The Descent of Moral Sentiment

Abstracts

Peter Railton – Moral Learning as a Fundamental Cognitive Capacity

Evolutionary approaches to morality often focus on the question whether known selection mechanisms would have produced inherited dispositions to behave in accord with moral principles or to internalize moral principles from the surrounding social environment.  An alternative approach would be to view moral cognition more in the manner in which we view cognition generally.  For example, evidence has emerged in recent decades that general-purpose learning processes enable foraging animals to construct expectation-based models of their environment and possible actions within it.  These models incorporate evaluative as well as descriptive expectations, furnishing the basis for intelligent weighing of options to guide choice and behavior.  Subsequent experience can then afford further development or refinement of these models through the reduction of predictive error.  Might such general-purpose capacities for evaluative modeling and learning also underlie much moral cognition?  If so, then a number of core dimensions of human moral life might be explicable without presupposing innate moral dispositions or a specialized capacities for learning moral norms.