What is the difference between right and wrong? This is no easy question
to answer, yet we constantly try to make it so, frequently appealing to
some hidden cache of cut-and-dried absolutes, whether drawn from God,
universal reason, or societal authority. Combining cognitive science
with a pragmatist philosophical framework in Morality for Humans:
Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science, Mark
Johnson argues that appealing solely to absolute principles and values
is not only scientifically unsound but even morally suspect. He shows
that the standards for the kinds of people we should be and how we
should treat one another--which we often think of as universal--are in
fact frequently subject to change. And we should be okay with that.
Taking context into consideration, he offers a remarkably nuanced,
naturalistic view of ethics that sees us creatively adapt our standards
according to given needs, emerging problems, and social interactions.
Ethical naturalism is not just a revamped form of relativism. Indeed,
Johnson attempts to overcome the absolutist-versus-relativist impasse
that has been one of the most intractable problems in the history of
philosophy. He does so through a careful and inclusive look at the many
ways we reason about right and wrong. Much of our moral thought, he
shows, is automatic and intuitive, gut feelings that we follow up and
attempt to justify with rational analysis and argument. However, good
moral deliberation is not limited merely to intuitive judgments
supported after the fact by reasoning. Johnson points out a crucial
third element: we imagine how our decisions will play out, how we or
the world would change with each action we might take. Plumbing this
imaginative dimension of moral reasoning, he provides a psychologically
sophisticated view of moral problem solving, one perfectly suited for
the embodied, culturally embedded, and ever-developing human creatures
that we are.
