1 The Philosopher in the Theater 1 Fiery Cushman Joshua Greene
نویسندگان
چکیده
The moral principles found in philosophy and embodied in law are often strikingly complex, peculiar, and yet resolutely persistent. For instance, it was long held in Britain that a person could be tried for murder only if the victim died within a year and a day of the crime. And in the United States, if a robber gets into a shootout with a cop and the cop’s bullet hits a bystander, the robber can be charged with murdering the bystander. Naively, one might have assumed that murder could be defined simply as “intentionally causing another person to die.” In fact, the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code requires pages of fine print. Our goal in this chapter is to present a model of the origins of moral principles that explain these properties: complexity, peculiarity, and persistence. According to this model, abstract, general moral principles are constructed from the raw material of intuitive responses to particular cases, as explained in the next section of the chapter. Those intuitive responses depend, in turn, on many psychological capacities that are not specific to morality at all. These include attributions of causation (“John harmed Jane...”) and intent (“... on purpose.”). Consequently, explicit moral principles reflect the complexity of our psychological processes of causal and intentional attribution. That complexity can seem peculiar because our intuitive, automatic attributions of causation and intent are often at odds with our more considered, explicit theories of causation and intention. Despite their complexity and peculiarity, these principles persist because they are supported by compelling emotions that are particularly difficult to revise or reject, an issue considered in the final major section of this chapter.
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