Customer Reviews

Moral Psychology: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (Bradford Books) (Volume 2)

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This second volume of the series on moral psychology continues the fine quality of the first, but with a different emphasis. This time the contributors discuss what role cognitive science has in morality and ethics, but the most important part of the book is in addressing the question of why there is so much variability in ethical doctrines and social mores throughout the peoples of the world. Such diversity raises doubts on the truth of the assertion of a "universal" ethical foundation that is applicable in all cultures and contexts.

The debate on moral diversity takes the form of convergent versus divergent moral realism and is strongly dependent on the ability of each individual to conceptualize or intuit moral concepts. The "common" or "folk theory" usage of moral concepts may be very different than what "professional" philosophers put forward as ethical theories. Even further, and maybe even more interesting, is the (very plausible) assertion made in a few places in the book that contributions by professional philosophers are even completely unnecessary in dialog on ethics and morality. The arguments put forward for this are very convincing but not final, for the fact that philosophers are generally absent in everyday life when real decision-making is taking place raises considerable doubt on the need for their ideas or presence. They have no "dog in the fight" to quote one contributor to the volume. Other contributors though are not so quick to judgment, presenting the need and efficacy of the thought experiments and "armchair" methods of professional philosophers.

Debates on moral responsibility inevitably lead to questions on causation, and this topic is amply represented in this volume. At least to this reviewer, the attribution of causation to certain events is usually done so quickly and "on-the-fly" without in-depth analysis and usually not deploying sophisticated concepts. Perhaps this attribution is a useful fiction that works in the short term in order to avoid lengthy (and therefore) costly deliberations on human actions. Along these same lines, some contributors to this volume are careful to note the difference between moral and criminal responsibility.

But expediency (or pragmatism, which may be a synonym) in dealing with causation may eventually be repeated so often that it becomes codified as a timeless, objective philosophical system. This may result in what some contributors have labeled as "conversational pragmatics", which results in a much wider view of causation in public use than what is actually believed privately.

Considerations of how "ordinary" people (a class never defined in the book) use moral concepts or "moral vocabulary", results in the assertion by some contributors that a clarification or dissection of these concepts will result in a "convergence" to moral truth. Moral relativism is viewed in this framework as a kind of "statistical outlier" that in the final form (after "convergence") will be insignificant or inconsequential. Other contributors however write that moral systems are so incoherent that any sensible discussion of what is moral will always be frustrated. Attempting to collect empirical evidence on moral vocabularies will only reveal more and more divergence, they argue.

For this reviewer, the in-depth study of this book has resulted in the conviction that cognitive science has much to say about ethics and morality, and the volume forms an excellent prequel to the third and final book of the series, which deals with how the field of neuroscience has affected discussions of morality and ethics. Now labeled as `neuroethics", it will put morality and ethics where it should be: in the synapses and processes of the human brain, and it will be the predominant one in the twenty-first century.