Abstract
A relatively new and exciting area of collaboration has begun between philosophy of mind and ethics. This paper attempts to explore aspects of this collaboration and how they bear upon traditional ethics. It is the author's contention that much of Western moral philosophy has been guided by largely unrecognized assumptions regarding reason, knowledge and conceptualization, and that when examined against empirical research in cognitive science, these assumptions turn out to be false -- or at the very least, unrealistic for creatures with our cognitive structures. The fundamental tension between the Western idea of morality (as basically rule-following) and the way in which people actually confront and experience moral dilemmas is a result of our failure to take the insights of cognitive psychology seriously. This failure has had a dramatic impact on not only how we teach ethics, but how we attempt to live out lives.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Beaugrande, R. de and B. N. Colby: 1979, 'Narrative Models of Action and Interaction', Cognitive Science 3, 43–66.
Berlin, Brent and Paul Kay: 1969, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (University of California Press, Berkeley).
Black, Max: 1962, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy.
Churchland, P.: 1989, A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the structure of Science (MIT Press/Bradford Books, Cambridge).
Dubois, D. and H. Prade: 1980, Fuzzy Sets and Systems: Theory and Applications (Academic Press, New York).
Ekman, Paul, Wallace v. Friesen, and P. Ellsworth: 1972, Emotions in the Human Face (Pergamon Press, Elmsford, N.Y.).
English, Jane: 1975, 'Abortion and the Concept of a Person', Canadian Journal of Philosophy V(2m) (October), 233–243.
Feinman: 1989, 'The Jurisprudence of Classification', 41 Stanford Law Review 661, 696–717.
Flanagan, Owen: 1991, Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism (Harvard University Press).
Flanagan, Owen and Jonathan Adler: 1982, 'Impartiality and Particularity', Social Research 50, 576–596.
Fuller, Lon: 1958, 'Positivism and Fidelity to Law — A Reply to Professor Hart', 71 Harvard Law Review 630, 664–666.
Fuller, S.: 1988, 'Playing Without a Full Deck: Scientific Realism and the Cognitive Limits of Legal Theory', 97 Yale Law Journal 549.
Hart, H.: 1958, 'Positivism and the Separation of Laws and Moral', 71 Harvard Law Review 593.
Henly: 1987, ''Penumbra:' The Roots of a Legal Metaphor', 15 Hastings Constitutional Legal Quarterly 81.
Holland, D. and N. Quinn (eds.): 1987, Cultural Models in Language and Thought (Cambridge University Press, New York).
Johnson, Mark: 1993, Moral Imagination (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).
Johnson, Mark: 1987, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).
Karst: 1984, 'Woman's Constitution', Duke Law Journal 447, 505.
Kintsch, W.: 1977, 'On Comprehending Stories', in M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter (eds.), Cognitive Processes in Comprehension (Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ).
Lakoff, George: 1987, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).
Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson: 1980, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).
Lakoff, G. and M. Turner: 1989, More Than a Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).
Langacker, R.: 1987, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar (Stanford University Press).
Lickona, Thomas: 1980, 'What Does Moral Psychology Have to Say to The Teacher of Ethics?', in D. Callahan and S. Bok (eds.), Ethics Teaching in Higher Education (The Hastings Center Series in Ethics).
Lopez: 1984, 'Lay Lawyering', 32 UCLA Law Review 1.
Mischel, W.: 1968, Personality and Assessment (Wiley, New York).
Nussbaum, Martha: 1986, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, New York).
Nussbaum, Martha: 1990, 'Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination', in Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford University Press, Oxford).
Piaget, Jean: 1932, The Moral Judgement of the Child (Free Press, New York).
Putnam, Hilary: 1981, Reason Truth and History (Cambridge University Press, New York).
Pratt, M. L.: 1977, Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Indiana University Press, Bloomington).
Quinn, Naomi: 1981, 'Marriage as a Do-It-Yourself Project: The Organization of Marital Goals', in Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (University of California Press, Berkeley).
Quinn, Naomi: 1987, 'Convergent Evidence for a Cultural Model of American Marriage', in D. Holland and N. Quinn (eds.), Cultural Models in Language and Thought (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge).
Rorty, R.: 1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, Princeton).
Rorty, R.: 1982, Consequences of Pragmatism (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis).
Rosch, Eleanor: 1978, 'Principles of Categorization', in E. Rosch and B. B. Lloyd (eds.), Cognition and Categorization (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ).
Schneider: 1986, 'The Dialectic of Rights and Politics: Perspectives from the Women's Point of View', 61 New York University Law Review 589, 601.
Shweder, Richard A. et al.: 1987, 'Culture and Moral Development', in J. Kagan and S. Lamb (eds.), The Emergence of Morality in Young Children (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).
Singer, J. L.: 1976, Daydreaming and Fantasy (George Allen and Unwin, London).
Sweetser, E.: 1990, From Etymology to Pragmatics: The Mind-as-body Metaphor in Semantic Structure and Semantic Change (Cambridge University Press).
Winter, Steven: 1988, 'The Metaphor of Standing and the Problem of Self-governance', Standford Law Review 40(6), 1371–1516.
Winter, Steven: 1989, 'Transcendental Nonsense, Metaphoric Reasoning, and the Cognitive Stakes for Law', University of Pennsylvania Law Review 137(4), 1105–1237.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig: 1953, Philosophical Investigations (Macmillan, New York).
Zadeh, Lotfi: 1965, 'Fuzzy Sets', Information and Control 8, 338–353.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Anderson, J. What Cognitive Science Tells Us About Ethics and The Teaching of Ethics. Journal of Business Ethics 16, 279–291 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1017995512747
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1017995512747