| Popis: |
Morality guides people with conflicting interests towards agreements of mutual benefit. We therefore might expect our moral psychology to be organized around the logic of bargaining, negotiation, and agreement. Yet, while ``contractualist'' methods play an important role in moral philosophy, they are starkly underrepresented in moral psychology. From a contractualist perspective, the ideal moral judgments would be those rendered by rational bargaining agents---a perspective shared with economic, biological, and cultural models of game theory. As a practical matter, however, investing time and effort in negotiating every interpersonal interaction is unfeasible. Instead, we propose, people use abstractions and heuristics to efficiently identify mutually beneficial arrangements. We argue that many well-studied elements of our moral minds, such as reasoning about others' utilities (``consequentialist'' reasoning) or evaluating intrinsic properties of certain actions (``deontological'' reasoning), can be naturally understood as resource-rational features of a contractualist moral psychology. Moreover, this view explains the flexibility of our moral minds---how our moral rules and standards get created, updated and overridden and how we deal with novel cases we have never seen before. Thus, the apparently fragmentary nature of our moral psychology---commonly described in terms of systems in conflict---can be largely unified around the principle of finding mutually beneficial agreements under resource constrain. The resulting ``triple theory'' of moral cognition naturally intregrates contractualist, consequentialist and deontological concerns. |
