Mind attribution is for morality

Morality—judging others’ behavior to be right or wrong, as well as behaving in a right or wrong manner towards others—is an essential component of social life. Morality depends critically on our ability to attribute minds to entities that engage in moral actions (towards ourselves and others) and the entities that experience these actions (our own actions and others’). The cognitive capacities for attributing minds to others and considering the specifi c contents of those minds (i.e. mental state reasoning or theory of mind) allow us to understand and interact with individuals and even entire groups of individuals. More specifi cally, mental state reasoning represents a critical cognitive input for behavior explanation, action prediction, and moral evaluation. We deploy our mental state reasoning abilities in order to explain people’s past actions (e.g. Lisa looked for her shoes in the garage because she forgot her mother had moved them to the closet); to predict people’s future behavior (e.g. Mike will tell Barbara his favorite dog joke not knowing that Barbara’s dog has just been hit by a car); and to make moral judgments (e.g. Grace must be a bad person for putting what she thinks is poison into someone else’s coffee). Our capacity to consider other people’s mental states, including their thoughts, their true or false beliefs, and their helpful or harmful intentions, helps us to navigate our social environment. Indeed, as much research has shown, mental state reasoning functions fl exibly across domains, one of which is morality, the focus of this chapter. The novel claim we make in this chapter is that the primary service of mental state reasoning may be for moral cognition and behavior, broadly construed. In particular, the cognitive capacities for mental state reasoning become less relevant when morality is not at stake. We are motivated to understand the actions of relevant moral agents, to predict people’s actions when those actions affect us, directly or indirectly, and to evaluate moral agents as current or future allies or enemies. Computations like these crucially elicit mental state reasoning. In this chapter, we will therefore review the literature on mental state reasoning for moral cognition—both for judging other moral actors, from the position of “judge” on high, and also for fi guring out, as “actors” on the ground, so to speak, who might help us or hurt us, to whom we have moral obligations (for helping or, minimally, not hurting), and whom we ought to trust or avoid (see Figure 6.1).