Rutger Cognitive Lab round 3

  This week, I presented a paper to my lab in one of our weekly lab meeting. As our lab takes lots of RAs, they try to teach them as much as possible, one of the ways being through these weekly meetings in which every RA reads the same paper and one presents it. The article I presented was “Universal Moral Grammar” (John Mikhail.) It was not a research paper, rather, it is meant to do to Moral Grammar that which Chomsky did to language. Mikhail proposes that we are all born with an innate ability to develop similar moral decisions. However, abnormal development (abuse, psychopathy, ect.) can hinder this development. He cites as evidence the fact that most cultures, however different, have bans on battery of all forms. Also, he claims that the intuition for a set of trolley problems is similar across cultures. Trolley problems are hypothetical situations in which a trolley is headed down a track to 5 people, and a separate character presses a button to divert the train onto another track where only one person is standing. The purpose is to see what people’s intuition on the morality of the characters actions are. There have been dozens of variations on the trolley problem which attempt to explain why some situations are acceptable and others are not. From asking people about their intuitions, the “Doctrine of double effect” has been established. The doctrine attempts to set parameters to predict if people will think if something is morally acceptable. There are several stipulations, but the most important are these; if the harm outdoes the good of an action, or if harm is a direct means of achieving good, people find it morally objectable. Anyway, presenting to a group of grad and college students was a nerve racking experience, but I think I did well.