Special Workshop Abstract

Special Workshop Title: Cognitive Science, Ethics and Law
Author: Susan Dwyer
Paper Title: Moral Innateness, Moral Difference and Moral Parameters
Abstract: There are good reasons to believe that human beings are innately endowed with a moral faculty, where this faculty is to be understood in terms similar to that of the language faculty, as posited by linguists working in the Chomskian tradition.  Building on earlier work ("Different Selves and Moral Parameters" (1993) and "Moral Competence" (1999)), I rehearse the poverty of stimulus considerations that tell in favor of an innate moral endowment, explain how the existence of moral parameters makes sense of observed moral differences while avoiding relativism, and begin to develop a more detailed account of how the moral faculty itself and an individual=s own moral competence might work.

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