The central idea of this book is simple: we evolved a moral instinct, a capacity that naturally grows within each child, designed to generate rapid judgments about what is morally right or wrong based on an unconscious grammar of action. Part of this machinery was designed b the blind hand of Darwinian selection millions of years before our species evolved; other parts were added or upgraded over the evolutionary history of our species, and are unique both to humans and to our moral psychology.
Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong is a 2006 book by former Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser in which he develops an empirically grounded theory to explain morality as a universal grammar. He draws evidence from evolutionary biology, moral and political philosophy, primatology, linguistics, and anthropology.
Hauser uses artificial moral dilemmas as a research strategy. The reason is that people already have moral judgments of real world cases such as abortion and euthanasia, so there is no intuition left. In artificial moral dilemmas intuition plays an important role. A second advantage of artificial cases is that they can be subtly modified to observe the effects on moral judgments on people. There is an internet version of the test called the Moral Sense Test which is aimed at a worldwide public.
The Moral Sense Test
http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/index.html
(sk)
では、私はなぜ、
Marc Hauser の言うことは間違っていると思い、
Adrian Ward の言うことは正しいと思うのだろう。
そしてなぜ、アメリカ人が「人権や民主主義が普遍的な価値だ」と言うと、それがまやかしに感じられ、
Katie Melua が “the line between wrong and right is the width of a thread from a spider’s web” と歌うと、そうだそうだと思うのか？