Special Workshop Abstract

Recently, there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in the nature and origin of human moral intuitions.  Researchers in a variety of disciplines, ranging from biology and psychology to economics and law, have focused attention on both the adult’s and developing child’s sense of right and wrong.  Perhaps the most interesting and plausible of these approaches attempts to investigate the structure and ontogenetic development of the human moral faculty within the framework of computational models of moral perception and cognition analogous to those models that have proven so successful in the “core” areas of cognitive science, namely, language and vision.  In my paper, I sketch the outline of one such model, the generative grammar model described by Rawls (1971), and I examine the recent attacks on moral philosophy by legal economists like Posner (1999) and Kaplow and Shavell (2002) in light of this model.  I argue that their contention that moral philosophy is intellectually bankrupt because moral principles either are vacuous or can be given a functional explanation that undermines their role in legal policy analysis is itself intellectually suspect.  The problem with the legal economists’ accounts of morality is not that they are too scientific, but that they are not scientific enough.