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Mikhails Naturalized Moral RationalismAaron Zimmerman (UCSB)

azimmerman@philosophy.ucsb.edu

In a series of recent essays, John Mikhail has argued that humans are innately

endowed with knowledge of moral principles.1 But where traditional moralrationalists from Plato to Kant tried to argue for innate moral knowledge on largelya priori grounds, Mikhail infers its existence as the best explanation of the results ofpsychological experiments he ingeniously designed and conducted with colleagues.Elements of Moral Cognition is the capstone on these efforts. It is an updated versionof the empirically informed dissertation on moral judgment Mikhail defended in2000, in the face of (what I believe to be) deeply misguided skepticism about therelevance of common moral judgment to anything of genuinely philosophicalimport. Indeed, there is ample evidence thatElements will come to be recognized asan important work in the history of moral psychology: a turning point in therapprochement between psychologists and moral philosophers that Mikhail is

helping to engineer. The evidence is a large and growing literature on moralcognition published by both philosophers and psychologists, much of it utilizing theexperimental paradigm Mikhail designed.2

And yet, while I agree with a great deal of what Mikhail asserts in thisimportant work, I do not think Mikhail successfully supports its central thesis. Itherefore have two aims in this brief critique. First, I will argue that Mikhail has notpresented evidence sufficient to support his belief in innate knowledge of moralprinciples. But I will also go on to defend Mikhails views on the role empirical studyshould play in the construction of moral theories. In short, I propose to argueagainst Mikhails doctrinal rationalism but in favor of Mikhails methodologicalnaturalism.

I will begin (1) by describing (in broad terms) the classic rationalist modelof moral judgment that Mikhail endorses and situating it alongside some of itshistorically popular alternatives. I will then examine Mikhails experiments and thesupport they are supposed to provide for this model (2). I proceed (3-5) toexpress a series of doubts over whether the results of Mikhails experiments reallydo favor his account over its competitors. Finally, I turn to Mikhails interpretationof John RawlsA Theory of Justice and the question of what role Rawls assigned to

I would like to thank Jonathan Caravello, Jenessa Strickland, and an anonymous referee fortheJerusalem Review of Legal Studies for helpful comments.

1 See Mikhail (2002, 2007, 2008a, 2008b and 2009).2 See, for example, the contribution to this symposium by Chemla, Egr and Schlenker.Mikhails experiments are part of a methodological shift within moral psychology fromKholbergian interviews that test a subjects developing ability to justify a resolution of a

moral dilemma, to simply recording subjects verdicts about(hypothetical) cases so as totest hypotheses about the sources of their most basic moral judgments. Another influentialexample of this shift is Haidt (2001). (Though these projects can be pursued in tandem, Iagree with Mikhail and Haidt that its best for psychologists to initially focus more attentionon the less sophisticated competence.)

mailto:azimmerman@philosophy.ucsb.edumailto:azimmerman@philosophy.ucsb.edumailto:azimmerman@philosophy.ucsb.edu

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the scientific study of moral cognition in his construction of a contractualist theoryof justice (6-7). I conclude (8) by outlining my reasons for joining both Rawlsand Mikhail in thinking that psychological accounts of moral judgment can andshould play a prominent role in our efforts to answer traditional philosophicalquestions about our moral obligations.

1. Rationalist and Empiricist Models of Moral Knowledge

There are many different rationalist accounts of evaluative and normative judgment.Rationalists have defended accounts of our judgments of value, virtue, injustice andmany other forms of appraisal; and they have defended theories of our judgments ofmotives, acts, laws and several other objects of evaluation. Moreover, the accountsof these judgments offered to us by historically important rationalists disagree withone another on several points. Contemporary theorists should feel free to endorserationalist accounts of certain kinds of appraisal but not others, just as they shouldfeel free to accept certain parts of a given rationalists model of these judgments

while rejecting others. In what follows, I narrow the field by joining Mikhail infocusing on our judgments of the permissibility and impermissibility of actions. Andthough I want to admit in advance that there may be self-described rationalists whoreject aspects of the model I call rationalist, I think its central tenants enjoyenough support among paradigmatic rationalists to justify the label.

Traditional accounts of moral thought depict our verdicts on the deonticstatus of actions as the conclusions of deductive inferences of the modus ponensform. We are supposed to deduce that a token action is impermissible from: (i) ourknowledge that the act has value-neutral properties F1Fn, taken together with (ii)our knowledge of a moral principle of the form: if an act is F1Fn, then it isimpermissible. For example, on the traditional model, a subject might deduce that

Teds killing someone for money was impermissible from her non-moral knowledgethat Ted killed someone for money along with her knowledge of the moral principle:if an agent kills someone for money, she therein acts impermissibly.

But how are we supposed to know the moral principles from which wededuce the impermissibility of particular acts? According to the (epistemic) moralrationalistwe must intuit these principlesi.e. know them in a non-inferential apriori manneror deduce them from more general moral principles that we intuit.Perhaps the most important advocate of this position is Kant, who grants us non-inferential a priori knowledge of intermediate principles (Lying is impermissibleStealing is impermissible) along with non-inferential a priori knowledge of thecategorical imperative in its various formulations (1797/1996, 6:225; 1788/1997,

5:47). The knowledge in question is supposed to be innate in at least one sense ofthat vexed termit is not supposed to be abstracted, inferred or in any other waylearned from experience. More importantly (from an epistemological perspective)its content is supposed to have the status of a datum: it is known by subjects whoeither cannot adduce considerations in its support, or if they could argue for theprinciple to convince a skeptic of its truth, they would not think of themselves astherein supplying the grounds on which they believe the principle. I can point to anx-ray image of my broken back to convince a skeptic that I really am in pain, but my

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knowledge of my back pain is direct and has nothing to do with the x-ray. Similarly,I am supposed to know the categorical imperative directly, even if I would have touse its agreement with a skeptical persons intuitions about cases to convince her ofits validity should she fail to initially grant it her explicit assent (Kant, 1785/2002,4:409).

In contrast, the (epistemic) moral empiricistcontends that moral principlesare known on the basis of moral experience. When applied to the deontic realm, theempiricist has it that we make repeated observations of the moralimpermissibility of token F1Fn acts so as to inductively establish the generalimpermissibility of performing acts of this type. For instance, we might be said toobserve or intuit the impermissibility of several for-profit killings and theninductively infer that it is impermissible to kill for profit. Once the principle isinductively verified, we can then use it to deduce the impermissibility of a murderfor hire (in accordance with the standard model) even when we are not well placedto observe the murders manifest impermissibility.

Historically important empiricists include Bertrand Russell (1912/1997, 70-

1), W.D. Ross (1930, 33) and C. D. Broad (1930, 214), who introduced the termintuitive induction to denote the process whereby we verify the immorality of atype of action on the basis of our quasi-perceptual knowledge of the immorality ofparticular instances of that type. But I think that the empiricist model continues toenjoy wide support among contemporary moral philosophers. A contemporaryphilosopher will often say that her belief in the immorality of some particular(typically hypothetical) act is grounded in an intuition and leave it at that. Butwhat is meant by intuition in this context? According to many of those whoaddress the issue, having an intuition amounts to occupying a frame of mind inwhich a contemplated actjust seems to one to be immoral. We are thus supposedto arrive at knowledge of the immorality of an act by endorsing (or taking at face

value) the acts seeming immorality in something like the way we arrive atknowledge of the shape of a sphere by endorsing or taking at face value its seemingsphericality (Kagan, 2001; Shafer-Landau, 2003; McGrath, 2005; Heumer, 2005).

Admittedly, some contemporary theorists who embrace the model I amcalling empiricist may think of themselves as rationalists. They may call theirintuitions rational intuitions, and if they go on to consider the psychologicalsource of these intuitions, the faculty of reason will likely play a large part in anyconjecture that eventuates. But intuitive knowledge of the immorality of a tokenaction is non-inferential knowledge of a phenomenon unfolding in space over time.The similarity to paradigmatic cases of observational knowledge is overwhelming.In fact, if a theorist is to treat our intuitions about the immorality of token actions as

foundational without therein abandoning the traditional rationalist thesis thatfoundational moral knowledge is a prioriand so independent of observationalknowledge of datable events unfolding in space over timeshe must model ourintuitions about cases as disguised knowledge of principles. What we really cometo non-inferentially know when we intuit the immorality of an (typicallyhypothetical) action is a subjunctive conditional. Where the (typically hypothetical)act is observed to have (or described as having) morally relevant value-neutralfeatures F1Fn, we must be said to learn, without inference, that were an F1Fn

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event to occur, it would be immoral (Kagan, 2001, 61-2). (A subjunctive principle ofthis kind can then be used as the major premise in a (modalized) modus ponensinference for the immorality of an actual F1Fn act.) But if a theorist does not adoptthis maneuver, and nevertheless insists that our intuitions provide us with non-inferential knowledge of the immorality of acts, I can see no coherent way to adopt

an epistemological taxonomy faithful to her self-ascription of rationalism. Themodel she is advancing grounds our knowledge of moral principles in ourobservation of the moral qualities of token actions. It is empiricist.

Since Mikhails experiments are designed to show that we tacitly cognize orrepresent moral principles, our primary interests here are psychological rather thanepistemic.3 So, though it strains the label, we should also include among the moralrationalists skeptical philosophers, such as Freud and Marx, who model us asdeducing the impermissibility of certain acts from moral principles we areindoctrinated to cognize, where the forms of indoctrination invoked involvereligious dogma, self-serving myth, and sexual fantasy: things we antecedentlybelieve to be unreliable guides to genuine impermissibility (should there be such a

thing). And we should include among the empiricists those skeptical theorists, suchas Jon Haidt (2001) and Jesse Prinz (2007), who emphasize the role that disgust andpotential embarrassment play in generating our non-inferential judgmentsregarding the impermissibility of actswhere disgust and embarrassment arefeelings we antecedently think unlikely to correspond to genuine impermissibility(again, should there be such a thing). Though they disagree on a great deal, theskeptical rationalists agree with their non-skeptical brethren that we typicallydeduce the impermissibility of token acts from a tacit representation of a generalprinciple we non-inferentially cognize. So they agree with Mikhail that we tacitlyaccept moral principles and derive our judgments about cases from these principles.(They only part ways with Mikhail when he reasons from tacit, nearly universal

cognition of these principles to their innateness.) And the skeptical empiricistsagree with their non-skeptical brethren that we initially cognize theimpermissibility of token acts directlyi.e. without the aid of tacitly cognized moralprinciples. So they disagree with Mikhail both about the innateness of suchprinciples and about the role unconscious representation of them plays in ourevaluation of token actions.

Now Mikhail is explicit in arguing that the hypothesis that we tacitly knowvarious deontic principles provides theorists with the best explanation of ourconsidered judgments of the impermissibility of token actions. So labeling him anepistemic moral rationalist (in the sense given that term above) would seemunproblematic. But the attribution requires at least two caveats.

First, consider the status of modus ponens and certain other rules of naturaldeduction. It would seem that we are innately so disposed that when we know apropositionp and know the corresponding proposition if p then q (and we consider

3 Mikhail adduces additional considerationsroughly, the reasonableness of assuming, inthe absence of arguments to the contrary, the reliability of the deontic faculty to which heattributes representation of tacitly cognized moral principlesto establish that theprinciples unearthed by his experiments are true or known or (at least)justlyendorsed.

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these propositions in tandem) we either draw q as a conclusion or come to doubteither one or both ofp and if p then q. It seems a theorist would need compellingevidence to conclude thatin addition to this cognitive disposition we also innatelyrepresent modus ponens: the principle in accordance with which we reason whenwe come to believe q by directly inferring it from our knowledge ofp and our

knowledge ofif p then q. The default assumption would seem to be that we onlycame to represent modus ponens in its own right when logicians reflected on ourtypically unreflective inferential dispositions, articulated a rule of inference we canconsciously follow to mimic the realization of these dispositions, and then went onto prove that rules soundness. Similarly, one might allow that we humans areinnately disposed to infer the impermissibility of an F1Fn act from our knowledgethat it is F1Fn, while doubting whether the human mind also innately contains, inaddition to this disposition, a representation of the general deontic principle: if anact is F1Fn, then it is impermissible. The default assumption would seem to be thatwe only came to represent basic deontic principles when moral thinkers extractedthem from our unreflective dispositions. But since Mikhail is content to argue that

we are innately disposed to infer the impermissibility of certain kinds of act fromour knowledge of certain of their value-neutral properties, and he does not argue, inany substantial way, that we realize these dispositions by executing modus ponensinferences that feature moral principles among their premises, we must interprethis claim that we have innate knowledge of moral principles in a somewhat loosefashion. Though he never explicitly says as much in Elements, Mikhails rationalistmodel of moral judgment is supposed to be confirmed by the discovery that moralprinciples are akin to logical principles in their psychological etiology. It seems,then, that when Mikhail says that we innately know a given moral principle hemeans to assert no more than that we are innately disposed to reason in accord withit.4

A second caveat that we must bear in mind when reading Mikhail as atraditional rationalist concerns the supposed subject or bearer of the tacit moralknowledge he posits. According to the traditional model each (mature, biologicallynormal) person knows the moral law or laws from which she deduces theimmorality of certain acts. But Mikhail analogizes our knowledge of moralprinciples to our knowledge of the phonological, syntactic and semantic rules thatconstitute a native speakers competence in her natural language. And I think thestandard understanding among linguists is that representation of phonological andsyntactic rules (or the disposition to process representations in accord with suchrules) is sub-personal.5 Indeed, unlike modus ponens and other principles of naturaldeduction, the dispositions that characterize syntactic and phonological knowledge

are not characterized in terms of contents thatcan be grasped by subjects who are

4 Mikhail has confirmed this interpretation in conversation.5 I exclude semantics here because it seems to me that paradigmatic semantic rules areproperly attributed to persons rather than their parts. I have in mind the knowledge ofstanding meaning that allows one to recover an utterances truth-conditional content fromknowledge of the utterance and relevant features of the conversational context: suchprinciples as that I refers to the person tokening it.

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ignorant of linguistic theory, as such subjects lack the technical concepts (such as c-commandand constraint hierarchy) that we must use to frame these contents.

And this introduces a real interpretive worry. Mikhail says that we innatelyknow a set of deontic principles. But what he means by this is that a normallydeveloped human mind (or brain) will generate representations of impermissibility

in accordance with such principles. So interpreted, need the empiricist denyMikhails claim? After all, the empiricist should allow that there must be somenaturalistic explanation of the process whereby a representation of theimpermissibility of a given act is generated by an observation of certain of its value-neutral qualities. Cant an empiricist allow thatmoral psychologists will eventuallycome to accurately model the target process with general rules, equations orprinciples? To answer negatively is to force a choice between rationalism andmysterianism; and that would be unfair to the empiricist. The lesson, I think, is thatwhen we descend from cognitive hypotheses framed at the personal level tohypotheses framed at the sub-personal level, we must reframe the traditionaldebate between rationalist and empiricist models of moral judgment to take this

change into account.In the end, I think Mikhail is right to ignore the first of these two caveats. At

any rate, the upshot for philosophical worries about the content of our moralobligations remains the same whether we are no more than innately disposed toreason in accord with certain deontic principles, or whether, in addition, the humanmind contains some further representation of them. In either event, we will havedodged a debunking explanation of the principle in question (a la Freud, Marx,Haidt, Prinz, et al), and theorists who become convinced of the principlesinnateness will either augment or retain their confidence in its validity. Of course,the principle in question might still prove fallacious, as there is no contradiction inpositing widespread (even innate) dispositions to execute demonstrably unreliable

inferences (see, e.g., Kahneman, 2003). But evidence of the principles unreliabilitywould then have to come from something other than knowledge of itsdevelopmental origins.

In contrast, the second of these worries (regarding Mikhails move to sub-person knowledge) would seem more pressing. I think that Mikhail can bestaddress it by doing more to describe what he takes to be the most promisingempiricist alternatives to the rationalist model of moral judgment he aims toempirically verify. Mikhails rationalist model of moral judgmentis supposed tobetter explain the data generated by his experiments than do the best empiricistalternatives. What do these alternatives look like?

I look forward to Mikhails responding to this request to better articulate the

space of alternatives among which his experiments decide. In the meantime, I willtry to do a little to fill out the field on his behalf.

2. Mikhails Experiments Nave Reactions to Trolley Scenarios

Mikhails experiments gauge common reactions to a series oftrolley scenarioshypotheticals akin in important respects to one mentioned by Philippa Foot (1967)in a paper on the morality of abortion. And though Mikhail discusses data he

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collected on reactions to twelve such scenarios, I will here focus on the responses herecorded to a single pair and the evidence these responses might be thought toprovide for tacit (ultimately innate) knowledge of the doctrine of double effect.

What is the doctrine of double effect? Though the doctrine has been givenmany different formulations since Aquinas articulated its basis in his Summa

Theologica (1274/1948, II-II, Qu. 64, Art. 7)and it is perhaps the mostcontroversial of the moral principles Mikhail ascribes to our innate endowmentthe least controversial formulation of the thesis is comparative: killing someone as ameans to achieving a moral end is worse (all else being equal) than killing someoneas an unintended but foreseen side effect (or consequence) of achieving the samemoral end.6 Our initial question, then, is whether naive reactions to the pair oftrolley scenarios Mikhail titles Loop Track and Man-in-Front constitute goodevidence that we tacitly accept a principle of this kind.

Consider the scenarios.

Loop Track: Ned is taking his daily walk near the train tracks when he notices

that the train that is approaching is out of control. Ned sees what hashappened: the driver of the train saw five men walking across the tracks andslammed on the brakes, but the brakes failed and the driver fainted. Thetrain is now rushing toward the five men. It is moving so fast that they willnot be able to get off the track in time. Ned is standing next to a switch,which he can throw, that will temporarily turn the train onto a side track.There is a heavy object on the side track. If the train hits the object, theobject will slow the train down, giving the men time to escape. The heavyobject is a man, standing on the side track with his back turned. Ned canthrow the switch, preventing the train from killing the men, but killing theman. Or he can refrain from doing this, letting the five die. Is it morally

permissible for Ned to throw the switch?

Man-In-Front: Oscar is taking his daily walk near the train tracks when henotices that the train that is approaching is out of control. Oscar sees whathas happened: the driver of the train saw five men walking across the tracksand slammed on the brakes, but the brakes failed and the driver fainted. Thetrain is now rushing toward the five men. It is moving so fast that they willnot be able to get off the track in time. Oscar is standing next to a switch,which he can throw, that will temporarily turn the train onto a side track.There is a heavy object on the side track. If the train hits the object, the objectwill slow the men down, giving the men time to escape. There is a man,

standing on the side track in front of the heavy object with his back turned.

6 According to Mikhail (2011), the principle of double effect, holds that an otherwiseprohibited action, such as battery or homicide, which has both good and bad effects may bepermissible if the prohibited act itself is not directly intended, the good but not the badeffects are directly intended, the good effects outweigh the bad effects, and no morallypreferable alternative is available (2011, 149). Compare with Harman (2008).

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Oscar can throw the switch, preventing the train from killing the men, butkilling the man. Or he can refrain from doing this, letting the five die. Is itmorally permissible for Oscar to throw the switch?

Mikhail reports that a majority of those presented with these vignettes answered

that it is not morally permissible for Ned to throw the switch in Loop Track, but thatit is morally permissible for Oscar to throw the switch in Man-In-Front. Morespecifically, 48% of those surveyed answered that Neds throwing the switch ispermissible, whereas 61% answered that Oscars throwing the switch ispermissible. And if these results are both valid and replicable they certainly requiresome explanation.

What kind of explanation do the data demand? First, we must look at thedifferences between the two scenarios to discover what is causing a majority ofthose surveyed to judge the one act permissible and the other act impermissible.Presumably, it is not the fact that one protagonist is named Ned and the otherOscar. Indeed, I think it is reasonable to join Mikhail in hypothesizing that the

difference in judgment has something to do with the fact that in Loop Track Nedwould be killing one man as a means to saving five, whereas in Man-in-Front Oscarwould not be killing one man as a means to saving five. For though Oscar knows inadvance that if he switches the trolley he will kill one man in the process of savingfive, since it is the heavy object behind the man (rather the man in front of the heavyobject) that will obstruct the train from killing the five men trapped on the trackbehind it, it is the heavy object (and not the man in front of it) that serves as themeans Oscar employs to save the five in Man-In-Front. Moreover, since Mikhailssubjects were unable to point to this difference to explain or justify their judgingNeds act differently than Oscarssince they seem not to be able to articulate thisdifferenceit is reasonable to conjecture that Mikhails subjects tacitly represented

this dissimilarity in the action-theoretic structure of the cases.

3. We Do Not Need to Posit Tacit Knowledge of the Doctrine of Double Effect to

Explain the Data

There is then some reason to join Mikhail in supposing that his subjects tacitlydistinguish between killing someone as a means to achieving some morallyimportant end and killing someone in the process of achieving that same end. Butneed we also join Mikhail in supposing his subjects accept or cognize the doctrine ofdouble effect? It seems not. For we might instead suppose that people are disposedto judge that killing in the process of executing a moral worthy project is moderately

bad but that people are disposed to judge that killing as a means to executing thissame kind of project is verybad. If we suppose too that, all things being equal, theworse a subject judges an act to be, the more disposed she is to judge that actimpermissible, mightnt we thereinexplain Mikhails results without positing tacitknowledge of the doctrine of double effect?

Indeed, on the face of it, we might explain these results with psychicelements considerably less sophisticated than tacit judgments of value. Suppose, forinstance, that people are disposed to experience more aversion when they consider

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an agents killing someone as a means to saving others than they do when they

consider an agents killing someone in the process of saving others. And supposetoo that, all things being equal, the more aversion a subject experiences toward ahomicide, the more disposed she is to judge that act impermissible. The dispositionto experience greater aversion at killing someone as a means and the disposition to

more harshly judge homicides to which one is averse might be innate. Or thesedispositions might be acquired through some form of learning. In either event, onemight wonder whether someone might have these dispositions without even tacitlyaccepting the doctrine of double effect.

As far as I can tell, Mikhail provides neither data nor considerations of a morea priori sort to argue that his rationalist account on which tacit knowledge of thedoctrine of double effect generates the data is better supported than the seeminglyempiricist alternatives I have described. Is it possible that Mikhail thinks of them asmere iterations of the rationalist model for which he argues? Are they not genuinealternatives to that model?7

Admittedly, the empiricist accounts I have sketched do posit tacit acceptance

of various principles. As Mikhail rightly points out, his vignettes dont explicitly saythat Ned kills one man as a means to saving five; nor do they state that Oscar merelykills one in the process of saving five. So the empiricist needs some hypothesis as tohow subjects were led by what they read to represent the cases in these terms. Forthis reason, I think Mikhail is right to reject as overly simplistic forms ofsentimentalism according to which moral judgments are generated by (or evenconstituted by) emotions rather than reasoning. (Humes claim thatmorality isgrounded in sentiment should not be taken out of context.) As both Hume(1751/2000) and Mikhail (2011, 121-2) rightly observe, reasoning and emotionboth play a role in the genesis of moral judgment (cf. Hauser, 2006). The task for alltheorists investigating the phenomenon in good faith is to determine the respective

role played by each.Now, strictly speaking, the empiricist can respond to Mikhails experiments

by positing tacit knowledge of extremely specific principleswhere the specificityof the principles might be cited as a reason to think subjects have in some wayderived knowledge of them from their prior experiences. For instance, Mikhailssubjects might be thought to tacitly infer that Ned kills one as a means to saving fivefrom their knowledge of the fact that Ned knowingly crushes the one man with the

7 In other work, Mikhail (2008a) likens the doctrine of double effect to a principle ofuniversal moral grammar. Just as Chomskian linguists appeal to the principles of

universal grammar to explain how children gain competence in their natural language fromimpoverished data, moralists can appeal to principles of universal moral grammar (such asthe doctrine of double effect) to explain how children gain competence in their naturalmorality from impoverished data. The analogy would suggest that knowledge of thedoctrine of double effect is notpart of the mature moral competence that generates onesconsidered moral judgments, but instead plays a role in the processes through which oneacquired that competence. Nothing I say here contradicts the hypothesis that the doctrineplays this kind of role in moral learning. But since evidence for this claim would need tocome from something other than Mikhails trolley experiments, I ignore it in the text.

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trolley, their knowledge of the fact that Ned knows thatit is the crushed mans bodythat will stop it from killing five others, and their knowledge of the fairly concrete(not-particularly-general) principle: if an agent knowingly crushes a man with atrolley, and knows in advance that the mans crushed body will stop the trolley fromkilling five other men, the agent in question has killed one man as a means to saving

five. But Mikhail conjectures (2011, ch. 9) that further testing would reveal thatsubjects make similar judgments when buses rather than trolleys are involved, orwhen the one man is poisoned rather than crushed in the process of saving fiveothers. And though the data are not yet in hand, perhaps Mikhail is warranted inhypothesizing that the pattern that will emerge from these studies will demand thatwe posit inferential dispositions that accord withfully generalprinciples that state,in informative terms, sufficient (and necessary?) conditions under which one agentuses another as a means to her ends.

And yet, even if the empiricist would be forced by the data to posit tacitknowledge of a principle as general in form as a paradigmatic logical principle likemodus ponens, the claim that someone has treated someone else as a means (or

even a mere means) to her ends is not yet a moral claim. For it is not incoherent tosuppose that O knows that A used B as a mere means to As ends, but that O has not

(yet) judged that A acted immorally in doing so (Audi, 2004; Zimmerman, 2010). Inconsequence, the principle the empiricist would be forced to posit by the pattern ofresults Mikhail thinks likely would not yet be moral (or deontic) in content. If weare in the business of positing cognitive faculties, we should say that tacitknowledge of such a principle is conjointly realized in faculties of intention-attribution and causal judgment rather than in a supposed deontic faculty or senseof justice. We would have to look elsewhere for evidence of tacit (ultimately innate)representation of the impermissibilityof treating another as a mere means to onesends.8

4.WouldTacit Knowledge of the Doctrine of Double Effect Explain the Data?

There are reasons, then, to conclude that we do not need to posit tacit cognition of

8 Some evidence might come from the Ultimatum Gamean experiment invented bybehavioral economists to investigate our sense of justice (Gth et al, 1982). One subject A isgiven a sum of money (e.g. $100) to split between herself and another subject B. If Bapproves of A's offer the two subjects divide the money as A proposed. If B rejects A's offerneither subject gets anything. There is an argument to be made that B should always acceptA's offer however unequal it is. After all, even if A offers $1 to B in an attempt to get $99 for

herself, B would be better off from a financial perspective getting $1 than $0. When subjectsreject substantially unequal distributions of the sum they reveal a willingness to forgofinancial rewards to "punish" someone for attempting to affect substantive inequality. Theexperiment would therefore seem to isolate an aversion to being subjected to an intentional(self- interested) attempt to generate inequality (or something conceptually connected tothis). Psychologists have applied a non-linguistic version of the experiment to non-humanprimates in search of evidence that the relevant sentiment of injustice is innate, but as faras I know, their attempts have so far proven unsuccessful. See, e.g., Jensen et al (2007).

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the doctrine of double effect to explain the results of Mikhails experiments. But is

tacit cognition of the doctrine sufficient to explain the data? I do not think theanswer to this question is obvious, and I would once again urge Mikhail to answer itin more detail in his response.

Consider not the doctrine of double effect but the much stronger principle

that one should never kill someone as a means to preventing the death of others.When it is plugged into the classic model of moral judgment, tacit cognition of thisprinciple surely is sufficient to explain the majority response to Loop Track. For ifMikhails subjects tacitly believe that it is always impermissible to kill someone as ameans to preventing the death of others, they might conjoin this belief with theirtacit belief that Neds turning the trolley would amount to killing one as a means tosaving others, to deduce the impermissibility of Neds turning the trolley.

But while some philosophers and religious thinkers may think that it isalways impermissible to kill someone as a means to preventing the death of others,there is reason to doubt that Mikhails subjects join them in this belief. First, most of

us believe in the moral permissibility of self-defense where one kills ones attacker

as a means to saving oneself. (Surely most of us do not think killing in self-defenseonly permissible if the death of the assailant is just a foreseen side effect ofsomeones succeeding at what she intends in defending herself.) I assume too,though this is somewhat more controversial, that most of us think it is permissiblefor a stranger to save an innocent person by intentionally killing his or her assailant(see, e.g., Graham, 2011). In any event, when the numbers of those who would besaved by the homicide-as-means are made sufficiently large, we can reasonablyassume that a majority of those surveyed will shift to describing the act aspermissible. (I assume, for instance, that according to common thinking, we shouldkill one man if this is necessary to save five thousand other men, even if we mustemploy the death of the one as our means to saving the five thousand.) Indeed, it is

for precisely this reason that the doctrine of double effect must be given acomparative form if it is to be reasonably attributed to common sense. Theproblem, though, is that if the doctrine is given a comparative form, it cannot serveas the major premise in a modus ponens inference that features the impermissibilityof Neds turning the trolley in Loop Track as its conclusion.9

So what role might tacit cognition of the doctrine play in generating theverdicts Mikhail has recorded? Try as I might, I cannot see how belief in thecomparative principle could be thought to generate belief in the impermissibility ofNeds act. Instead, it seems to me that those of us who endorse the doctrine do so onthe basis of a series of single-case verdicts that lend it support. We endorse thedoctrine because we think Oscars act permissibleand Neds act impermissible; we

do not think the former act permissible and the latter not because we endorse the

9Might Mikhail think his subjects are led to their assessment of Neds act in Loop Trackfrom an ill-considered belief in the absolute prohibition of killing someone as a means, abelief they would drop were they to contemplate the conditions under which self-defense isjustified? This would seem an exceedingly uncharitable interpretation of Mikhails data;and it would force Mikhail to abandon talk of his experiments revealing tacitknowledge ofthe deontic principle.

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doctrine. What is surprising, perhaps, is that the argument for this empiricist-sounding conclusion is fairly a priori, stemming as it does, from the comparativeform in which the content of that doctrine must be cast if it is to retain itsplausibility.

5. Are Mikhails Data Replicable?

I said initially that Mikhails results demand explanation if they are replicablebecause I have recently acquired some reason for doubt on this score. Considerthese alternative formulations of Loop Track and Man-In-Front that John Caravelloand I presented to subjects in the course of our on-going study of deonticjudgment.10

Loop Track-ALT: Jamie is taking a walk next to some trolleytracks when he sees an empty trolley speeding down the maintrack. In the distance, Jamie sees 5 people stuck on the main

track. Jamie knows that if the trolley continues on its currentcourse these 5 people will die. There is also a side track where1 person is stuck, which loops back around to the main track.Next to the track, Jaime sees a switch. If thrown, the switchwill divert the trolley onto the loop track and hit the 1 person.This person will stop the trolley, but will die in the process. Ifthe 1 person were not there, the trolley would loop back to themain track and hit the 5 people stuck on the main track,resulting in the death of these 5 people.

Should Jamie throw the switch? (Circle one number)

(definitely yes) |1-----2-----3-----4-----5-----6| (definitely no)

10 The participants were all undergraduate students of the University of California, SantaBarbara with either little or no philosophical training. The experiment was entirelybetween subject: each student was asked to respond to the one (and only one) vignette we

distributed to her on paper.

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Man-In-Front-ALT: Jamie is taking a walk next to some trolleytracks when he sees an empty trolley speeding down the maintrack. In the distance, Jamie sees 5 people stuck on the maintrack. Jamie knows that if the trolley continues on its currentcourse, these 5 people will die. There is also a side track where

1 person is stuck, which loops back around to the main track.Next to the track, Jaime sees a switch. If thrown, the switchwill divert the trolley onto the loop track, where it will hit this1 person resulting in the persons death. Jamie also knows that

the trolley is running low on gas. If the trolley is diverted tothe loop track, it will run out of gas before it gets back to themain track.

Should Jamie throw the switch? (Circle one number)

(definitely yes) |1-----2-----3-----4-----5-----6| (definitely no)

It seems clear that if Jamie throws the switch in Loop Track-ALT he will kill oneperson as a means to saving five others, but his throwing the switch in Man-In-Front-ALT would result in his merely killing one in the process of saving five. (Jamieknows that if he switches the trolley in Loop Track-ALT, he will stop it by causing itto hit and therein kill the one man on the side track. In contrast, Jamie knows that ifhe switches the trolley in Man-In-Front-ALT, he will stop the trolley by causing it torun out of gas; so he knows in advance that he will do no more than cause it to hitand kill one man in the process of causing it to stop.) And yet, despite the structuralsimilarity of our cases to Mikhails, Caravello and I did not detect a significantdifference in our subjects responses to these cases. In both cases, the same narrow

majority of subjects answered that Jamie should throw the switch. (93 subjectsresponded to the Likert scale version of Loop Track-ALT presented above; theiraverage response was 2.59i.e. slightly in favor of Jamies switching the trolley.100 subjects responded to the Likert version of Man-In-Front-ALT; incredibly, theiraverage response was also 2.59.) We then presented these same vignettes in theYES/NO format Mikhail used in his studies and again failed to detect a significantdifference in our subjects responses. (48 subjects responded to a YES/NO versionof Loop-Track-ALT; 89.58% answered Yes, to Should Jamie throw the switch?

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whereas 10.42% answered No to this question. 41 subjects responded to aYES/NO version of Man-In-Front-ALT; 82.93%, answered Yes, to Should Jamiethrow the switch, whereas 17.07% answered No to this question.)

These responses stand in sharp contrast to the reactions we recorded to aversion ofJudith Jarvis Thomsons (1976) famous trolley scenarioa hypothetical

Mikhail calls Footbridgewhich asks about the permissibility of pushing a heavyman off a footbridge onto the track below to obstruct a run-away trolley from killingfive men who would otherwise perish. Our subjects overwhelmingly andconfidently judged the protagonists act in Footbridge impermissible, which isconsistent with a number of experiments that have surveyed common assessment ofthis scenario. (40 subjects were given a Likert version of Footbridge; the averageresponse to Should Jamie throw the man on the track? was 4.475 on a scale from 1

(definitely yes) to 6 (definitely no). 39 subjects were given a YES/NO version of thesame; 74% responded No to Should Jamie throw the man? whereas 26%answered yes to this question).

What should we make of this disparity? Clearly, further study is needed. But

the data we have collected to date raise doubts as to whether the distinctionbetween killing as a means and killing in the process is consistently drawn and

consistently granted the deontic import it should be granted were we to possessinnate, cognitively efficacious knowledge of the doctrine of double effect. Indeed,these doubts remain even if we adoptthe loose sense of innate knowledge Mikhailhas in mind when advancing his rationalist model of moral judgment.

6. Was Rawls a Moral Psychologist?

Mikhail has three main goals in Elements. His first aim is to explore an analogybetween tacit knowledge of moral principles and tacit knowledge of linguistic

principles. His second is to provide experimental evidence in support of a model ofmoral judgment inspired by the analogy between linguistic theory and moraltheory: to begin the laborious process of modeling the tacit cognition that (exhypothesi) finds expression in core instances of moral judgment.

So far, I have limited my analysis to these two efforts. And though I havepresented reasons for thinking that the evidence available to date does notunequivocally speak in Mikhails favor, I want to reiterate my belief that Mikhailstheory remains a viable alternative to the more empiricist accounts I have sketched.It surely deserves further elaboration and testing in the years to come.

But Mikhail has a third goal in Elements: to offer a detailed, well-supportedinterpretation of the methodology John Rawls advocated and (purportedly)

followed in constructing his masterfulA Theory of Justice (and earlier essays). Insection 9 ofTheory, Rawls explicitly compares his investigation of our sense ofjustice to Chomskys investigation of our sense of grammaticalness (1971, 47). Andthough he did not dwell on the analogy, nor often return to it, Mikhail makes a fairlygood case for its importance.

Mikhail is even more successful, I think, in arguing that Rawls attributed coreinstances of basic (non-inferential) moral judgment to a set of moral capacities; thatRawls attributed our mostbasic judgments of justice to a sense of justice; and that

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Rawls thought moral philosophers can and should use the techniques employed bycognitive scientists to investigate these faculties. It seems to me, that is, that thoughRawls hypothesizes that our moral capacities resemble our linguistic faculties intheir operations, he seems much more confident that these moral capacities existand are amenable to scientific study than that they resemble our linguistic faculties

more closely than our perceptual faculties, the faculties we employ in executingcausal and probabilistic judgments, or any of the other cognitive abilities we use toform and revise our beliefs, deliberate, decide and act. For Rawls repeatedly saysthatthe provisional aim of moral philosophy should be the attempt to describeour moral capacity and he clearly thought that philosophers offering theories ofjustice should begin by describing our sense of justice (ibid; cf. Mikhail, 2011,

281.) Indeed, as Mikhail ably argues, the idea that moral philosophy must in somesense begin with theories, experiments or (at least) assumptions about thesources of our basic moral intuitions and capacities wasnt Rawls innovation; it hasbeen the dominant conception throughout most of the subjects history. Mikhaildemonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that Rawls embraced this history and

took his project to be continuous with it.11In his explicit discussions of moral methodology, then, Rawls advocates

beginning with a scientific investigation ofour sense of justice. Why then didntRawls conduct experiments? Perhaps he thought philosophers and psychologistsmust first do more to articulate the space of alternative theories of the principles towhich we conform and the dispositions we realize when formulating those basicmoral judgments we credit to intuition. Only then will we find ourselves in aposition from which we can design experiments that test the relative merits of thesetheories. Perhaps. But when one looks at the details of Rawls theory of justice, it isexceedingly difficult to interpret it as theory of this kind. So while Rawls mightutilize claims about our sense of justice to defend his theory of justice, the theory

itself looks almost nothing like a cognitive scientific account of that sense. I am infact uncertain as to whether Mikhail really means to interpret the central machineryof Rawlss Theoryas a descriptive account of the tacit knowledge (purportedly)responsible for our core intuitions of injustice. But if he does, I think hisinterpretation is in need of further defense.

The first thing to note on this score is thatRawls stated aim in Theoryis todefend a contractualist theory of justicea theory he names Justice as Fairnessthat is an alternative to intuitionism and utilitarianism. And utilitarianism, for one,is not best viewed as an account of our most basic moral judgments, much less ourmost basic judgments of justice. Instead, utilitarian thinkers from Hume to Millinvoke the principle of utility as a means of reforming and extending our common

sense moral beliefs. And it is natural to interpret Justice as Fairness in this samelight. The assumption that society is a cooperative venture engaged in for themutual advantage of its members; the assumption that we are more likely to choose

11 There is, in fact, more than one passage in which Rawls endorses the traditional model ofmoral judgment on which our verdicts about cases result from modus ponens inferences,the major premises of which are tacitly known general principles with value-neutralantecedents and value-laden consequents (see, e.g., 1971, 46).

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just laws and institutions if we do so in accordance with lexically ranked generalprinciples of justice; the assumption that we would more likely choose justprinciples (justly ranked) if we resided behind a veil of ignorance and did notknow how wealthy or talented we are, or the religions we practice, and so did notknow how we would benefit from the distribution of goods affected by choices made

in accord with these principlesnone of these assumptions seems cognitively basicor pre-theoretical in origin. So the idea that mature moral thinkers tacitly know (orrepresent) the content of these assumptions, and that they use them whenrendering verdicts on the fairness of tax policies or the righteousness of extendingcivil liberties would seem to require a great deal of argumentative support: supportthat Rawls does not provide.

Indeed, the suggestion that unconscious contemplation of the originalposition plays any role in the genesis of the intuitions that motivate a deonticallycompetentprogressives opposition to (say) the flat tax, strains credulity. It may bethat many progressives judge the flat tax immoral because they think it unfair. Andit may be that they think it unfair because they think it requires the poor to sacrifice

a much greater proportion of what they have than the rich. But is it a seriouspossibility that they believe in the unfairness of disproportionate sacrifice becausethey tacitly know that rational contractors in the original position would seek tomaximize the long-term wellbeing of the worst off in a manner compatible with asufficiently extensive system of liberties? The suggestion strikes me as so unlikelythat I am reluctant to attribute it to Rawls.

7. The Role Moral Psychology Plays in Rawls Defense of Justice As Fairness

So what role does investigation of our sense of justice play in the construction ofRawls theory of justice? In his opening remarks on methodology, Rawls states that

his theory is supposed to better approximate our considered judgments than itsutilitarian and intuitionistic rivals and that it therefore supposed to constitute themost "appropriate moral basis" for a democratic society (1971, viii). But it is notentirely clear which of the claims made in Theory(if any) are supposed to constituteour considered judgments, and which are supposed, in contrast, to merelyapproximate such judgments. Indeed, my main dissatisfaction with Mikhailsinterpretation ofTheoryis that it does not do more to distinguish Rawls datahowever provisional he meant them to befrom the theory of justice he tried todefend on their basis.

There are indeed value-laden claims Rawls relies upon in defending Justiceas Fairness that Rawls does not in turn defend with arguments or inferences. So let

us suppose, as a first approximation, that Rawls considers those normative premiseshe employs without explicit defense considered judgments. If we adopt thissupposition, we must confront three interpretive questions: First, whatdistinguishes our consideredjudgments from the rest? Second, what is it for anormative theory to bestapproximate these judgments? And third, why should we

favora theory of justice to the extent that it better approximates our consideredjudgments than its rivals?

In answer to the first of these questions, Rawls provides two (related)

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characterizations of considered judgment. The first is relatively pre-theoretical.Considered judgments are the spontaneous, stable, impartial, and confidentjudgments of mature, educated, reasonable people who are sensitive to the feelings,interests and woes of other people (1971, 47-8). Now, most of us will allow thatjudgments enjoying these characteristics tend to be among the most reliably just or

wise verdicts we encounter. And it is natural to read Rawls as supposing that weshould favor the conception of justice that best approximates these judgments forthis very reason. We have pre-theoretic beliefs about the most reliable kinds ofmoral belief; and we test theories of justice (or proposed moral bases for oursociety) against each other by seeing which theory (or basis) bestcoheres (in avariety of ways) with judgments of these pre-theoretically favored kinds.

But Mikhail makes a good case that Rawls considered view of consideredjudgment was more theoretical in nature. After all, why would Rawls focus onspontaneous judgments, if he were just trying to limit the data to (what we pre-theoretically take to be) the most reliable judgments of which we are capable?Arent moral judgments reached after much deliberation more likely to be valid or

correct than contents that immediately spring to mind? The answer can be found inRawls description of considered judgments as "those judgments in which our moralcapacities are most likely to be displayed without distortion" (1971, 47). If Mikhailis right, Rawls pre-theoretical characterization of considered judgments is just aheuristic he uses to approximate an underlying psychological distinction. Theoriststrying to provide an overall conception of justice to justify as just (or impugn asunjust) a proposed set of laws and institutions must limit themselves, in arguing forsuch a conception, to the spontaneous judgments of smart, sensitive people becausethat is the best way to isolate those of our moral beliefs that owe their existence toour moral capacities, rather than religious dogma, political ideology, and otherpotentially unnatural causes of moral conviction.

So, to take an example of particular importance to Rawls, consider the beliefthat were contracting parties to find themselves in the conditions that togethercomprise the veil of ignorance they would more likely reach a fair agreement thanthey would in the absence of these conditions. It is not hard to see how Rawls mightdefend this judgment on the basis of considered judgments. We have alreadyevaluated the fairness of verdicts rendered by those who have no financial stake in adispute and judged them more equitable, on the whole, than verdicts rendered bythose who do have some such stake. (It is in part for this reason that we ask judgesto recuse themselves from cases in which they have a vested interest.) Inconsequence, once we assume with Rawls that the contractors in the originalposition have no non-derivative interest in selecting just principlesand are

ultimately only interested in themselves and their families or genetic lineswemust then imagine these contractors ignorant of their wealth and talents if we are toconclude that (ceteris paribus) they would likely choose a fair set of principles forarriving at basic laws and institutions. It would seem then, that with respect to thedecision as to whether to adopt a utilitarian theory of justice or to instead acceptJustice as Fairness, Rawls assigns the considered intuitions that support our belief inthe distorting effects of self-interest a relatively foundational role. We can ignorethese intuitions if (holding much else fixed) retaining them would force us to

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abandon a number of our distinct considered judgments about the justice andinjustice of laws and institutions. But unless substantive incoherence results, Rawlscouncils us to take these intuitive verdicts on board. And yet, if Mikhail is right,Rawls belief thatthese intuitions are themselves considered judgments is itself atheoretical claim beholden to the results of psychological experiments. If the

intuitive verdicts that support our belief in the distorting effects of self-interest arein fact the products of religious mythrather than our shared sense of justicetheymight be false or unwarranted even though they are indeed common intuitionsattributable to most reasonable people. And reasonable people might thereforeachieve coherence between these intuitions, their overall conception of justice, andtheir settled convictions about the justice of particular laws and institutions, andstill end up with a substantively false or unwarranted view of political justice.12

In the end, then, it seems that Justice as Fairness is not supposed to besupported by coherence alone. Instead, though its superiority to utilitarianism issupposed to be demonstrated by its greater coherence with our consideredjudgments, these purported instances of considered judgment are to be allowed to

serve as provisional data only insofar as the best contemporary cognitive sciencecontinues to grant them the honorific. That is, if Mikhails reading of consideredjudgment is correct, Rawls leaves itto cognitive science to vindicate his view thatthe provisional assumptions he uses to defend his basic contractualist apparatus arederived in an epistemologically respectable manner from intuitive verdicts thatdirectly issue from our moral capacities.

My sense, then, is that when Rawls says that Justice as Fairness betterapproximates our shared sense of justice than its traditional rivals, he means nomore than that the theory better illuminates, systematizes, strengthens, and (inother respects) coheres with assumptions grounded in the outputs of this sensethan they do. As far as I can tell, Rawls does not give a more determinate gloss than

this of what it means for one theory to better approximate our consideredjudgments than another. In particular, he never asserts or implies that Justice asFairness itself constitutes an accurate model of the cognitive origins of our intuitivedeontic verdicts.

8. Mikhails Defense ofRawls Naturalistic Methodology

Rawls early critics were unhappy with his reliance on considered judgment. ButMikhail does an excellent job of answering their criticisms on Rawls behalf.

Consider, for instance, R. M. Hares (1973/1989) reaction to Theory. Hareallows that Rawls' methodology can give us insight into what people believe to be

just and how they arrive at these beliefs. Hare even allows that the method might

12 Indeed, the intuitions in question might be compared to predictable visual illusions orinnate dispositions to fall prey to particular kinds of fallacious inference. So Rawls wouldhave to admit the possibility that some of his guiding assumptions are both consideredjudgmentsi.e. judgments in which our moral capacities are displayed without distortionanddemonstrably false or unreliable. Unger (1996) contains the seeds of a utilitariancritique of Rawls along these lines.

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enable theorists to distinguish the role played by a person's moral competence orsense of justice from the role played by other aspects of her psychology ingenerating her deontic beliefs. But Hare regards these as purely psychologicalconclusions, and he insists that they lack the "normative force" philosophers justlydemand of a theory of justice properly so-called. Peter Singer advances a similar

criticism.

We cannot test a normative theory by the extent to which it accords with themoral judgments people ordinarily make. Insofar as Rawls frequently doesseem to be testing his own theory in this way, the theory fails to benormative and Rawls cannot be regarded as pursuing the same task asSidgwick and most other moral philosophers. (1974, 515)

I have already indicated my agreement with Rawls and Mikhail in rejectingthe second of Singers criticisms. An accurate account of our moral capacities is

essential to the theories of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant and yes, even Sidgwick.13

The role Rawls assigns to this project does not signal a break with the tradition, butis instead the natural outgrowth of Rawls profound respect for it.But what of the charge of insufficient normativity? Well a normative guide

is a set of laws, principles, directives or procedures that we can use to improve ourbeliefs, decisions and actions. And Singer is right that a mere description of ourinferential dispositions and judgments could not play this role. But, though itperhaps takes some reflection to see this, neither could a set of laws or decisionprocedures that bore no connection to the beliefs we actually hold and the rules wehave already come to adopt. Indeed, Singers Cartesian suggestion that, it would bebest to forget all about our particular moral judgments, and start again from as nearas we can to self-evident moral axioms (1974, 516) will strike many contemporary

readers as a recipe for dogmatism. There are some, like Singer, who find theprinciple of utility self-evident. There are more who join Kant in thinking the samewith regard to the validity of the categorical imperative as a test for the justice ofmaxims or policies. But while most of us find these principles attractive when wefirst hear them articulated, we also find that our assent to their truth or validity isconditional on their coherence with single-case verdicts we find even morecompelling. Whether contemplation of the original position (and the rest of it) hasled to the improvement of anyones beliefs and actions is (of course) a matter fordebate. But if we put to the side the difficulties many encounter in their efforts tograsp Rawls system, its normative potentialits potential to actuallyimprove thejudgments and voting behavior of a citizenryseems to me to be much greater than

Singers alternative proposal.Figuring out which moral beliefs are shared across space and time and which

differ, and figuring out how these beliefs came to be held, can and often will alter arational person's confidence in the contents of her own moral intuitions. So,ultimately, will the theories of moral competence that cognitive scientists likeMikhail infer from these observations. Because of this, Mikhails approach to the

13 On Sidgwick see Rawls (1971, 51, fn.26) citing the interpretation of Schneewind (1963).

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study of morality seems to me to be a fine methodology to adopt even if onesultimate aim is not the description of our moral capacities but the improvement ofour beliefs and actions. Indeed, if Rawls is right, and direct conscious apprehensionof general moral truths is not to be had, the alternative approach is to just stick withour pre-theoretic moral convictions and to evaluate normative theories, procedures

and claims with reference to them. And this too seems to me to be overly dogmatic.Though knowledge of the origins of our moral intuitions does not exhaust moralphilosophy, it is surely relevant to the justification with which we retain these pre-theoretic moral beliefs. And we must, in the end, evaluate moral theories withreference to some set of pre-theoretic moral beliefs, whether or not that set hasbeen improved by an on-going empirical critique of its cognitive origins.

In the end then, the process of revising and extending our moral convictionsin a manner suitably informed by empirical moral psychology seems to me, uponreflection, to be a better doxastic practice than the only viable alternatives. Inconsequence, if Mikhail succeeds in his attempts to articulate our shared moralgrammar, he will have done those of us who have dedicated ourselves to improving

our current store of moral beliefs a great service.

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Prinz, Jesse, The Emotional Construction of Morals, Oxford UP (2007).Rawls, John,A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP (1971).Ross, W.D., The Right and the Good, Oxford: Clarendon (1930).Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy, J. Perry (ed.), Oxford UP

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