Abstract

The subtitle of this book raises the question of what cognitive science can teach ethics. The answer, I believe, is "very little" or at least "little that ethics doesn't know already." This can be seen in the fact that, with one important exception, the authors to which Johnson most often refers are not cognitive scientists, but are instead those moral philosophers engaged in developing fundamental criticisms of "modern" or "enlightenment" morality, philosophers such as Taylor, Williams, and MacIntyre. What Johnson does take from cognitive science is a set of terms, a general viewpoint, and a methodology which leads him to look at how ordinary people actually go about solving moral problems. Fortunately, this methodology yields some interesting results.