Reddit reviews Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls' Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment

Yeah, I don't think Chomsky has written in depth about this, but obviously he'd be alive to the risk of naturalistic fallacy. He praises this 2011 book, exploring the topic -

https://www.amazon.ca/Elements-Moral-Cognition-Linguistic-Cognitive/dp/0521855780

Right. I agree. I was thinking of "investigation" in a deeper sense of something more rigorous. Obviously we could talk about what's right/wrong right now, without any theory.

Would you agree that these theory-neutral investigations would not be useful if the other person doesn't accept your bedrock framework?

We probably have moral rules built into our brains, but I think that it would be confusing to consider that a "theory," because usually we have in mind something deliberate/conscious/intellectual when we say "theory."

Can we have complicated intellectual models in our minds that are unconscious? Chomsky notes that the vast majority of thought/thinking/decision-making is unconscious, but to say unconscious "theory" is confusing to me because it makes me think that you have like "Darwin's theory of evolution" in your subconscious, which is weird.

Mikhail writes here about rules in our brains, subconscious, but they aren't theory, I don't think:

>Is the science of moral cognition usefully modeled on aspects of Universal Grammar? Are human beings born with an innate "moral grammar" that causes them to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness as they analyze human speech in terms of its grammatical structure? Questions like these have been at the forefront of moral psychology ever since John Mikhail revived them in his influential work on the linguistic analogy and its implications for jurisprudence and moral theory. In this seminal book, Mikhail offers a careful and sustained analysis of the moral grammar hypothesis, showing how some of John Rawls' original ideas about the linguistic analogy, together with famous thought experiments like the trolley problem, can be used to improve our understanding of moral and legal judgment. The book will be of interest to philosophers, cognitive scientists, legal scholars, and other researchers in the interdisciplinary field of moral psychology.

Mikhail tinkers the thought-experiments to show all the sophisticated unconscious judgments that people make that the people themselves can't explain (of course), but that show deep moral principles. I'm not sure how much people differ on these principles.

You and I could "investigate" a Trolly Problem scenario and debate it, without any theory, but what if we disagree on a fundamental value? Then don't I need to construct (and argue for) and underlying theory that supports my value, or else we're at an impasse?

(I was also curious about impasses regarding rationality too, but that's a different topic.)

The book referenced at 4:20 is Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls' Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment by John Mikhail. Seems very interesting.