Citation

Saxe R. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2016; 113(17): 4555-4557.

Affiliation

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 saxe@mit.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1604154113

PMID

27078109

Abstract

No one is naive enough to expect that all moral beliefs are universal. Today, some countries legally beat and imprison homosexuals, and others recognize gay marriage; in some places, killing a bull is a sport, and, in others, it is an abomination; in some places, corporal punishment is the obligation of a responsible parent and, in others, grounds for forced removal. Indeed, the burden of proof seems to be on the other side: Is there anything universal about human moral cognition? In PNAS, Barrett et al. (1) test one candidate for a universal principle of human morality: that an action’s moral value depends not only on the action’s consequences but on the person’s intentions.

A cognitive universal is a way of thinking that does not have to be invented by an individual or a culture, and does not have to be explicitly transmitted to the next generation by formal pedagogy. In general, scientists take two approaches to searching for such universals. One approach is to measure cognition before cultural influences are likely to operate, in young children and infants. The other approach is to measure cognition across a wide range of cultures, with a special focus on people in remote groups who have been least affected by intergroup contact. Ideally, these two approaches converge: Features of universal cognition that are observed in preenculturation infants are also observed in adults across a wide range of cultures.

Cognitive universals can be contrasted with “cognitive technologies,” ideas that evolve or are invented, in one or a few specific places and times, and are transmitted through explicit teaching and modeling (2). The prototypical example of a cognitive technology is the integer count system. Count lists emerged independently in some (but not all) human cultures; through contact between cultures, a small number of counting systems …

Language: en