Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity

by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (editor)

For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these three volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in this emerging interdisciplinary field. The contributors to volume 2 discuss recent empirical research that uses the diverse methods of cognitive science to investigate moral judgments, emotions, and actions. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author(s) of the original essay. Topics include moral intuitions as a kind of fast and frugal heuristics, framing effects in moral judgments, an analogy between Chomsky's universal grammar and moral principles, the role of emotions in moral beliefs, moral disagreements, the semantics of moral language, and moral responsibility. Contributors to Volume 2:
Fredrik Bjorklund, James Blair, Paul Bloomfield, Fiery Cushman, Justin D'Arms, John Deigh, John Doris, Julia Driver, Ben Fraser, Gerd Gigerenzer, Michael Gill, Jonathan Haidt, Marc Hauser, Daniel Jacobson, Joshua Knobe, Brian Leiter, Don Loeb, Ron Mallon, Darcia Narvaez, Shaun Nichols, Alexandra Plakias, Jesse Prinz, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Russ Shafer-Landau, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Cass Sunstein, William Tolhurst, Liane Young

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology

606 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 2007

About the author

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (born 1955) is an American philosopher specializing in ethics, epistemology, neuroethics, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of cognitive science. He is a Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.

Reviews

[Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very stimulating read. I love the way these volumes are set up. It's great to finish an article and immediately look at critiques from others in the field.

After finishing this volume, I feel pretty convinced that while cognitive approaches to moral psychology are certainly important, they lack a certain legitimacy without corresponding neuroscientific evidence. The various cognitive models presented here are certainly fascinating, and most are at least partly supported by empirical evidence, but I nevertheless feel that modeling human morality requires a closer look at the actual mental mechanisms involved in making moral decisions.

Though I'm generally a fan of Haidt's work, and his article in this volume is no exception, I'd like to see a neuroscientist demonstrate how various types of bias and emotional reasoning play out in the brain. It's not that Haidt or any of these other writers are necessarily looking in the wrong place, but I'd like to see more interdisciplinary work that supports these theories at multiple levels of organization (biological, psychological, social). Hopefully the third volume in this series will provide some insights into how this can be accomplished.

Favorite articles:

Chapter 3: "Reviving Rawls' Linguistic Analogy"
Chapter 4: "Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions About Moral Psychology"
Chapter 6: "How to Argue About Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism"
Chapter 7: "Moral Incoherentism: How to Pull a Metaphysical Rabbit Out of a Semantic Hat"