Reviving Rawls's linguistic analogy: operative principles and the causal structure of moral actions
In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.) Moral psychology, vol 2: The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity., Cambridge, MA, 2008, pp. 107–143
Abstract
Moral intuitions are often understood by means of analogy to Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar, an analogy suggested by John Rawls. This analogy is developed in this chapter. This research group uses a very large Web-based survey as well as data on brain-damaged patients to adjudicate among four models of moral judgment. They conclude that at least some forms of moral judgment are universal and mediated by unconscious and inaccessible principles. This conclusion supports the analogy to linguistics and suggests that these principles could not have been learned from explicit teaching. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
