Abstract
Contemporary research in the fields of moral psychology and cognitive philosophy has provided considerable data supporting the claim that there are important similarities in the ways in which different people conceive of morality and produce moral judgments. However, one of the more pressing questions is how to account for the fact that, despite these similarities, moral judgments appear to be highly variable both on a cultural and individual level. This paper addresses this issue by developing a model which is inverted with respect to the one usually embraced by the cognitive literature on morality. Instead of analyzing the problem of moral judgment starting from all the actions that are considered impermissible, this work assumes that people first judge which actions are morally permissible. Permissibility is interpreted in terms of what each subject feels he/she must be free to do. The advantage of this inversion is that it allows us to make a connection between two lines of research that are usually considered unrelated: research on the processes underlying the production of moral judgments and research on the problem of determining how people understand ‘freedom’. Regarding this latter issue, the article focusses specifically on George Lakoff’s cognitive analysis of how humans develop their concepts of freedom. The starting point of Lakoff’s analysis is that different groups and different individuals do not have the same understanding of ‘freedom’, even though everybody shares the common empirical core concept. Lakoff puts forward a model which aims to explain both the common cognitive ground of the various concepts of freedom and how these concepts vary depending on other cognitive elements connected to them. In this work we try to show that Lakoff’s model can provide an explanation of moral judgment that accounts for both the cross-cultural and trans-individual similarities and the cultural, individual and situational differences.
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Notes
- 1.
The existence of an innate moral faculty is hypothesized by e.g. [6], pp. 152–153, [18, 19, 27, 28, 30]; Haidt (see e.g. [13]) also speaks of a moral module, even though he maintains a different view according to which this module works with principles that are entirely derived by the culture the individuals belong to.
- 2.
Haidt defines them as issues relating to harm/care and fairness/reciprocity.
- 3.
For a critical examination of Haidt’s view showing—among other things—that the moral principles identified by Turiel and colleagues have a greater degree of universality compared to the ones identified by Haidt: see [9].
- 4.
Haidt’s view tries to respond to the need for explaining why different cultures rely on different moral principles. However, de facto it binds moral evaluation entirely to cultural rules concluding that a virtuous person is a fully enculturated person ([14, p. 216]). Thus, Haidt bars the possibility of explaining those cases in which an individual moral judgment diverges from the rules expressed by the culture he/she belongs to and therefore fails to account for the individual and situational variability of moral judgment (on this issue see also [9]).
- 5.
M. S. James, Prison Is ‘Living Hell' for Pedophiles, http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90004#.T7o8BMXiYjk,abcNEWS Aug. 26, 2003.
- 6.
It is not clear how this solution can preserve the analogy with Chomsky’s theory in relation to many factors, among others: what are the universal principles beyond this variability; why do people change their ‘moral parameters’ over time, when they should be set once and for all at an early developmental stage; how is it possible that ‘moral parameters’ are subject to exceptions, etc.
- 7.
Immediately after the core concept is formed, we naturally, automatically and unconsciously extend it through metaphorical thought which accomplishes the function of linking “abstract ideas to visceral bodily experience.” [23]. The first extension is obtained by applying a so called “primary metaphor” which is basically universal and gives rise to a larger common core of the concept. (About primary metaphors (see e.g. [25, p. 46.]) The last and most important extension of the concept, as a consequence of which it takes its specific and individually different final abstract form, is carried out by inserting it into a so-called cognitive model: this step will be discussed below. For a more detailed analysis of Lakoff’s theory on the origin and development of the first stages of the concept of freedom see also [11].
- 8.
The word cognitive indicates that they are mental theories: i.e. models internalized by the subject to understand the structure and the interconnections of specific complex phenomena, and to create links between concepts that allow their reciprocal determination. The word idealized suggests that the structures these models consist of “do not exist objectively in nature”, but “are created by human beings” [22, p. 69].
- 9.
This definition of theories and of models resemble in a way that given by Thagard [38], even though for Thagard a model can only be computational, while Lakoff’s model is not meant to be computationally realizable.
- 10.
Lakoff maintains that such a specification is possible in principle and gives important suggestions about how to develop it concretely. However, he doesn’t offer any systematic representation of ICMs, so, the structure of ICMs hasn’t been detailed yet.
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Dellantonio, S., Pastore, L. (2014). Freedom and Moral Judgment A Cognitive Model of Permissibility. In: Magnani, L. (eds) Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 8. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37428-9_19
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