ABSTRACT

In his article “Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality,” Joshua Greene argues that the empirical findings of cognitive neuroscience have implications for ethics. Specifically, he contends that we ought to trust our manual conscious reasoning system more than our automatic emotional system when confronting unfamiliar problems; and because cognitive neuroscience has shown that consequentialist judgments are generated by the manual system and deontological judgments are generated by the automatic system, we ought to trust the former more than the latter when facing unfamiliar moral problems. In the present article, I analyze one of the premises of Greene’s argument. In particular, I ask what exactly an unfamiliar problem is, and whether moral problems can be classified as unfamiliar. After exploring several different possible interpretations of familiarity and unfamiliarity, I conclude that the concepts are too problematic to be philosophically compelling and, thus, should be abandoned.

摘要

约书亚·格林（Joshua Greene）在他的文章“超越指责道德”中指出，认知神经科学的实证研究结果对伦理学具有重要意义。他特别指出，面对不熟悉的问题时，我们应该更加信任手动意识推理系统而不是自动情感系统。而且由于认知神经科学已经表明，结果论的判断是由手动系统生成的，而道义学的判断是由自动系统生成的，因此在面对陌生的道德问题时，我们应该比后者更信任前者。在本文中，我分析了格林论证的前提之一。我特别要问的是什么是不熟悉的问题，以及道德问题是否可以归类为不熟悉。