Elements of Moral Cognition

John Mikhail's long-awaited book Elements of Moral Cognition is finally available.  The Rawlsian/Chomskyean line of reasoning explored by Mikhail in his previous research on moral grammar is fully fleshed out in this book, so I expect it to have an immediate and lasting impact on the growing field of moral psychology.

Abstract:

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 infl uential 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 fi eld of moral psychology

Comments

[Neal Goldfarb]

Although Mikhail's "Universal Moral Grammar" has gotten a lot of attention, there hasn't been much discussion of whether, by relying on Chomsky and the concept of universal grammar, Mikhail's ideas are built on a foundation of quicksand.

Chomsky is a very controversial figure within linguistics, and his suggestion that there exist such things as universal grammar and innate linguistic knowledge is hotly disputed. See, for the example, Evans & Nicholson, The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science (http://tinyurl.com/5spfhb4).

From what I've seen, the discussion of Mikhail's work by philosophers and legal academics uncritically accepts Mikhail's Chomskyan framework. Before continuing too far down that road, it might make sense to consider whether that framework is empirically valid.