically reason from a principle favoring welfare‐maximizing
choices. But there is also good reason to believe that people, at least in some
circumstances, explicitly reason from deontological moral principles. Further
research in this area will be critical.

Second, the origins of each system of moral judgment remain unknown. In this
chapter we have explored two hypotheses concerning the origins of explicit
moral principles within individuals, both of which ultimately implicate affective
systems. Others have proposed diverse origins for moral principles such as
metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999: 290–334) and construction from social
experience (Kohlberg, 1969). A further question is the origin of moral intuitions,
which several authors have suggested may have an innate basis (Hauser, 2006:
1; Mikhail, 2007; Greene & Haidt, 2002). Several of these proposals operate at
distinct levels of analysis (ontogenetic versus evolutionary) and are specific to
one of the two systems we have discussed (cognitive versus affective), and thus
may be broadly compatible.

Third, at present we know little about how the intuitive/affective and conscious/
cognitive systems interact on‐line in the production of moral judgments. This is a
topic we have left largely untouched in the present chapter, and somewhat out of
necessity. Until the contours of individual systems of moral judgment are better
understood, it will be difficult to make much progress towards understanding
the interactions between systems. One aspect of this problem that we suspect
will be of interest are the standards for the normative plausibility of putative
moral principles. Certain factors that reliably shape moral judgments, such as
the physical proximity of an agent to a victim, are sometimes rejected as prima
facie invalid criteria for moral judgment. Others, such as the doctrine of double
effect, are more commonly accepted (Cushman et al., 2006). The bases on which
particular explicit moral rules are accepted or rejected are poorly understood,
and such meta‐ethical intuitions are a key area for investigation at the interface
between the intuitive/affective and conscious/cognitive systems.

Finally, it remains to be seen how generally the dual‐process model developed
for harm‐based moral dilemmas can be extended to other domains of (p.68)
morality. There are at least two ways that this issue can be framed. On the one
hand, we have argued that in the specific case of tradeoffs in harms, conflict
between distinct psychological systems gives rise to the phenomenon of a

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-206

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-203

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-193

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-210

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-184

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-175

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 21 of 26

dilemma (Cushman & Young, 2009; Greene, 2007; Sinnott‐Armstrong, in
preparation). One important question is whether this multi‐system account can
be employed to understand the phenomenon of a moral dilemma beyond the
domain of physically harmful actions. That is, are there distinct systems that
give rise to potentially conflicting moral judgments in domains such as the
division of economic resources, the establishment of conventional standards of
conduct, sexual taboo, and so forth?

On the other hand, we have argued for the operation of two psychological
processes: an intuitive/affective response to intentional harms and a conscious/
cognitive response favoring welfare maximization. This raises a second question:
to what extent do other types of moral judgment depend on the operation of
these specific processes? For instance, when evaluating allocations of resources,
financial losses could be coded as “harms” and then processed via the operation
of one of the systems we have explored in this chapter. Whether these particular
systems have such broad applicability is presently unknown.

It is, of course, our hope that the small corner of moral judgment we have
explored in this chapter—a corner strictly limited to the occurrence of physical
harms and preternaturally concerned with railway operations—will teach lessons
with broad applicability. The extent of this applicability remains to be
determined, but we feel confident in asserting at least this much: there is no
single psychological process of moral judgment. Rather, moral judgment
depends on the interaction between distinct psychological systems. Notably,
these systems tend to be reflected in the principles characteristic of competing
moral philosophies (Greene, 2007).

Acknowledgments

We thank Tim Schroeder for his comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
We also thank the members of the Moral Psychology Research Group, and
especially John Doris, for their valuable input.

References

Bibliography references:

Baron, J., & Spranca, M. (1997). Protected values. Behavior and Human Decision
Processes, 70: 1–16. (p.69)

Bjorklund, F., Haidt, J., & Murphy, S. (2000). Moral dumbfounding: When
intuition finds no reason. Lund Psychological Reports, 2: 1–23.

Blair, R. J. R. (1995). A cognitive developmental approach to morality:
Investigating the psychopath. Cognition, 57: 1–29.

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-174

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-183

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 22 of 26

Botvinick, M. M., Braver, T. S., Barch, D. M., Carter, C. S., & Cohen, J. (2001).
Conflict monitoring and cognitive control. Psychological Review, 108 (3): 624–
652.

Ciaramelli, E., Muccioli, M., Ladavas, E., & di Pellegrino, G. (2007). Selective
deficit in personal moral judgment following damage to ventromedial prefrontal
cortex. Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, 2: 84–92.

Cushman, F. A., & Young, A. W. (2009). The psychology of dilemmas and the
philosophy of morality. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 12 (1): 9.

Cushman, F. A., Young, L., & Hauser, M. D. (2006). The role of conscious
reasoning and intuitions in moral judgment: testing three principles of harm.
Psychological Science, 17 (12): 1082–1089.

—— (in preparation). Patterns of moral judgment derive from non‐moral
psychological representations.

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error. Boston, MA: Norton.

Darley, J. M., & Shultz, T. R. (1990). Moral rules—their content and acquisition.
Annual Review of Psychology, 41: 525–556.

Fischer, J. M., & Ravizza, M. (1992). Ethics: Problems and Principles. New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Foot, P. (1967). The problem of abortion and the doctrine of double effect. Oxford
Review, 5: 5–15.

Gilligan, C. (1982/1993). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Greene, J. D. (2003). From neural ‘is’ to moral ‘ought’: what are the moral
implications of neuroscientific moral psychology? Nature Reviews Neuroscience,
4: 847–850.

—— (2007). The secret joke of Kant’s soul. In W. Sinnott‐Armstrong (ed.), Moral
Psychology (Vol. 3). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 35–117.

Greene, J. D., & Haidt, J. (2002). How (and where) does moral judgment work?
Trends in Cognitive Science, 6: 517–523.

Greene, J. D., Cushman, F. A., Stewart, L. E., Lowenberg, K., Nystrom, L. E., &
Cohen, J. D. (2009). Pushing moral buttons: The interaction between personal
force and intention in moral judgment. Cognition, 111 (3): 364–371.

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 23 of 26

Greene, J. D., Morelli, S. A., Lowenberg, K., Nystrom, L. E., & Cohen, J. D.
(2008). Cognitive load selectively interferes with utilitarian moral judgment.
Cognition, 107: 1144–1154.

Greene, J. D., Nystrom, L. E., Engell, A. D., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2004).
The neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment. Neuron,
44: 389–400.

Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D.
(2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment.
Science, 293: 2105–2108. (p.70)

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist
approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108: 814–834.

—— (2007). The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science, 316 (5827): 998–
1002.

Haidt, J., & Hersh, M. (2001). Sexual morality. The cultures and emotions of
conservatives and liberals. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 31: 191–221.

Hamlin, K., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2007). Social evaluation by preverbal infants.
Nature, 450: 557–559.

Hauser, M. D. (2006). Moral Minds: How Nature Designed a Universal Sense of
Right and Wrong. New York: HarperCollins.

Hauser, M. D., Cushman, F. A., Young, L., Jin, R., & Mikhail, J. M. (2007). A
dissociation between moral judgment and justification. Mind & Language, 22 (1):
1–21.

Huebner, B., Dwyer, S., & Hauser, M. (2008). The role of emotion in moral
psychology. Trends in Cognitive Science, 13 (1): 1–6.

Hume, D. (1739/1978). A Treatise of Human Nature. In L. Selby‐Bigge and P. H.
Nidditch (eds.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Kamm, F. M. (1998). Morality, Mortality: Death and Whom to Save from it. New
York: Oxford University Press.

—— (2006). Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Kant, I. (1785/1959). Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. New York:
Macmillan.

—— (1785/1983). On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic
Concerns. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 24 of 26

Knutson, B., Taylor, J., Kaufman, M., Peterson, R., & Glover, G. (2005).
Distributed neural representation of expected value. Journal of Neuroscience, 25
(19): 4806–4812.

Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F. A., Hauser, M. D., et
al. (2007). Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral
judgments. Nature, 446: 908–911.

Kohlberg, L. (1969). Stage and sequence: The cognitive‐developmental approach
to socialization. In D. A. Goslin (ed.), Handbook of Socialization Theory and
Research. New York: Academic Press, 151–235.

LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Lombrozo, T. (2008). The role of moral commitments in moral judgment.
Cognitive Science, 33: 273–286

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic
Books.

Macmillan, M. (2000). An Odd Kind of Fame. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mendez, M. F., Anderson, E., & Shapria, J. S. (2005). An investigation of moral
judgment in frontotemporal dementia. Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, 18
(4): 193–197.

Mikhail, J. M. (2000). Rawls’ linguistic analogy: A study of the “generative
grammar” model of moral theory described by John Rawls in A theory of justice.
Unpublished PhD, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. (p.71)

—— (2007). Universal moral grammar: Theory, evidence, and the future. Trends
in Cognitive Science, 11 (4): 143–152.

Miller, E. K., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cotex
function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24: 167–202.

Phelps, E. A., O’Connor, K. J., Cunningham, W. A., Funayama, E. S., Gatenby, J. C.,
Gore, J. C., et al. (2000). Performance on indirect measures of race evaluation
predicts amygdala activation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12 (5): 729–
738.

Piaget, J. (1965/1932). The Moral Judgment of the Child. New York: Free Press.

Pizarro, D. A., Uhlmann, E., & Bloom, P. (2003). Causal deviance and the
attribution of moral responsibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
39: 653–660.

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 25 of 26

Schaich Borg, J., Hynes, C., Van Horn, J., Grafton, S. T., & Sinnott‐Armstrong, W.
(2006). Consequences, action, and intention as factors in moral judgments: An
fMRI investigation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18 (5): 803–837.

Schnall, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G. L., & Jordan, A. H. (2008). Disgust as embodied
moral judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34: 1096–1109.

Schweder, D., & Haidt, J. (1993). The future of moral psychology: truth, intuition,
and the pluralist way. Psychological Science, 4: 360–365.

Sinnott‐Armstrong, W. (2008). Abstract + Concrete = Paradox. In S. Nichols & J.
Knobe (eds.), Experimental Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 209–
230.

Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of
Experimental Psychology, 12: 643–662.

Tetlock, P., Kristel, O., Elson, S., Green, M., & Lerner, J. (2000). The psychology
of the unthinkable. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (5): 853–870.

Thomson, J. J. (1985). The trolley problem. The Yale Law Journal, 279: 1395–
1415.

Turiel, E. (1983). The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and
Convention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—— (2005). Thoughts, emotions, and social interactional processes in moral
development. In M. Killen and J. Smetana (eds.), Handbook of Moral
Development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1–36.

Valdesolo, P., & DeSteno, D. (2006). Manipulations of Emotional Context Shape
Moral Judgment. Psychological Science, 17 (6): 476–477.

Waldman, M. R., & Dieterich, J. H. (2007). Throwing a bomb on a person versus
throwing a person on a bomb: intervention myopia in moral intuitions.
Psychological Science, 18 (3): 247–253.

Wheatley, T., & Haidt, J. (2005). Hypnotic disgust makes moral judgments more
severe. Psychological Science, 16 (10): 780–784.

Notes:

(1) By contrasting intuitive versus “rational” processes of moral judgment we
aim to capture the common social psychological distinction between automatic
(rapid, effortless, involuntary) and controlled (slow, effortful, voluntary)
processes. Our purpose in choosing the term “rational” is not to imply the
normative optimality of a particular decision, but rather to imply the use of
deliberative reasoning in reaching that decision.

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Page 26 of 26

(2) For more on the somewhat artificial, but undeniably useful distinction
between affect and cognition, see Greene (2007).

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-3#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-183

Multi‐system Moral Psychology

John M. Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Fiery Cushman
Liane Young
Joshua D. Greene
Abstract and Keywords
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
1. A Dual‐Process Model of Moral Judgment
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
2. Intuition and Affect: A Common System?
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
3. Reasoning from Deontological Principles
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
4. The Pervasive Role of Affect
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
5. Conclusion
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Acknowledgments
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Multi‐system Moral Psychology
Notes:
Multi‐system Moral Psychology

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 1 of 24

The Moral Psychology Handbook
John M. Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group

Print publication date: 2010
Print ISBN-13: 9780199582143
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Erica Roedder
Gilbert Harman (Contributor Webpage)

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter describes various issues suggested by the analogy between
morality and linguistics. The first part discusses what might be involved in a
generative “moral grammar”. The second part discusses what might be involved
in a universal moral grammar that parallels universal linguistic grammar.

Keywords: acquisition, animal morality, categorization, constraints, core language, core morality,
generative grammar, moral grammar, recursive embedding, universal grammar

Analogies are often theoretically useful. Important principles of electricity are
suggested by an analogy between water current flowing through a pipe and
electrical current “flowing” through a wire. A basic theory of sound is suggested
by an analogy between waves caused by a stone being dropped into a still lake
and “sound waves” caused by a disturbance in air. At the very least, analogies
suggest questions and shape the direction of research; at most, analogies may
be crucial to explaining and understanding natural phenomena (Holyoak &
Thagard, 1995). Of course, principles suggested by such analogies need to be
confirmed by relevant evidence. Even where analogies are fruitful, they are only
partial. Sound waves and electricity are not wet; electricity does not spill out
when a wire is cut.

In this chapter we consider what is suggested by taking seriously an analogy
between language and morality. Recently there have been a number of striking
claims made about such a linguistic analogy—claims that, if true, have profound
implications for longstanding debates in moral philosophy about the innateness

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143

http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=acquisition

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=animal morality

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=categorization

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=constraints

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=core language

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=core morality

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=generative grammar

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=moral grammar

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=recursive embedding

https://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=universal grammar

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-613

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 2 of 24

of moral capacities, and the existence of moral universals. (For example, the title
of Hauser, 2006 is Moral Minds: How Nature Designed a Universal Sense of
Right and Wrong.) We shall indicate what support pursuit of the linguistic
analogy might provide for such claims. Perhaps more importantly, we shall
discuss implications the linguistic analogy might have for the methodology and
structure of moral theory.

1. Moral Grammar

Rules of morality have sometimes been described as analogous to rules of
grammar, with the occasional further suggestion that moral theory may be at
least in some respects analogous to linguistic theory. (p.274)

Adam Smith appeals to this analogy when he says, “The rules of justice may be
compared to the rules of grammar; the rules of the other virtues, to the rules
which critics lay down for the attainment of what is sublime and elegant in
composition” (Smith, 1817: 281).2

More recently, starting in the 1950s (Chomsky, 1957, 1965), a few moral
theorists began to see analogies between moral theory and generative linguistic
theory. According to John Rawls,

[O]ne may think of moral theory at first (and I stress the provisional nature
of this view) as the attempt to describe our moral capacity; or, in the
present case, one may regard a theory of justice as describing our sense of
justice. . . . A conception of justice characterizes our moral sensibility when
the everyday judgments we do make are in accord with its
principles. . . . We do not understand our sense of justice until we know in
some systematic way covering a wide range of cases what these principles
are.

A useful comparison here is with the problem of describing the sense of
grammaticalness that we have for the sentences of our native language
[here Rawls refers to Chomsky, 1965: 3–9]. In this case the aim is to
characterize the ability to recognize well‐formed sentences by formulating
clearly expressed principles which make the same discriminations as the
native speaker. This undertaking is known to require theoretical
constructions that far outrun the ad hoc precepts of our explicit
grammatical knowledge. A similar situation presumably holds in moral
theory. There is no reason to assume that our sense of justice can be
adequately characterized by familiar common sense precepts, or derived
from the more obvious learning principles. A correct account of moral
capacities will certainly involve principles and theoretical constructions
which go much beyond the norms and standards cited in everyday life . . .–
(Rawls, 1971: sec. 9)

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-612

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-646

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-590

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-592

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-641

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 3 of 24

Moreover, the appeal of the linguistic analogy has not been limited to
philosophers in the Western “analytic tradition.” Pope Benedict XVI uses a
similar analogy in his message for the 2007 World Day of Peace:

The transcendent “grammar,” that is to say the body of rules for individual
action and the reciprocal relationships of persons in accordance with
justice and solidarity, is inscribed on human consciences, in which the wise
plan of God is reflected. As I recently had occasion to reaffirm: “we believe
that at the beginning of everything is the eternal word, reason and not
unreason.” Peace is thus also a task demanding of everyone a personal
response consistent with God’s plan. The criterion inspiring this response
can only be respect for the “grammar” written on human hearts by the
divine creator.–(Benedict, 2006)3

The authors above are explicitly concerned with analogies between principles of
grammar and principles of justice. In addition, other authors invoke an analogy
between rules of grammar and more general moral principles. (p.275)

For instance, three years before Rawls (1971), Nozick (1968) offered an account
of “moral complications and moral structures” in general, not limited to
principles of justice. Nozick (1997: 4–5) reports that one “model [for the 1968
paper] was Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, and I meant ‘Moral
Complications’ to begin to uncover the structure underlying our moral
judgments.” Nozick (1968) mentions that “one needs a distinction similar to that
which linguists make between linguistic competence and linguistic
performance,” referring to Chomsky (1965), a distinction we discuss below.

As another example, Kamm (2007) describes the methodology she uses in that
book and in Kamm (1992, 1993, 1996) as follows:

[P]eople who have responses to cases are a natural source of data from
which we can isolate the reasons and principles underlying their
responses. The idea [is] that the responses come from and reveal some
underlying psychologically real structure, a structure that was always
(unconsciously) part of the thought processes of some people. Such people
embody the reasoning and principles (which may be thought of as an
internal program) that generates these responses. . . . (Unlike the deep
structure of the grammar of a language, at least one level of the deep
structure of moral intuitions about cases seems to be accessible upon
reflection by those who have intuitive judgements . . . ) If the same “deep
structure” is present in all persons—and there is growing psychological
evidence that this is true (as in the work of Professor Marc Hauser)—this
would be another reason why considering the intuitive judgements of one
person would be sufficient, for each person would give the same
response.–(Kamm, 2007: 8)

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-583

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-641

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-636

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-637

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-636

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-592

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-619

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-616

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-617

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-618

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-619

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 4 of 24

We return below to the issue whether the same moral deep structure is present in all
persons. At the moment we are content to point to Kamm’s acceptance of an analogy
between the grammar of a language and an individual’s moral principles.
Finally, Mikhail (2000, 2007) provides an account of “universal moral grammar,”
based on legal categories. We eventually return to the idea of a universal moral
grammar. But we want first to consider what proposals about “moral grammar”
are suggested by the analogy with the grammar of a language, appealing to
developments in contemporary linguistics starting with Chomsky (1957, 1965).

I‐grammar

The primary object of study of linguistics so conceived is not language in the
ordinary sense in which English, German, Mohawk, and Chinese are languages.
Any ordinary language in this sense has different dialects that blend into one
another in ways that do not correspond to national or geographical (p.276)
boundaries. There is a well‐known saying that “a language (in the ordinary
sense) is a dialect with an army and a navy.” What counts as a dialect of French
rather than Flemish is a social or political issue, not an issue in the science of
language. It may be that any two speakers have at least somewhat different
dialects, with at least somewhat different vocabularies. Chomsky (2000) and
other linguists (e.g. Freidin, 1992; Isac and Reiss, 2008) are concerned with
language as a property of a particular person, assumed to be abstractly
specifiable by an internal grammar, or I‐grammar.

This is one of a number of significant idealizations or abstractions linguistics
makes in the course of arriving at a theoretically useful account of an otherwise
unwieldy phenomenon. Others include the distinction, mentioned below,
between “competence” and “performance” and a more controversial distinction
some linguists make between “core” and other aspects of grammar.

In pursuing possible analogies between linguistics and moral theory, we might
consider whether similar idealizations or abstractions are theoretically useful to
moral theory. Should moral theory be in the first instance concerned with an
individual’s I‐morality—that particular person’s moral standards? This might be
captured by some sort of (possibly unconscious) abstract representation, an I‐
moral‐grammar. I‐morality in this sense would be distinguished from the
principles or conventions of a social group; it would also be distinguished from
the correct moral principles, if there are any.

“Generative” Grammar

A generative grammar of a language (a generative I‐grammar) would fully and
explicitly characterize the relevant linguistic properties of expressions of the
language (Chomsky, 1965; Freidin, 1992). It is very important to recognize that
the word “generative” is here used as a technical term. There is no implication
that the principles of a generative grammar are followed by speakers in
generating (in a more ordinary sense) what they say. To suppose that there is a

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-628

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-629

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-590

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-592

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-594

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-603

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-615

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-592

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-603

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 5 of 24

passive “transformation”—a function that associates the structure underlying an
active sentence like Bill gave Mabel a book with the structure underlying a
passive sentence like Mabel was given a book by Bill—is not necessarily to
suppose that a speaker first forms the active structure and then, by some causal
process, converts it into the passive structure.

A generative grammar of a particular person’s language would specify the
linguistic structure of expressions of that language, indicating the nouns, verbs,
adjectives, prepositions, etc., as well as the phrases of which these are the
“heads,” as when a noun is the head of a noun phrase and a preposition the head
of a prepositional phrase. A generative grammar might specify important (p.
277) aspects of the meanings of expressions, depending on how the expressions
are structured and possibly indicating the scope of quantifiers and other such
operators. The grammar would also specify aspects of the pronunciation of
expressions (for spoken languages—something similar would be true of the
grammar of a sign language). So, a generative grammar would relate
pronunciations of expressions to possible interpretations, in this way indicating
certain sound–meaning (phonetic–semantic) relationships.

An analogous moral grammar would attempt explicitly to characterize an
individual’s moral standards. Just as a grammar specifies the structure of a well‐
formed linguistic sentence by using a specialized linguistic vocabulary, an I‐
moral grammar might specify the structure of impermissible actions, using a
specialized moral vocabulary.4 That is, just as English grammar might specify
how a noun phrase and verb phrase combine to form a grammatical sentence, an
I‐moral grammar might specify that that certain actions, in virtue of their
structure, are impermissible, e.g. intentional harm directed towards an innocent
person without reason. In this way, an I‐moral grammar might specify certain
action‐assessment relationships—or, indeed, character‐assessment or situation‐
assessment relationships. Thus the rules of an I‐moral‐ grammar would generate
a set of impermissible actions, just as a linguistic grammar generates a set of
grammatical sentences. An I‐moral grammar would have to specify the relevant
structures of the objects of moral assessment (e.g. acts, character traits,
situations, etc.) using a specialized moral vocabulary, perhaps including terms
like ought, obligation, duty, justice, fairness, right, wrong, responsibility, excuse,
justification, etc.

Relatedly, principles of generative grammar specify how the structure of a
sentence might be transformed, grammatically, into another. For instance, the
structure underlying a declarative sentence The book is on the chair is
transformable into the structure underlying a question, What is on the chair?
Characterized abstractly, such principles allow the theoretician to move from the
known grammaticality of one sentence structure to the grammaticality of a
transformed sentence structure. Similarly, there might be found certain

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 6 of 24

transformative principles within I‐morality; we suggest an example of such a
principle below.

Given such a picture, it may be tempting to assume certain causal structures.
However, this would be a mistake. For instance, let us assume that the moral
grammar specifies action‐assessment relationships. If this is right, one might (p.
278) assume the following causal structure: first, some non‐moral brain system
assigns a structural description of the action. Second, the structural description
is provided as input to the moral system, and the moral system generates a
moral assessment. As in the linguistic case, however, there is no guarantee that
the brain’s causal pathway parallels that of the grammatical principles. While
the existence of such a moral grammar guarantees that there is, in a
mathematical sense, a mapping of action to assessments, the brain’s method of
processing information may be quite different. (Cf. Marr’s [1982] distinction
between computational and algorithmic descriptions of mental processing.)

This point about the non‐causal character of moral grammars is important for at
least two reasons, which we discuss immediately below. The first reason is a
theoretical point about recursive embedding; the second reason draws on some
recent empirical studies.

Recursive Embedding

The rules of a generative grammar specify recursive embedding of grammatical
structures. For example, a larger sentence can contain a smaller sentence within
it, which can contain another even smaller sentence, and so on without limit:

Jack told Betty that Sally believes that Albert no longer thinks Arnold
wants to leave Mabel.

Similarly, the rules of grammar imply that a noun phrase can contain a noun phrase
within it, which can contain another noun phrase, and so on:

the man next to the girl near the door with the broken hinge.

So, a particular generative grammar might imply rules that could be represented as
follows:

S => NP + (V + S)
NP => Art + N + (P + NP)

This point about linguistic recursive embedding is a point about grammatical
rules. It is not just that a sentence can occur within a larger sentence or a noun
phrase within a larger noun phrase. This sort of “recursion” is common enough:
many artifacts can contain smaller things of the same kind, e.g. a large raft can
be made of smaller rafts which have been tied together.5 Thus there is a sense in
which recursion is not particularly uncommon. However, there is a (p.279)
substantial difference between recursion found in linguistic grammars and this
sort of everyday “recursion.” In the case of linguistics, recursion is an explicit

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-627

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 7 of 24

feature of rules that have proved theoretically useful. In contrast, recursion is
not explicitly implied by theoretically fruitful rules either for artifacts in general,
or for rafts in particular. Were we to construct rules to answer the question,
“What objects count as rafts?” the answer would presumably focus on how the
object functions (it bears weight as it floats on water), its similarity to certain
prototypes, etc. without making use of recursion.

The analogy between morality and language suggests that a “generative moral
grammar” might also imply recursive embedding. It might, for example, imply
that it is wrong to encourage someone to do something that is wrong, which is
recursive in the sense that it implies that it is wrong to encourage someone to
encourage someone to do something that is wrong, etc. Similarly, a generative
moral grammar might imply that it is wrong to promise to do something that it
would be wrong to do.6

There are two points to be made about recursive embedding. First, true
recursion—as opposed to the natural embedding that occurs with rafts—is an
important feature of grammatical rules. This recursive character allows a
relatively small number of rules to generate a potentially infinite set of
sentences. Recursion is an important, and perhaps distinctive, feature of
generative grammars; thus if moral judgments can only be modeled using a
recursive theory, that is a point in favor of the linguistic analogy.

Second, recursive embedding emphasizes that, in a generative I‐moral grammar,
the normative evaluation assigned to structural descriptions can depend on
normative evaluations embedded within those structural descriptions. The point
does not yet by itself rule out a processing model that first constructs
nonnormative action and situation descriptions in terms of causes and effects,
ends and means, distinguishing what is done intentionally or not, etc., and then,
when that is done, adds normative labels to various parts of the structure,
perhaps starting with smaller parts, and then labeling larger parts to handle the
recursive aspects of the I‐moral grammar. But such a processing model faces the
further worry that seemingly nonnormative aspects of relevant descriptive
structure themselves seem to depend on normative considerations.

Structural Dependence on Normative Assessments

There is considerable evidence (summarized in Knobe, 2008) that whether
people accept certain seemingly descriptive claims can depend on whether (p.
280) they accept certain normative claims about side effects of actions. For
example, suppose Tom increases his profits by doing something that, as a side
effect, either (a) harms or (b) helps the environment, where Tom does not care
either way about the effect on the environment. People who think that it is good
to help the environment and bad to harm it tend to say (a) that in so acting Tom
intentionally harmed the environment but will tend not to say (b) that in so

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-622

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 8 of 24

acting Tom intentionally helped the environment (Knobe, 2003; for further
discussion, see Knobe & Doris, Chapter 10 in this volume).

They also tend to say (a) that Tom increased profits by harming the environment
but tend not to say (b) that he increased profits by helping the environment.
They tend to say (a) that Tom harmed the environment in order to increase
profits but tend not to say (b) that he helped the environment in order to
increase profits (Knobe, 2007). And they are more inclined to say (a) that the
harming of the environment was the same thing as the implementing of the
policy than they are to say (b) that the helping of the environment was the same
thing as the implementing of the policy (Ulatowski, 2008).

Furthermore, sometimes whether one will judge that a particular person caused
a certain result can depend on whether one judges that the person is morally at
fault for doing what he or she did (Mackie, 1955; Dray, 1957; Alicke, 1992;
Thomson, 2003). For example, whether one judges that Tom’s omitting to water
the plants caused their death can depend in part on whether one thinks Tom was
obligated to water the plants.

So, it seems that relevant structural descriptions of the situations or actions
must themselves sometimes involve normative assessments.

Categorization versus Grammar

Many moral judgments offer a moral categorization of an action, person, or
situation. So, instead of drawing an analogy between moral theory and
generative grammar, some theorists (e.g. Stich, 1993) propose instead to draw
an analogy between moral theory and psychological theories of categorization,
especially theories in which an instance to be categorized is compared with a
number of standard prototypes (or exemplars) of various categories and is then
assigned the category of the prototype to which it is most similar (theories of
this sort are described in section 6 in Harman, Mason, & Sinnott‐Armstrong,
Chapter 6, this volume).

We can offer two preliminary comments on the categorization proposal: first, it
is not clear that a categorization approach competes with a moral grammar
approach. The two approaches may be apples and oranges. Categorization is a
mental process, i.e. the term refers to a form of cognitive processing. In
contrast, the proposal that there is a mental grammar is not, first and foremost,
(p.281) about mental processes at all. Rather, it is a proposal about the
structures of the contents of moral assessments, just as a linguistic grammar is a
proposal about the structures of linguistic expressions. It might both be true that
there is a moral grammar, and that we make moral judgments by applying
certain prototypes. This might be the case if, for instance, all of a person’s
“murder” prototypes shared certain basic features, e.g. intentional harm of an
innocent.

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-620

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-11#

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-621

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-651

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-626

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-597

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-582

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-650

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-647

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-7#

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 9 of 24

Second, modern theories of concepts and categorization often emphasize the
multi‐faceted nature of concepts: they are not just prototypes; they also
embedded in theories (Murphy, 2004; Machery, 2009). Prototypes and exemplars
alone seem insufficient to explain certain features of categorization. If moral
concepts also have a theoretical component, as seems likely to be demonstrated
empirically, then that would leave the door open to a moral grammar approach
as part of a theory of mental processing.

“Competence–Performance Distinction”

In developing a theory of linguistic grammar, Chomsky (1965) distinguishes
between “competence” and “performance”—where these are technical terms
that are not used in their ordinary senses. By “competence” Chomsky means an
individual’s internalized grammar. He uses the term “performance” to refer to all
other factors that may affect the use of language. In Chomsky’s framework, an
individual’s linguistic intuitions may or may not reflect the individual’s
competence, in Chomsky’s sense.

For example, compare the following sentences:

This is the cheese that the mouse that the cat that the dog that the
man owns bothered chased ate.
This is the man that owns the dog that bothered the cat that chased
the mouse that ate the cheese.

Intuitively, the first sentence is hard to understand—deviant in some way—while the
second is much easier to understand. The relative deviance of the first sentence
appears to be the result of “center embedding.” When this center embedding is made
explicit, it can appear that the semantic content of the two sentences is similar:

This is the cheese that the mouse ate.
This is the cheese that the mouse that the cat chased ate.
This is the cheese that the mouse that the cat [that the dog bothered]
chased ate.
This is the cheese that the mouse that the cat [that the dog (that the
man owns)] bothered chased ate. (p.282)

The intuitive deviance of the first sentence may fail to reflect something about one’s
linguistic competence in the sense of an internalized grammar. It may instead be due,
for example, to limitations of one’s parsing strategies, in which case it may be purely
the result of performance limitations. The sentence may fit one’s I‐grammar, but
performance factors affect one’s ability to comprehend the sentence as fully
grammatical.
The linguistic analogy suggests that it might be fruitful to suppose that there is a
distinction between moral competence and performance in something like
Chomsky’s technical sense of the terms “competence” and “performance.” As in
the linguistic case, we might suppose that other considerations beyond one’s
assumed I‐morality affect moral intuitions. In addition to memory and other

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-634

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-625

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-592

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 10 of 24

processing limitations, moral intuitions might be affected by “heuristics and
biases” (Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002; see Sinnott‐Armstrong et al.,
Chapter 7 in this volume; also Sunstein, 2004; Horowitz, 1998; Doris & Stich,
2005; Sinnott‐Armstrong, 2008), prejudices, emotional responses, self‐interest,
etc.7 For example, utilitarians such as Greene (2008) have argued that intuitions
that appear to conflict with utilitarianism are due to morally irrelevant emotional
factors (see also Baron, 1993).

Of course, in most cases, performance factors are not distorting; they are an
integral part of proper functioning. One needs an internal parsing strategy in
order to comprehend what others say, so that strategy is not necessarily
distorting, as it may be in the above example. Similarly, pace Greene, emotions
like disgust may play an important role in getting one to appreciate the moral
character of a situation—even though, in other cases, they can lead one astray.
Someone with full moral “competence” (that is, with an internalized moral
grammar) who is unable to experience relevant emotions may have trouble with
moral evaluations in the same way that someone with full linguistic
“competence” but with a damaged parser might be unable to understand other
speakers. Here we have in mind work on so‐called “psychopaths” or other brain‐
damaged patients who do not exhibit normal emotive responses. Research has
shown that such individuals make abnormal moral judgments (Blair, 1995, 1997;
Koenigs et al., 2007). Some of these patients might possess moral
“competence” (an internalized moral grammar) but lack certain critical
performance capabilities. Of course, whether or not this is a useful way to
understand such patients depends on future empirical work. We offer this only
as an example of how the distinction between performance and competence
might be put into play. (p.283)

More generally, our point is that in moral theory, as in linguistics, we can
consider whether it makes sense to postulate a distinction between an
individual’s internal moral grammar or moral “competence” in contrast with
various other factors that determine the person’s intuitions and actions. For
linguistics, the corresponding assumption has been theoretically fruitful and
illuminating. With respect to moral theory, the assumption amounts to assuming
that there is a distinctive moral competence or I‐moral‐grammar. A contrary
view is that one’s morality is determined entirely by performance factors, so that
for example one’s emotional responses are actually constitutive of one’s moral
view rather than merely enabling or distorting performance factors.

It may be that a distinction between competence and performance applies only
to certain parts of morality and not other parts. We come back to this possibility
below in considering whether to distinguish aspects of morality we share with
other animals and aspects that are distinctively human.

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-605

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-8#

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-648

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-614

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-596

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-645

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-609

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-585

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-586

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-587

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-623

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 11 of 24

Summary of Suggested Issues about Generative Moral Grammar

We have so far discussed one idea from linguistics that might be relevant to the
theory of morality, namely, generative grammar—an explicit specification of the
grammatical properties of expressions of a language. The conception of
grammar as generative or explicit in this way has proved quite productive for
the study of language and some moral theorists try to see an analogous
conception of moral grammar that might be productive for the study of morality.

Among the issues such an analogy raises for moral theory are (1) whether the
useful unit of analysis for moral theory is an individual’s I‐grammar, in contrast,
for example, with the moral conventions of a group; (2) whether and how such a
moral grammar might associate structural descriptions of actions, situations,
etc. with normative assessments; (3) whether and how the rules of such a moral
grammar might involve recursive embedding of normative assessments; and (4)
whether it is useful to distinguish moral “competence” from moral
“performance,” using these terms in the technical senses employed in linguistic
theory.

2. Universal Morality

We now turn to a related issue about linguistic and moral universals. Features of
language are universal if they occur in all natural human languages that
children can acquire as first languages. Universal grammar is concerned in part
(p.284) with such linguistic universals and also with limits on ways in which
natural human languages can differ. To what extent might it be fruitful to
develop an analogous universal moral theory which would seek to describe
common features of any moralities children can acquire as first moralities—
along with an account of how moralities can differ?

Some people believe that various familiar moral principles are universal in the
sense that they are cross‐culturally accepted: “You should not steal.” “It is wrong
to murder or harm others.” “You should not tell lies.” “You should do your part in
useful group activities.” “You should help those worse off than yourself.” “You
should not treat others as you would not want to be treated.” “You should do
unto others what you would want them to do unto you.”

Instead of directly discussing whether such familiar principles are universally
accepted, we shall focus on two other sorts of universality suggested by the
analogy with linguistics. (That is, we shall not discuss whether everyone, cross‐
culturally, believes that it is wrong to murder; instead, we shall consider
universality of the sort that linguists find.) The first sort of universality is the
existence of universal constraints on possible I‐moral grammars; the second is
the notion of universal parameters (with local variance in parameter settings).

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 12 of 24

Constraints on Linguistic Grammars

Universal linguistic grammar is concerned in part with constraints on the rules
of particular I‐grammars. Such grammars might contain two sorts of rules—
phrase structure rules for forming phrases out of their parts and transformations
or movement rules for reorganizing these parts (Chomsky, 1957, 1965; Freidin,
1992; van Riemsdijk & Williams, 1986).

For example, an adjective like green can combine or “merge” with a noun like
apple to form a noun phrase green apple; a determiner like a or the can merge
with a noun phrase to form a determiner phrase like a green apple; a preposition
like from can merge with a determiner phrase to form a prepositional phrase like
from a green apple; and so on. These are instances of phrase structure rules.
Universal grammar places constraints on the phrase structure rules for a given
I‐language. One such constraint implies that, if there are prepositions and so
prepositional phrases in which prepositions appear before their objects, then the
same must be true (p.285) of verb phrases and noun phrases: verbs must
appear before their objects and nouns before their objects. On the other hand, if
instead of prepositions there are postpositions and postpositional phrases in
which postpositions appear after their objects, then the same must be true of
verb phrases and noun phrases: verbs and nouns must appear after their
objects.

Transformations allow items in phrase structures to be rearranged. For example,
a transformation (wh‐movement) might allow the derivation of the structure
underlying a relative clause like (2) from something like the structure underlying
(1).

(1) Bob gave which to Bill.
(2) which Bob gave to Bill.

A different transformation (topicalization) might allow the derivation of the structure
underlying (4) from something like the structure underlying (3).

(3) Bob gave a book to Bill.
(4) A book, Bob gave to Bill.

Chomsky (1964) observed that there must be constraints of various sorts on such
transformations. He proposed an “A over A” constraint that would rule out moving an
item of a given type A from a larger phrase of type A. That turned out to be overly
simple and Ross (1967) proposed to replace it with a number of more specific “island
constraints,” where “islands” are structures that items cannot be moved out of. Ross’s
constraints include a “coordinate structure constraint” and a “complex NP constraint,”
among others; here we describe only his coordinate structure constraint.
Coordinate structures are special cases of the A over A principle in which an
item of type A immediately contains two or more coordinate items of type A, as in
the noun phrase: a man, a woman, and a child; or the verb phrase: kissed Jack or

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-590

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-592

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-603

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-642

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-591

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-643

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 13 of 24

hugged Harry. These larger phrases themselves immediately contain smaller
coordinate phrases of the same type.

Ross’s coordinate structure constraint prevents transformations from moving
any coordinate item out of a coordinate structure and also prevents
transformations from moving anything contained in a coordinate item out of that
item. Suppose, for example, there is a transformation of topicalization that starts
with (5) and moves a book to the front to yield (6):

(5) Bob gave a book to Bill.
(6) A book, Bob gave to Bill.

Ross’s constraint would prevent topicalization from moving a book from a position in a
coordinate structure like (7) to yield (8).

(7) Bob gave a record and a book to Bill.
(8) * A book, Bob gave a record and to Bill.

(p.286)
Observe that it is unclear how a coordinate structure constraint of this sort
could be learned by children either from explicit instruction or by trial and error.
No one had heard about this constraint before Ross (1967), so no one could have
told children about it before that time. Furthermore, children never seem to
make errors that consist in violating the constraint, so they don’t seem to
acquire it by trial‐and‐error learning.

One way to explain the above facts about acquisition is to postulate that children
are predisposed towards certain linguistic constraints. If there is such a
predisposition, however, it would be present in all normally developing children.

Of course, it is possible to invent and use an artificial language that is not
subject to the constraint. But such a language might not be easily acquired as a
first language by children. We might expect them to acquire a variant that is
subject to the constraint. Furthermore, we might expect that children not
exposed to human language (e.g. because they were deaf) who developed a
language among themselves (presumably a sign language) would develop a
language that was subject to the constraint. There is evidence that this
expectation is correct. Padden (1988) claims that coordinate clauses in American
Sign Language (ASL) adhere to the coordinate structure constraint.

Constraints on Moralities?

A number of moral philosophers (Foot, 1978; Quinn, 1993) have suggested that
ordinary moral intuitions obey certain non‐obvious rules. For instance, it may be
that moral intuitions reflect some version of the Principle of Double Effect. Here
is one version of that principle:

Double Effect: It is worse knowingly to harm one person X in saving
another Y when the harm to X is intended as part of one’s means to

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-643

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-638

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-602

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-640

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 14 of 24

saving Y as opposed to when the harm to X is merely a foreseen
unintended side‐effect of one’s attempt to save Y.

For another example, Thomson (1978) suggests that some ordinary moral
intuitions might reflect a principle of the following sort:

Deflection: It is better to save a person X by deflecting a harmful
process onto another person Y than by originating a process that
harms Y.

As with Ross’s coordinate structure constraint, these principles are not generally
recognized and it is therefore unlikely that they are explicitly taught to children.
If children do acquire moralities containing such principles, it would seem that
they must be somehow predisposed to do so. If so, we might (p.287) expect
such principles to be found in all moralities that children naturally acquire.8

As in the linguistic case, even if there are such constraints, it may be possible to
construct more or less artificial moral systems not subject to them—utilitarian
moralities, for example. But we might then expect that children of utilitarians
would not easily and naturally acquire their parents’ morality but would acquire
a version subject to those constraints. John Stuart Mill (1859, 1863, 1873) might
be an example. His version of utilitarianism appears to incorporate various
principles that do not fit with the version taught him by his father, James Mill
(1828). In particular, John Stuart Mill’s views about the importance of personal
creativity, self‐development, and personal liberty led him to adopt a distinction
between higher and lower qualities of pleasure that conflicts with the purely
quantitative conception of amount of pleasure accepted by Bentham and James
Mill.

Linguistic Principles and Parameters

We now turn to a discussion of linguistic principles and parameters and possible
analogies for moral theory.

Baker (2001) begins a highly readable account of current linguistic theory with
the story of eleven Navajo Code Talkers. During World War II, Allied forces in
the Pacific were in difficulty because Japanese cryptographers were able to
decode all their messages. The US Marine Corps solved the problem by using
the Code Talkers to transmit and receive military communications in Navajo.
Japanese cryptographers were unable to “decode” these messages.

Baker notes that this illustrates two important points about languages. On the
one hand, Navajo is sufficiently different from English and Japanese that skilled
cryptographers were unable to decode the Navajo messages. On the other hand,
Navajo is sufficiently similar to English that the Code Talkers could immediately
translate messages from English into Navajo and from Navajo back into English.
How can we account for both the similarities and the differences? Indeed, how

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-649

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-631

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-632

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-633

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-630

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-584

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 15 of 24

can we account for the fact that a child exposed to a language when young will
easily acquire that language, when the best cryptographers are unable to make
head or tail of it?

Part of the answer why a child can so easily learn a language may be that the
child is somehow prepared to acquire a language whose syntax is largely
determined by the setting of a small number of parameters—a parameter that
(p.288) indicates whether a sentence must have a subject as in English, or not
as in Italian; a parameter that indicates whether the head of a phrase precedes
its complements, as in English, or follows, as in Japanese; and so on. Baker
suggests that it may be possible to give something like a structured periodical
table of languages, much as there is a structured periodical table of chemical
elements. (Hence his title, The Atoms of Language.)

A child picks up language from its interactions with others; there is no need for
explicit teaching. According to the principles and parameters theory, the child
uses its limited experience to set a relatively small number of parameters and
acquire the “core” syntax of a language. Other “non‐core” aspects of syntax,
perhaps involving stylistic variation, are learned as exceptions.

Universal grammar includes an account of principles and parameters. To repeat
a point mentioned above in connection with universal constraints on rules, it is
possible to devise and use a language that is not in accord with the principles
and parameters of universal grammar, and people can learn to use that
language. But children will not naturally acquire that language in the way they
acquire languages that are in accord with universal grammar.

Another aspect of the principles and parameters universal grammar approach in
linguistics is that a theorist’s conception of the generative grammar of a given
language can be affected by considerations involving other languages and ease
of language acquisition. The task of the child learner is easier to the extent that
as much as possible of grammar is part of universal grammar and so is built into
the child’s innate language faculty. So, for example, instead of detailed rules for
noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, and prepositional or
postpositional phrases, the basic theory of phrase structure might become part
of universal grammar, perhaps with a single phrase structure rule (merge X with
something to form a phrase), so that the grammar of a particular language like
English would be limited to such matters as whether the head of a phrase (noun,
verb, adjective, preposition or postposition) comes before or after its
complement. The grammar of a particular language like English might contain
no special rearrangement or transformational rules; instead there might be a
single rule of universal grammar (move X somewhere) that says something can
be moved anywhere, subject to universal constraints (Chomsky, 1981; van
Riemsdijk & Williams, 1986).

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-593

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-642

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 16 of 24

One possible parameter might be whether or not the grammar allows such
movement or rearrangement. At least one currently existing language appears
not to allow this, the Amazonian Pirahã (Everett, 2005). Bolender (2007) argues
that all or most languages existing more than 40,000 years ago would probably
not have allowed such movement. (p.289)

The linguistic analogy suggests considering whether it is possible to develop a
universal theory of morality involving relevant principles and parameters.

How Moralities Differ: Principles and Parameters?

Moralities differ about abortion and infanticide, about euthanasia, about slavery,
about the moral status of women, about the importance of chastity in women
and in men, about caste systems, about cannibalism, about eating meat, about
how many wives a man can have at the same time, about the relative importance
of equality versus liberty, the individual versus the group, about the extent to
which one is morally required to help others, about duties to those outside one
or another protected group, about the importance of religion (and which religion
is important), about the importance of etiquette (and which standards of
etiquette), about the relative importance of personal virtues, and so on.

What are the prospects of a principles and parameters approach to explaining
these and other moral differences? Perhaps all moralities accept principles of
the form: avoid harm to members of group G, share your resources with
members of group F, etc., where G and F are parameters that vary from one
morality to another. However, Prinz (2008) points out that such parameters
would differ from those envisioned in linguistics by having many possible values,
whereas the parameters in linguistics have a small number of values, typically
two.

Dworkin (1993) argues that all intuitive moralities take human life to have what
he calls a “sacred value” that increases during pregnancy and in childhood,
reaching a maximum at the beginning of adulthood, and slowly declining
thereafter, so that the death of 20‐year‐old person is worse (“more tragic”) than
the death of an infant or someone who has reached old age. However, according
to Dworkin, individual moralities differ concerning whether an early embryo or
fetus has significant sacred value. Dworkin argues that this difference is what
lies behind ordinary (as opposed to theoretical) disagreements about abortion.
Perhaps there are different settings of a “sacred value” parameter. In this case
there might be only two relevant settings, indicating whether there is significant
sacred value in the embryo or fetus immediately after conception.

A somewhat different appeal to parameters can perhaps be found in the work of
certain anthropologists who see a small number of ways of organizing societies,
with differences in which ways organize which aspects. Fiske (1991, 1992)
distinguishes four general types of social organization: communal sharing,

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-599

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-589

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-639

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-598

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-600

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-601

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 17 of 24

authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. Shweder et al. (1997)
distinguish the “big three” of morality: autonomy, community, and divinity. In
these cases, the relevant “parameters” might determine which models fit which
aspects of organization in a given society. (p.290)

However, we shall need to have more explicit generative accounts of a variety of
moralities before being able to think clearly about moral principles and
parameters.

Does Morality have to be Taught?

Acquisition of language does not require explicit instruction. Children pick it up
from the locals even if parents do not know the local language. The linguistic
analogy suggests we consider whether morality is like that.

How does a child acquire an I‐morality? Does the child pick up morality from
others in something like the way in which language is picked up? Does morality
have to be taught? Can it be taught?

Perhaps all normal children pick up the local morality much as they pick up the
local dialect, whether or not they receive explicit instruction in right and wrong.
Children with certain brain defects might have trouble acquiring morality, just as
children with certain other brain defects have trouble acquiring language.

Prinz (2008) suggests that moral conventions can be picked up in the way other
conventions are, with no need for moral universals, principles and parameters,
and other aspects of moral grammar. Similar suggestions were raised as
objections against universal grammar in linguistics in the 1960s (e.g. Harman,
1967, later retracted in Harman, 1973). But today universal grammar is a
central part of contemporary linguistics (Baker, 2001).

Core Morality?

As mentioned above, some linguists distinguish “core” aspects of grammar from
other “peripheral” aspects. In their view, the “core” grammar of an I‐language is
constituted by those aspects of grammar acquired just by setting parameters.
Peripheral aspects of the I‐language are special language‐specific rules and
exceptions that are acquired in other ways. Examples might include irregular
verbs and special “constructions” as in the sentence John sneezed the tissue
across the table, where the normally intransitive verb sneeze is used in a special
way. However, the distinction between core and peripheral aspects of grammar
is controversial, with some linguists (Newmeyer, 2005) treating it as a matter of
degree and others rejecting it altogether (Culicover and Jackendoff, 2005;
Goldberg, 1995).

The linguistic analogy suggests there might be a similar controversy within
moral theory about the usefulness of a distinction between core and peripheral
aspects of morality, where the core aspects are universal or are anyway acquired

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-644

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-639

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-610

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-611

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-584

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-635

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-595

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-607

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 18 of 24

via parameter setting and other aspects are acquired in other ways. For
example, (p.291) it might be that people explicitly accept certain moral
principles on the basis of authority, much as they might accept certain
grammatical principles on the basis of authority. Where some people accept,
purely on the basis of authority, that it is ungrammatical to end an English
sentence with a preposition, others might accept, purely on the basis of
authority, that euthanasia is always wrong even to prevent prolonged terrible
suffering when someone is dying. This is just an example; we do not know
whether a distinction between core and peripheral moral principles will prove to
be theoretically useful in thinking about morality.

Humans and Other Animals

Certain aspects of language are similar to aspects of communication systems in
other animals—the use of certain sounds and gestures, for example. Other
aspects are particular to human language, arguably the existence of recursive
embedding rules of grammar of the sort discussed above. An analogy between
language and morality suggests that it might be useful to consider what aspects
of morality are shared with animals and what aspects are specific to human
moralities.

Recall Fiske’s four models of social relations: communal sharing, authority
ranking, equality ranking, and market pricing. Bolender (2003) notes that the
first three of these models, or something like them, can be found among non‐
human social animals. Furthermore, only two of Fiske’s models, communal
sharing and egalitarian equality matching, seem to have existed in most groups
of hunter‐gatherers, a mode of life “which represents over ninety‐nine percent of
human existence” (Bolender, 2003: 242). Bolender offers “evidence that humans
do not need hierarchy in groups of 150 or less” (245) so that this form of social
relation “was little used before the advent of plowing . . . [which] forced people
to allocate meager resources in large groups” (245). Similarly, there was no
previous need for market pricing.

Some questions arise here. Are the moralities of humans who use only these two
models (communal sharing and egalitarian equality matching) significantly
different from the moralities of social animals who use these models? Do such
humans have moralities with anything like the recursive properties mentioned
above, so that they accept such principles as that it is wrong to encourage
someone to do something that it is wrong to do? (Do non‐human animals accept
such principles?)

One way to test speculation in this area might be to look at the morality of the
Pirahã mentioned above, a small group of people with limited contact with
others until recently. The Pirahã have a very limited sense of absent (p.292)
items; their language does not appear to use any sort of quantification or other
constructions that involve variable binding operators (Everett, 2005; Bolender,

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-588

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-599

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 19 of 24

2003, 2007). Presumably they cannot even express in their language the
principle that it is wrong to encourage someone to do what is wrong. A Pirahã
infant who was removed from that culture and brought up by adoptive parents in
New Jersey would acquire normal human language, an ability to use
quantification, and similar moral principles to those accepted by others in New
Jersey. On the other hand, nothing similar is true of a non‐human social animal.

3. Conclusion

In this chapter, we have described various issues suggested by the analogy
between morality and linguistics. In the first part of the chapter, we discussed
what might be involved in a generative “moral grammar.” In the second part we
discussed what might be involved in a universal moral grammar that parallels
universal linguistic grammar.

We believe that the issues suggested by such analogies are worth pursuing. In
particular, we think that looking at the developed science of linguistics suggests
new sorts of research that might be useful in thinking about the complicated
structure of morality. First, if moral theory is modeled on linguistics, its primary
focus would be on an individual’s I‐morality. Second, it may be useful to
distinguish performance and competence. Third, as in linguistics, moral theory
may benefit by distinguishing between the principles characterizing a moral
grammar and the algorithms actually used in the mental production of
grammatical sentences. Fourth, the linguistic analogy suggests ways to think
systematically about how moralities differ from each other and whether there
are moral universals. Finally, the analogy frames fruitful questions regarding
innateness of morality, the existence of a core morality, and the comparison of
human and animal morality.

In summary, linguistics has successfully developed into a mature science of
human language. In considering the linguistic analogy, then, we have been
exploring one possible way to develop a mature science of human morality.

References

Bibliography references:

Alicke, M. D. (1992). “Culpable Causation,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 63: 368–378. (p.293)

Benedict XVI, Pope (2006). “The Human Person, the Heart of Peace,” Vatican
City. Available online at .

Baker, M. C. (2001). The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of
Grammar. New York: Basic Books.

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-588

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-589

http://www.catholic.org/international/internationalstory.php?id=22342

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 20 of 24

Baron, J. (1993). “Heuristics and biases in equity judgments: a utilitarian
approach.” In B. A. Mellers and J. Baron (eds.), Psychological Perspectives on
Justice: Theory and Applications. New York: Cambridge University Press, 109–
137.

Blair, Robert James (1995). “A Cognitive Developmental Approach to Morality:
Investigating the Psychopath,” Cognition 57: 1–29.

—— (1997). “Moral Reasoning and the Child with Psychopathic Tendencies,”
Personality and Individual Differences 26: 731–739.

Bolender, J. (2003). “The Genealogy of the Moral Modules,” Minds and Machines
13: 233–255.

—— (2007). “Prehistoric Cognition by Description: A Russellian Approach to the
Upper Paleolithic,” Biology and Philosophy 22: 383–399.

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.

—— (1964). Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The Hague: Mouton.

—— (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

—— (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.

—— (2000). New Horizons in the Study of Language and the Mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Culicover, P. W. & Jackendoff, R. (2005). Simpler Syntax. New York: Oxford
University Press.

Doris, J. M. & Stich, S. P. (2005). “As a Matter of Fact: Empirical Perspectives on
Ethics.” In F. Jackson & M. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary
Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 114–152.

Dray, W. (1957) Laws and Explanation in History. London: Oxford University
Press.

Dworkin, R. (1993). Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia,
and Individual Freedom. New York: Knopf.

Everett, D. (2005). “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,”
Current Anthropology 46: 621–634.

Fiske, A. P. (1991). Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of
Human Relations. New York: Free Press.

—— (1992). “The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified
Theory of Social Relations,” Psychological Review 99: 689–723.

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 21 of 24

Foot, P. (1978). Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; Oxford: Blackwell.

Freidin, R. (1992). Foundations of Generative Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.

Geach, P. T. (1965). “Assertion,” Philosophical Review 69: 449–465.

Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (eds.) (2002). Heuristics and Biases.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gigerenzer, Gerd (2007). Gut Feelings. New York: Viking Penguin. (p.294)

Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to
Argument Structure. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Goldman, A. I. (1970). A Theory of Human Action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐
Hall.

Greene, J. (2008). “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul.” In W. Sinnott‐Armstrong
(ed.), Moral Psychology, Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Disease,
and Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 35–79.

Harman, G. (1967). “Psychological aspects of the theory of syntax,” Journal of
Philosophy 64: 75–87.

—— (1973). Review of Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, Revised Edition, in
Language 49: 453–464.

Hauser, M. (2006). Moral Minds: How Nature Designed a Universal Sense of
Right and Wrong. New York: Ecco Press/HarperCollins.

Holyoak, K. J. & Thagard, P. (1995). Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Horowitz, T. (1998). “Philosophical Intuitions and Psychological Theory.” In M.
DePaul & W. Ramsey (eds.), Rethinking Intuition. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 143–160.

Isac, D. & Reiss, C. (2008). I‐Language: An Introduction to Linguistics as a
Cognitive Science. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kamm, F. (1992). Creation and Abortion. New York: Oxford University Press.

—— (1993). Morality, Mortality, Vol. 1: Death and Who to Save from It. New York:
Oxford University Press.

—— (1996). Morality, Mortality, Vol. 2: Rights, Duties, and Status. New York:
Oxford University Press.

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 22 of 24

—— (2007). Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Knobe, J. (2003). “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language,”
Analysis 63: 190–193.

—— (2007). “Reason Explanation in Folk Psychology.” Midwest Studies in
Philosophy 31: 90–106.

—— (2008). “Action Trees and Moral Judgment.” Unpublished manuscript.
University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.

Koenigs. M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Hauser, M., Cushman, F., &
Damasio, A. (2007). “Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral
judgments.” Nature, 19.

Liberman, M. (2006). “Chomsky and the Pope: Separated at Birth?” Posting on
Language Log, 20 December 2006 at .

Machery, E. (2009). Doing Without Concepts. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mackie, J. L. (1955). “Responsibility and Language.” Australasian Journal of
Philosophy 33: 143–159. (p.295)

Marr, D. (1982). Vision: A Computational Approach. San Francisco, CA:
Freeman.

Mikhail, J. (2000). Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy: A Study of the “Generative
Grammar” Model of Moral Theory Discussed by John Rawls in A Theory of
Justice. PhD dissertation in Philosophy, Cornell University.

—— (2007). “Universal Moral Grammar: Theory, Evidence, and the Future,”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11: 143–152.

Mill, J. (1828). Essays on Government. London: J. Innes.

Mill, J. S. (1859). On Liberty. London: J. W. Parker.

—— (1863). Utilitarianism. London: Parker, Son & Bourn.

—— (1873). Autobiography. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer.

Murphy, Gregory M. (2004). The Big Book of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.

Newmeyer, F. J. (2005). Possible and Probable Languages. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003940.html

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 23 of 24

Nozick, R. (1968). “Moral Complications and Moral Structures,” Natural Law
Forum 13: 1–50.

—— (1997). Socratic Puzzles. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Padden, C. A. (1988). “Grammatical Theory and Signed Languages.” In F.
Newmeyer (ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey (Vol. II). Cambridge & New
York: Cambridge University Press.

Prinz, J. (2008). “Is Morality Innate?” Moral Psychology, Volume 1: The Evolution
of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness, W. Sinnott‐Armstrong (ed.). Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 367–406.

Quinn, W. (1993). Morality and Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

van Riemsdijk, H. & Williams, E. (1986). Introduction to the Theory of Grammar.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ross, J. R. (1967). Constraints on Variables in Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT PhD
Dissertation. (Published as Infinite Syntax, Ablex, 1986.)

Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C., Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). “The ‘Big Three’
of Morality (Autonymy, Community, and Divinity) and the ‘Big Three’
Explanations of Suffering as Well.” In A. Brandt & P. Rozen (eds.), Morality and
Health. New York: Routledge, 119–169.

Sinnott‐Armstrong, W. (2008). “Framing Moral Intuitions.” In W. Sinnott‐
Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 47–76.

Smith, A. (1817). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Philadelphia, PA: Anthony
Finley.

Stich, S. (1993). “Moral Philosophy and Mental Representation.” In M. Hechter,
L. Nadel, & R. Michod (eds.), The Origin of Values. New York: Aldine de Gruyter,
215–228.

Sunstein, C. (2004). “Moral Heuristics and Moral Framing,” Minnesota Law
Review 88:1556. (p.296)

Thomson, J. J. (1978). “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” Monist 59:
204–217.

—— (2003). “Causation: Omissions,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
66: 81–103.

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

Page 24 of 24

Ulatowski, J. (2008). “Action Under a Description.” Unpublished manuscript.
University of Wyoming.

Notes:

(1) We have benefited from comments on an earlier version of this chapter from
members of our moral psychology research group at a workshop in Pittsburgh
November 2007 and more recently from detailed comments from Stephen Stich.

(2) We are indebted here to Richard Holton.

(3) Here we are indebted to Liberman (2006).

(4) Mikhail (2000; see also 2007) suggests that relevant aspects of structure may
be arrived at through using Goldman’s (1970) theory of action and legal
concepts of battery, end, means, side effect, intention, etc. Abstractly
considered, the resulting structures are somewhat similar to the phrase
structures that figure in linguistic theory.

(5) We thank Jesse Prinz for bringing this point to our attention and John Doris
for the specific example.

(6) Such principles are famously problematic for expressivist theories that try to
explain the meaning of wrong simply by saying the word is used to express
disapproval (Geach, 1965).

(7) Of course, there is an ongoing debate whether such “biases” should or
should not be thought of as bad reasoning. See, for instance, Gigerenzer (2007).

(8) The linguistic analogy suggests that this remark is too strong. As we shall
explain, a principles and parameters approach of the sort we are about to
discuss allows for other possibilities.

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-624

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-628

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-629

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-608

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-604

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001/acprof-9780199582143-chapter-9#acprof-9780199582143-bibItem-606

Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1

John M. Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Erica Roedder
Gilbert Harman (Contributor Webpage)
Abstract and Keywords
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
1. Moral Grammar
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
I‐grammar
“Generative” Grammar
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Recursive Embedding
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Structural Dependence on Normative Assessments
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Categorization versus Grammar
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
“Competence–Performance Distinction”
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Summary of Suggested Issues about Generative Moral Grammar
2. Universal Morality
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Constraints on Linguistic Grammars
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Constraints on Moralities?
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Linguistic Principles and Parameters
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
How Moralities Differ: Principles and Parameters?
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Does Morality have to be Taught?
Core Morality?
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Humans and Other Animals
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
3. Conclusion
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Linguistics and Moral Theorys 1
Notes:

What Will You Get?

We provide professional writing services to help you score straight A’s by submitting custom written assignments that mirror your guidelines.

Premium Quality

Get result-oriented writing and never worry about grades anymore. We follow the highest quality standards to make sure that you get perfect assignments.

Experienced Writers

Our writers have experience in dealing with papers of every educational level. You can surely rely on the expertise of our qualified professionals.

On-Time Delivery

Your deadline is our threshold for success and we take it very seriously. We make sure you receive your papers before your predefined time.

24/7 Customer Support

Someone from our customer support team is always here to respond to your questions. So, hit us up if you have got any ambiguity or concern.

Complete Confidentiality

Sit back and relax while we help you out with writing your papers. We have an ultimate policy for keeping your personal and order-related details a secret.

Authentic Sources

We assure you that your document will be thoroughly checked for plagiarism and grammatical errors as we use highly authentic and licit sources.

Moneyback Guarantee

Still reluctant about placing an order? Our 100% Moneyback Guarantee backs you up on rare occasions where you aren’t satisfied with the writing.

Order Tracking

You don’t have to wait for an update for hours; you can track the progress of your order any time you want. We share the status after each step.

Order Now Talk to Us

Areas of Expertise

Although you can leverage our expertise for any writing task, we have a knack for creating flawless papers for the following document types.

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

Areas of Expertise

Although you can leverage our expertise for any writing task, we have a knack for creating flawless papers for the following document types.

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

Trusted Partner of 9650+ Students for Writing

From brainstorming your paper's outline to perfecting its grammar, we perform every step carefully to make your paper worthy of A grade.

Preferred Writer

Hire your preferred writer anytime. Simply specify if you want your preferred expert to write your paper and we’ll make that happen.

Grammar Check Report

Get an elaborate and authentic grammar check report with your work to have the grammar goodness sealed in your document.

One Page Summary

You can purchase this feature if you want our writers to sum up your paper in the form of a concise and well-articulated summary.

Plagiarism Report

You don’t have to worry about plagiarism anymore. Get a plagiarism report to certify the uniqueness of your work.

Free Features $66FREE

Most Qualified Writer $10FREE
Plagiarism Scan Report $10FREE
Unlimited Revisions $08FREE
Paper Formatting $05FREE
Cover Page $05FREE
Referencing & Bibliography $10FREE
Dedicated User Area $08FREE
24/7 Order Tracking $05FREE
Periodic Email Alerts $05FREE

Our Services

Join us for the best experience while seeking writing assistance in your college life. A good grade is all you need to boost up your academic excellence and we are all about it.

On-time Delivery
24/7 Order Tracking
Access to Authentic Sources

Academic Writing

We create perfect papers according to the guidelines.

Professional Editing

We seamlessly edit out errors from your papers.

Thorough Proofreading

We thoroughly read your final draft to identify errors.

Thorough Proofreading

We thoroughly read your final draft to identify errors.

Delegate Your Challenging Writing Tasks to Experienced Professionals

Work with ultimate peace of mind because we ensure that your academic work is our responsibility and your grades are a top concern for us!

Check Out Our Sample Work

Dedication. Quality. Commitment. Punctuality

It May Not Be Much, but It’s Honest Work!

Here is what we have achieved so far. These numbers are evidence that we go the extra mile to make your college journey successful.

0+

Happy Clients

0+

Words Written This Week

0+

Ongoing Orders

0%

Customer Satisfaction Rate

Process as Fine as Brewed Coffee

We have the most intuitive and minimalistic process so that you can easily place an order. Just follow a few steps to unlock success.

Call Us +1 (877) 657-8180 Discuss Order Details Now

See How We Helped 9000+ Students Achieve Success

We Analyze Your Problem and Offer Customized Writing

We understand your guidelines first before delivering any writing service. You can discuss your writing needs and we will have them evaluated by our dedicated team.

Clear elicitation of your requirements.
Customized writing as per your needs.

We Mirror Your Guidelines to Deliver Quality Services

We write your papers in a standardized way. We complete your work in such a way that it turns out to be a perfect description of your guidelines.

Proactive analysis of your writing.
Active communication to understand requirements.

We Handle Your Writing Tasks to Ensure Excellent Grades

We promise you excellent grades and academic excellence that you always longed for. Our writers stay in touch with you via email.

Thorough research and analysis for every order.
Deliverance of reliable writing service to improve your grades.

Place an Order Start Chat Now

Moral Psychology

What Will You Get?

Premium Quality

Experienced Writers

On-Time Delivery

24/7 Customer Support

Complete Confidentiality

Authentic Sources

Moneyback Guarantee

Order Tracking

Areas of Expertise

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

Areas of Expertise

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

Trusted Partner of 9650+ Students for Writing

Preferred Writer

Grammar Check Report

One Page Summary

Plagiarism Report

Free Features $66FREE

Our Services

Academic Writing

Professional Editing

Thorough Proofreading

Thorough Proofreading

Delegate Your Challenging Writing Tasks to Experienced Professionals

Check Out Our Sample Work

It May Not Be Much, but It’s Honest Work!

0+

Happy Clients

0+

Words Written This Week

0+

Ongoing Orders

0%

Customer Satisfaction Rate

Process as Fine as Brewed Coffee

Share Your Requirements

Place Order & Deposit Funds

Release Payment to Your Writer

See How We Helped 9000+ Students Achieve Success

We Analyze Your Problem and Offer Customized Writing

We Mirror Your Guidelines to Deliver Quality Services

We Handle Your Writing Tasks to Ensure Excellent Grades