Reviving Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy: Operative Principles and the Causal Structure of Moral Actions

The thesis we develop in this essay is that all humans are endowed with a moral faculty. The moral faculty enables us to produce moral judgments on the basis of the causes and consequences of actions. As an empirical research program, we follow the framework of modern linguistics. 1 The spirit of the argument dates back at least to the economist Adam Smith (1759/1976) who argued for something akin to a moral grammar, and more recently, to the political philosopher John Rawls (1971). The logic of the argument, however, comes from Noam Chomsky's thinking on language specifically and the nature of knowledge If the nature of moral knowledge is comparable in some way to the nature of linguistic knowledge, as defended recently by Harman (1977), Dwyer (1999, 2004) and Mikhail (2000; in prep.), then what should we expect to find when we look at the anatomy of our moral faculty? Is there a grammar and if so, how can the moral grammarian uncover its structure? Are we aware of our moral grammar, its method of operation