Quotes from
2. 'Moral Prototypes and Moral Development'
Immediate and automatic discriminations: they are ampliative discriminations
relative to the often meager peripheral stimulation that triggers them, and
they are highly corrigible for that very reason. But they are not the result
of applying abstract general principles, nor the result of drawing covert
discursive inferences, at least in a well-trained individual.
Children learn to recognize hundreds of prototypical social/moral situations,
and the ways in which the embedding society generally reacts to those
situations and expects them to react.
One and the same situation can activate distinct prototypes in distinct
observers. Moral argument then consists in trying to reduce the exaggerated
salience of certain features of the situation, and to enhance the salience of
certain others, in order to change which prototype gets activated.
What the child is learning in this process is the structure of social
space and how best to navigate one's way through it.
What is problematic is whether this process amounts to the learning of genuine
Moral Truth, or to mere socialization. Can we specify under what
circumstances it will amount to something more than this?
3. 'Praxis, Theoria, and Progress'
An exactly parallel problem arises with regard to the learning of Scientific
Truth.
There remains every reason to think that the normal learning process, as
instanced both in individuals and in the collective enterprise of
institutional science, involves a reliable and dramatic increase in the amount
and the quality of the information we have about the world.
The members of the society are learning how best to organize and administer
their collective and individual affairs.
Moral knowledge has just as genuine a claim to objectivity as any other
kind of empirical knowledge.
"Superemperical" virtues such as simplicity and conceptual unity play a role
that is comparable in importance to adequately comprehending the data of
experience.
The stern father prototype is one that almost everyone possesses. It
activates the "sibling" prototype most of us possess.
Less primitive attempts:
party to a contract
maximizing private benefit under collective constraints
universalizable rules
maximizing general utility
There is no reason why our moral consciousness and moral understanding should
not continue to improve and our theoretical science may do so.