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How Good Is the Linguistic Analogy?
Susan Dwyer – UMBC
A striking fact about humans is that they demonstrate quite sophisticated socio-moral
normative sensitivity from as early as 2 ¾ years of age. Over two decades of study in
experimental and naturalistic settings, some carried out cross-culturally, shows that very
young children not only have the capacity to recognize socio-moral rules, they also have
the capacity to distinguish between different sub-types of such rules – in particular,
between moral and conventional rules – as evidenced in their differential responses to and
reasoning about associated transgressions. 3-4 year olds understand that moral rules differ
from conventional rules in terms of two main criteria: the former have force that is
independent of any particular authority (e.g., God, parents, social custom) and are closely
tied up with considerations of harm and injury. (See Nucci 2001; Turiel 1983; Turiel 1998.)
More recently, it has been shown that children of the same young age grasp the
import of deontic conditionals, or permission rules (e.g., ‘If Sally plays outside, she must
wear her hat’); they easily and accurately identify violations of such rules, and they
distinguish between intentional and accidental violations thereof (Cummins 1996; Harris &
Núñez 1996; Núñez & Harris 1998). Together with the vast amount of data from studies
documenting infants’ empathy and one-year-olds’ helping and comforting behavior (e.g.,
Dunn et al. 1995; Hoffman 1983; Zahn-Waxler & Hastings 1999), this work strongly
suggests that some basic moral capacities are in place quite early in development.
A pressing empirical question is how these capacities are acquired.
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A further striking fact about our species is that all (normal) humans develop into
moral agents, that is, into creatures with (at least) the following moral capacities: the
ability to make judgments about the moral permissibility, moral impermissibility, and
moral obligatoriness of actions in actual and hypothetical, novel and familiar cases; the
ability to register morality’s special authority (i.e., the fact that moral imperatives are
non-hypothetically binding and sometimes contrary to self-interest); the ability to make
attributions of moral responsibility for actions (as distinct from attributions of mere
causal responsibility); and the ability to recognize the force of excuses.
While moral capacities are present early in life and are virtually universal across
the species, there appears not to be universal agreement about which actions are morally
permissible or obligatory, nor about which creatures are owed moral concern. So, in
addition, to the acquisition question, we are confronted with the task of explaining the
‘diversity within unity’ of human moral life.
My own view is that a nativist moral psychology provides the best framework for
explaining these facts. In particular, I have argued elsewhere that there are interesting
parallels between the nature and development of human “moral competence” and the
nature and development of human linguistic competence (Dwyer 1999). In my view, this
suggests that the appropriation of some concepts and methodology from theoretical
linguistics will be useful for working out the nativist details in the moral domain. This
approach is sometimes characterized as pursuing the linguistic analogy (LA).
It is not the only game in town; indeed, the LA is treated with some skepticism
even by those who subscribe to some form of moral nativism (see, e.g., Nichols, prev
vol). But it is far too early in this inquiry to judge with any degree of certainty which
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version of moral nativism is best, if only because a set of competing views has not yet
been fully articulated.
After a brief recapitulation of a poverty-of-the-moral-stimulus argument, I turn to
the issue of moral differences, and sketch a view according to which something akin to a
Universal Moral Grammar provides a set of parameterizable principles whose specific
values are set by the child’s environment, resulting in the acquisition of a moral idiolect
or I-morality. This “moral parameters” model has not been subject to empirical
investigation, and it maybe incorrect. Nonetheless, together with the poverty-of-themoral-stimulus argument, it throws into sharp relief some central challenges for anyone
wanting to work out a nativist moral psychology.
In the background of all this is a ‘big picture’ reason for looking to linguistics for
help in thinking about morality – namely, that human moral capacities reflect the
operation of a genuine competence. The idea is not merely that there are poverty-of-themoral-stimulus arguments and that morality is a universal but heterogeneous human
institution. My suggestion is that morality – like language – is underpinned by a human
normative competence, the possession of which both allows us to and makes us see the
world in moral terms, while also making possible the acquisition of particular capacities
that allow us to negotiate a world so conceived, in ways that are sensitive to local
conditions.
But let’s return to the children.
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1. Poverty of the moral stimulus
At the outset I cited some facts about the moral capacities that all children
apparently acquire very early in life in the normal course of events. The capacity to
distinguish between different socio-moral normative domains and the heightened
sensitivity to permission rule violation appear to be central aspects of adult human moral
competence. These capacities do not represent a sort of proto-morality limited to
childhood. Rather it would appear that, over a remarkably short of period of time, human
children acquire moral capacities that are shared with adult members of their
communities.1
It is also worth emphasizing that the capacities in question concern a certain sort
of cognition, or way the human mind/brain negotiates the world. The claim is not that
children make the same particular moral judgments that adults make – say, that it is
permissible to eat non-human animals; though it should not be the least surprising that
young children parrot their parents’ pronouncements. The capacities in question are
more fundamental. Arguably, the capacity to distinguish between a moral rule violation
and a conventional rule violation needs to be in place before any judgments about the
moral permissibility of a particular action or practice can be made. And any plausible
acquisition story must explain how all (normal) children come to have this quite abstract
capacity in the normal course of development.
Traditional social-learning theory (e.g., Bandura 1986) and other empiricist
accounts claim that children are able to learn all they know about morality on the basis of
1
I am not suggesting that the capacities I have mentioned thus far exhaust the exercise of mature moral
competence. Indeed, as I shall emphasize throughout, the job of identifying the proper explananda for
moral psychology is a difficult one. It is a singular virtue of pursuing the LA that the difficulty becomes
vividly apparent.
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observation, (perhaps) coupled with an innate general-purpose learning mechanism.
Such approaches must assume that there is sufficient evidence of the right type available
to all children in all environments to explain the fact that 3-year-olds grasp the difference
between moral and conventional transgressions. For example, it might be argued that
moral rules are manifest in behavioral regularities in the child’s environment (children
are able to recover specifically moral rules from their environment); that children are
explicitly encouraged to be ‘good little boys and girls’ (children get lots of positive
evidence concerning what is morally required of them); and that children often meet with
emotionally-charged reactions from their caretakers when they act in less than morally
admirably ways (children get lots of negative evidence concerning what is morally
required of them). But this won’t do. First, empiricist accounts radically underestimate
the complexity of the task that faces the young child with respect to rule recovery.
Second, the positive and negative evidence adverted to is either irrelevant to or
inadequate to explain the child’s acquisition of the capacity to distinguish moral and
conventional rules.
To be sure, the general acceptance and following of rules among adults in a
community is liable to result behavioral regularities which a child can observe. But there
are regularities and regularities. Consider, for example, the matter of telling the
difference between rule-governed behavior and merely accidentally-regular behavior.
Suppose that in the Smith-Jones household there is a rule unbeknownst to 2-year-old Lisa
that glass containers go in the right-hand side of the recycling bin and plastic containers
go in the left-hand side of the bin. Imagine further that left-handed Jones typically lays
the breakfast table, which results in the Wheaties box being placed on the table in the
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same orientation each day. Young Lisa will observe two very regular sequences of
events or dispositions of objects. But how, absent explicit instruction, will she learn to
discriminate between the rule-governed behavior concerning recyclables and the merely
accidental but regular placement of the cereal box? Since elements of the world rarely
come with labels, it is highly implausible to claim that Lisa will manage to learn, just by
observation, to make the discrimination.
Of course, caretakers do engage in some explicit instruction: ‘Lisa, remember the
plastic bottles go in here’. But there is simply not sufficient time to explicitly characterize
every regularity to a child. And Lisa’s parents probably themselves do not notice the
accidentally regular placement of the cereal box.
The problem for the empiricist is worse. Presume for the sake of argument that
the child does manage to make the discrimination between rule-governed regularities and
merely accidental regularities just on the basis of data available in her environment. How
does she then, just by observation, learn that some rule-governed regularities are merely
conventional (forks go on the left for right-handed diners) while others are moral
(promises ought to be kept).
One could suggest that caretakers’ differential reactions to infractions of these
types of rules might provide the child with some guidance. It might be argued, in
particular, that caretakers have particularly strong or emotionally distinctive responses to
children’s moral transgressions as opposed to their conventional transgressions. So far as
I know, there is no evidence to support this hypothesis. Some parents get just as hot
under the collar about conventional transgressions as they do about moral transgressions.
(In some middle-class households, etiquette is taken very seriously). Moreover, it is
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likely that conventional transgressions outnumber moral transgressions, offering little
opportunity for the child to observe the peculiar type of emotional reaction allegedly
associated with a moral transgression. And, there is evidence that caretakers more often
correct or admonish conventional transgressions than they do moral transgressions (see
Nucci 2001; Smetana, 1989). Finally, even adults have difficulty distinguishing between
strong emotional reactions: is my interlocutor angry, disgusted, irritated, or disappointed
with my action? It’s hardly likely that very young children are any better at making finegrained discriminations between the emotionally-laden responses of their caretakers.
Again, it must be conceded that caretakers do provide explicit moral instruction.
The nativist need not deny this. But she will question whether this instruction provides
every child with sufficient data to acquire the capacity we are investigating.
First, it’s worth noting that ‘You ought to keep your promises’ has precisely the
same form as ‘You ought to put the fork on the left.’ ‘I’ve told you before, don’t do
that!’ is as appropriate after a hair-pulling as it is after an episode of food-throwing. In
other words, there appears little in the positive evidence concerning rule-violations
generally that would cue the child to whether a moral or a conventional rule has been
transgressed. Second, there may well be a paucity of negative evidence concerning the
distinction between the two types of rules. Very roughly, negative evidence is evidence
the child can use to correct a false assumption she has made or which she can use (in this
case) to eliminate a candidate criterion for making the discrimination.
At best it seems that children can become aware that the adults around them
exhibit some regularities, sometimes their caretakers codify those regularities by uttering
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‘ought’ statements, and their caretakers seem to care about whether those ought
statements are obeyed.
The nativist claim is not that there is no information in the child’s environment
relevant to her acquisition of the capacity to distinguish between moral and conventional
rules. The nativist’s concern is whether that information is sufficient to explain the
capacity the child possesses and whether it is available to all children. At present I don’t
think we can be sure that it is. Moreover, I have just discussed the acquisition of a single
capacity. Nothing has been said about how very young children come to grasp the
difference between deontic and indicative conditionals. One might speculate that that
capacity is even more abstract than the one just outlined, and thus that an empiricist
account of its acquisition will be even less plausible.
Poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments get traction when we are confronted with the
early acquisition of some distinctive capacities which appear to be universal across the
species and which cannot be explained on the basis of the positive and negative evidence
available to children everywhere. The conclusion is that the child – or, more precisely,
the child’s mind/brain – must contribute something to the process of acquisition.
Such arguments play a central role in linguistics (Crain & Pietroski 2001;
Laurence & Margolis 2001). The conclusion of such arguments in linguistics, which, it
must be noted, operate in a domain where we have a much richer and more specific
characterization of the relevant capacities (i.e., explananda), is that the child’s mind/brain
contains (at some level of abstraction) a Language Acquisition Device (or Language
Faculty) which makes possible the acquisition of all and only humanly possible
languages. The Language Faculty embodies a set of rules, principles, and/or constraints
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(Universal Grammar) which determine what aspects of her environment a child needs to
pay attention to, and which determines, together with what the child hears around her, her
mature linguistic competence, also called her I-language or idiolect. This account can be
illustrated as in Fig. 1.
INPUT 
(Primary linguistic
data)
LANGUAGE FACULTY 
(Universal Grammar)
OUTPUT
(I-language,
or idiolect)
Fig. 1
A similar proposal is very tempting as the conclusion of the poverty-of-the-moral
-stimulus argument: the child’s mind/brain contains (at some level of abstraction) a
Morality Acquisition Device (or Moral Faculty) which makes possible the acquisition of
all and only humanly possible moralities. The Moral Faculty embodies a set of rules,
principles, and/or constraints (Universal Moral Grammar) which determine what aspects
of her environment a child needs to pay attention to, and, together with what the child
hears and sees around her, determines her mature moral competence, which we can call
her I-morality or moral idiolect.2 This account can be illustrated as in Fig. 2.
2
Since the use of the expression Universal Moral Grammar is apt to lead to misunderstandings, two
important caveats must be entered here. First, while the content of Universal Grammar must be adequate to
the task of explaining the productivity of language, moral nativism inspired by the LA need not involve this
constraint. That is, when the moral nativist speaks of a moral grammar, she is not speaking of a set of
principles that will generate all and only (say) true moral judgments. Second, neither the linguistic nativist
nor the moral nativist need make any particular claims about how their respective grammars are
‘represented’. Obviously, if there are innate human capacities, they must be encoded in some way that
permits genetic transmission. But this leaves it wide open how ‘grammars’ are manifested in actual
mind/brains (Jackendoff 2002).
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INPUT 
(Primary moral
data)
MORAL FACULTY

(Universal Moral Grammar)
OUTPUT
(I-morality, or
moral idiolect)
Fig. 2
2. Moral Parameters
So far I have discussed how one appropriation from linguistics – the poverty-ofthe-stimulus argument – might help us address the empirical questions concerning how
children acquire the moral capacities they do. But I mentioned another fact to which
moral psychology must pay attention: while all (normal) human beings become moral
agents, there is diversity among the particular moral judgments that such agents are wont
to make. The situation seems to be this: quite abstract moral capacities which are
universal (e.g., marking the distinction between the moral and conventional, making
judgments of permissibility, and attributing moral responsibility) are exercised in ways
that are subject to local variations.
The former point is addressed by positing the existence of an innately given
Moral Faculty. Explanation of the latter point might benefit from thinking about how
linguists explain differences among the world’s languages. The general issue can put be
more precisely: the content of the Language Faculty must be general enough that any
child in any linguistic environment can acquire a (humanly possible) language, and yet it
must make possible the acquisition different languages.
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The Principles and Parameters approach (Baker, 2001; Chomsky 1981; Lightfoot
1991) is one very powerful and influential account in linguistics of the presence of
variation against the backdrop of deep similarities. But before describing that account,
and how it might help us think about moral difference, it will be useful to be a bit clearer
about some of the concepts that are (explicitly and implicitly) already in play.
Earlier, I referred to a speaker’s I-language as the manifestation of her mature
linguistic competence, and, pressing the LA, we can refer to a moral agent’s I-morality as
the expression of her mature moral competence. A speaker’s competence is something
she acquires (or is ‘set’) on the basis of two things: how her mind/brain is built and the
linguistic environment in which she grows up. The powerful Chomskian idea is that the
human mind/brain is built in a way that radically constrains its interaction with the world.
A human child cannot acquire birdsong competence; and the range of languages she can
acquire is itself severely constrained. This is the sense in which Universal Grammar –
understood as part of the innately specified, abstract functional architecture of the human
mind/brain – circumscribes a space of (linguistic) possibilities. Furthermore, a speaker’s
competence, once acquired, radically constrains her perception of and linguistic action in
her linguistic environment. Her I-language represents one – and not a host of other
logically possible – way(s) of so perceiving and acting. The absolutely central point is
this: in essence, a competence is a normative structure – that is, something that effects a
highly constrained mapping from one type of thing to another. In the case of language
the mapping is from signals (sounds) to meanings (Fig. 3).
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INPUT 
COMPETENCE/I-LANGUAGE 
(Signals)
(???)
OUTPUT
(Meanings)
Fig. 3
The structure of and content of a speaker’s competence is what explains why she
attributes certain meanings and not others to the signals to which she is exposed. And we
discover the content and structure of a speaker’s linguistic competence, by collecting her
so-called acceptability judgments. If a speaker judges that some string is ‘OK’ in her
language, then we know that the normative structure of her linguistic competence permits
the relevant construction. Here is a simple example (from Jackendoff, 2002, 16); there
are literally thousands of others.
(1) Joe thinks that Fred adores himself
(2) *Joe thinks that you adore himself
English speakers will judge that (1) is ‘OK’ while (2) is ‘not-OK’ (as indicated by
the asterisk). This suggests that the grammar of English contains a rule according to
which an anaphor in object position must be co-referential with the subject of the clause
in which it appears. In (1), ‘himself’ must refer to Fred and not to Joe. English speakers
judge (2) to be unacceptable because that rule is violated: ‘you’ and ‘himself’ cannot be
co-referential. (Linguists will say that (2) is ungrammatical, because it violates a rule of
grammar.)
Acceptability judgments are also crucial to the task of understanding the ways in
which human languages differ. Here is another very simple example. An English
speaker will judge (3), but not (4) to be ‘OK’; whereas an Italian speaker will find both
(5) and (6) acceptable.
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(3) I am going to the cinema
(4) *Am going to the cinema
(5) Io vado al cinema
(6) Vado al cinema
Since speakers’ acceptability judgments provide evidence for the content of linguistic
competence, this pattern of judgments provides some evidence for the ways in which
rules of English differ from the rules of Italian. The English speaker’s competence
imposes a constraint concerning the pronunciation of the subject of a sentence. The
Italian’s does not. In English one must always pronounce the subject of a sentence, while
Italian permits sentences with no overt subject in the main clause.
Linguists refer to such features that distinguish groups of languages from one
another as parameters. (The parameter in question above is called the Null Subject
Parameter.) The idea is quite simple. It is hypothesized that some principles of
Universal Grammar contain variables that are initially unspecified; specific values for
these variables are determined by the linguistic input to which the child is exposed. A
useful metaphor is that of a switch: a parameter, in principle able to be ‘on’ or ‘off’, is
switched either ‘on’ or ‘off’.
This is not the place to provide a thorough account of parameters. However, it is
worth emphasizing three important points about parameters. First, the effects of setting
of a parameter to ‘on’ or ‘off’, as it were, are noticeable throughout a language. For
example, whether a language is a null subject language or not determines the acceptable
form of questions formed from declarative sentences. Since Italian is a null subject
language, both (7) and (8) would be judged as acceptable by native Italian speakers:
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(7) Gianni verrá
(8) Verrá
(Gianni will-come)
([He] will-come)
Hence (9) (Baker 2001, 42) is a perfectly acceptable-sounding question to Italian
speakers, but not to English speakers:
(9) Chi
credi
(Whom you-think
che ________
verrá?
that
will-come?)
*Whom did you say that _______ will come?
(9) is ‘OK’ in Italian but not in English, because questioning the subject position in an
embedded clause requires moving a question word to the front of the sentence, and this
leaves behind a tensed clause with no overt subject. English doesn’t tolerate this. This is
a relatively small difference. Some languages appear to differ quite profoundly. Still, it
turns out that what appear to be massive differences between languages are explicable in
terms of the variable setting of a single parameter (see Baker 2001 on the polysynthesis
parameter).
Secondly, there is good reason to believe that the setting of parameters makes
the task of language acquisition much easier for the child. Consider for example, the
Head Directionality Parameter: either “Heads follow phrases in forming larger phrases”
or “Heads precede phrases in forming larger phrases” (Baker 2001, 68). English is a
Head-first language. Hence, in (10)-(12), the complement prepositional phrase ‘at
Charles’ comes after the Head, irrespective of whether the Head is a verb, a noun, or an
adjective.
(10) Mallory swore at Charles.
(11) Mallory’s amazement at Charles.
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(12) Mallory is mad at Charles.
A child growing up in an English-speaking environment will be able to set this parameter
on the basis of exposure to a wide range of triggering data; any sentences of the forms
(10)-(12) will do. And, supposing that the parameter is set on the basis of sentences like
(12), the child will not have to learn (independently) that verbs precede their objects, or
that prepositions precede their complements, for these are necessary concomitants of the
Head Position parameter being set a particular way.
Finally, parameter-setting is not a conscious process. It happens as the result of a
mind/brain structured in accordance with Universal Grammar existing in a linguistic
environment which contains signals that embody the constraints imposed by parameters.
With all this in place, we can fill the (???) in Fig 3 above by ‘parameterized
principles’.
So, how might the notion of moral parameters help us account for the variation
we see in the local expression of universal moral capacities? To begin, consider Fig. 4a.
INPUT 
(???)
I-MORALITY
(???)

OUTPUT
(???)
Fig. 4a
Right away, we are confronted with the challenge of replacing the question marks in the
parentheses. As in the case of language, this task will involve some boot-strapping.
Linguists don’t begin their inquiry by positing a handful of principles and parameters
from their armchairs. They collect lots of detailed data – from child speech (What
mistakes do kids make? What mistakes don’t they make? What evidence concerning
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language is available in the child’s environment?); from particular languages (Which
expressions do native speakers of Japanese judge to be ‘OK’? Which expressions do
native speakers of Japanese judge not to be ‘OK’?); and from comparisons between
languages (How does Mohawk differ from Italian?). Nothing like this sort of data –
either with respect to quantity or with respect to detail – is (yet) available to the moral
psychologist.
This is a serious problem for any moral nativist account that has explanatory
aspirations. Explanations are, quite generally, hard to come by. And, of course, they
simply cannot get started without a clear idea of what is to be explained. Since the main
focus of 20th century moral philosophers was moral theory (and not moral psychology), it
is not surprising that we lack a thorough and detailed account of the capacities
distinctively associated with morality. Moreover, developmental moral psychology
carried out by psychologists has either provided mere re-descriptions of aspects of moral
life (e.g., social learning accounts) or has been hampered by unwarranted assumptions
about what mature moral reasoning must involve (e.g., Kohlberg 1981).
The explananda identification problem is especially pressing for nativists,
because nativist claims are too easily dismissed if they do not say precisely what is
innate. Think of it this way: the plausibility of nativist claims is greatly increased by the
provision of quite fine-grained characterizations of the innate endowment, whether that is
understood a set of processes or a set of constraints. And the fineness of grain will be
determined by the level of specificity attaching to the target explananda. Absent a
detailed characterization of the phenomena to be explained, it is difficult to adjudicate
between accounts that posit rich, domain-specific innate endowments and those that posit
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all-purpose learning mechanisms, constrained only in the most general terms. Let me put
this vital point yet another way: a sloppy or catholic characterization of what is to be
explained imposes few, if any, constraints on what form the explanans takes. In effect,
anything will do. But, you get what you pay for.
This is why nativist claims about language are hard to refute. Linguists are able
to provide a rich characterization not only of what mistakes children make (in acquiring a
language), but also of what mistakes children do not make, and rich characterizations of
which strings of L native speakers will judge acceptable and which they will not. All
acquisition stories must be responsible to this data. They must ask: How is it possible
that children exhibit this behavior (as opposed to other behavior) on the basis of what is
available to them? Poverty-of-stimulus arguments, by their very nature, are acutely
attuned to this epistemic requirement.
Settling on the proper explananda for moral psychology is not a task I can
undertake here. But I can examine a suggestion. Given the diagrammatic representation
of the Principles and Parameters model above (Fig. 3), and its moral analogue (Fig. 4a), it
is very tempting to think of the output of an agent’s I-morality (or competence) in terms
of permissibility judgments. Like speakers’ acceptability judgments, permissibility
judgments are easy to elicit and thus easy to collect and study. And there appears to be a
significant degree of variability in the permissibility judgments (normal) moral agents are
wont to make. For example, some people judge that same-sex sex is morally permissible,
others judge that it is morally impermissible. Hence, we might fill out Fig. 4a as Fig 4b.
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INPUT 
(???)
I-MORALITY

(???)
OUTPUT
(Permissibility
judgments)
Fig. 4b
According to this way of working out the LA, an agent’s I-morality effects a highly
constrained mapping from inputs (as yet unspecified) to outputs, namely to an agent’s
permissibility judgments. We can bootstrap our way to articulating the content of an Imorality by noting how that mapping is effected. But, this will require knowing what the
inputs are.
A plausible candidate is actions – either observed or thought about. We make
moral judgments about actions that we witness (‘What he did was impermissible’) and
about actions we contemplate, either in an ethics workshop or preparatory to performing
them ourselves (‘Is it permissible for a hypothetical agent (or me) to do X in
circumstances C?’) Hence we arrive at Fig 4c.
INPUT 
(Actions or
action descriptions)
I-MORALITY
(???)

OUTPUT
(Permissibility
judgments)
Fig. 4c
Once we have some data concerning input and output, we can ask what needs to be ‘in’ Imorality to explain how an agent gets from a particular action or action description to a
judgment about whether the action is morally permissible or morally impermissible.
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As we have seen in the case of language, assuming Universal Grammar is a
highly abstract innate endowment universal in the species, we say that the content of a
speaker’s competence is a set of parameterized principles. A speaker’s language faculty
comes to be structured in one of a highly constrained set of ways. This structure imposes
limits on how she perceives the signals to which she exposed. If the signal can be
interpreted by her language faculty, if it does not violate any of the parameterized
principles which characterize her competence, then she will judge the signal to be ‘OK’;
if not, not.
The story that Fig. 4c then encourages is this. Assuming something like
Universal Moral Grammar, an agent’s I-morality comes to be structured in one of a
highly constrained set of ways. This structure imposes limits on how she perceives
actions to which she is exposed. But how do we complete the thought? If the action can
be interpreted by her moral faculty, if it does not violate any of the parameterized
principles that characterize her moral competence, then she will judge that the action is
morally permissible, if not, not. Fig. 4d represents the picture we arrive at.
INPUT 
(Actions or
action descriptions)
I-MORALITY
(Parameterized
principles)

OUTPUT
(Permissibility
judgments)
Fig. 4d
The Moral Parameters model appears to have the attractive feature of suggesting
an account of moral diversity, in much the same way that the Principle and Parameters
theory in linguistics has actually provided an account of linguistic diversity. Universal
Moral Grammar provides the cognitive resources that in turn make possible the
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acquisition of moral capacities. Since the latter are acquired in particular moral
environments, the developing moral agent will come to exercise them in ways that reflect
those environments, and so will come be able to negotiate moral space in ways that are
sensitive to local conditions.
A pretty picture, to be sure. It would be nice to have a concrete example. But
since, to the best of my knowledge, no one has actually looked for moral parameters,
speculations will have to suffice for now.
Recall that an agent’s moral competence, her I-morality, effects a highly
constrained mapping from inputs to outputs, where, for the moment, we are working with
an incredibly simple model, limiting the inputs to actions or action descriptions, and the
output to permissibility judgments.
Let us first think about those inputs, drawing again on linguistics. Speakers qua
speakers do not hear ‘noise’; they hear words, sentences, questions, and so on. This is
because their linguistic competence imposes structure on the incoming signal – where it
can. This is not to say, of course, that you and I do not hear birdsong. Rather the point is
that we do not interpret it as an utterance. Hence, it will be useful to think about the fact
that moral agents qua moral agents ‘see’ actions, not ‘happenings’. Again, the claim is
not that you and I do not see leaves falling and waves lapping. Rather we do not interpret
such things as actions.3 And to see something as an action as opposed to a happening just
is to impose some structure on it. At the very least it involves the marking of the agent(s)
of the action, the patient(s) of the action, and the spatio-temporal boundaries of the action
We are shameless anthropomorphizers. But anthropomorphism is just that – the (misguided or motivated)
projection of distinctly human properties onto the non-human world.
3
20
(its identity conditions). In a very real sense, we parse parts of our environment into
actions.
The identification of actions is something arguably made possible by the
possession of Universal Moral Grammar. We might imagine, that is, that one thing the
human Moral Faculty does is to get parts of our environment into the right ‘shape’ for
evaluation. Things that cannot be gotten into the right ‘shape’ – e.g., a squirrel knocking
an acorn on to my head when it scampers up the roof – cannot be evaluated in terms of
moral permissibility. (We can and do curse non-human animals; but we don’t really
think they act impermissibly.) Moral evaluations, like permissibility judgments and
attributions of responsibility simply cannot get started if we do not already ‘see’ the
world in terms of agents, patients, and consequences. And since every (normal) human
makes moral evaluations, it is not implausible to claim that every human has the innately
specified capacity to ‘see’ actions.4
The evaluative components of an agent’s I-morality can get to work once a
representation of an action is in place. Particular evaluations will depend on a number of
factors: the nature of the agent; the nature of the patient; the effect(s) or outcomes of the
action; and how the effects or outcomes are brought about (intentionally, accidentally,
directly indirectly, alone or in concert?) All of these things will make a difference to how
a moral agent’s I-morality will map an action into a permissibility judgment.
Parametric variation might be evident both at the input/I-morality interface and at
the I-morality/output interface. What kinds of creatures can be agents (only humans?,
only adults?); which patients matter for the purpose of evaluation of actions (only
4
Considerable evidence has accumulated that shows that very, very young humans detect agency in the
world. See, e.g., Gergly et al, 1995.
21
humans?, only members of the evaluator’s community? all sentient creatures?); what
outcomes and good or bad?). All these are areas in which we can expect to see
differences among human moral judges. Furthermore, one way of describing of
observed moral differences among the world’s moral agents is to say that members of
different cultures make different judgments concerning what is morally salient for the
purposes of evaluation: is the fact that the agent’s father has recently died relevant to
assessing his action of having a hair cut or eating chicken (see Shweder et al.1987)?
Let me try to make this less abstract – again, with a very simple example.
One thing seems to be true of all known human moral systems5: moral
considerations (obligations and prohibitions) do not apply to everything. For example,
pieces of furniture are not the sorts of things that have moral considerability: no one
thinks that tables are owed special treatment in virtue of their intrinsic properties, though
someone might judge that it is morally impermissible to scratch a table because that table
belongs to a human being. Still, there is global variation in what things are taken to fall
into the set of the morally considerable. Some human moral systems cast the net widely,
including, along with human beings, all animals; others are more conservative, extending
moral considerability only to human beings (and perhaps then only to a subset of human
beings – what moral philosophers like to call persons). In addition, there is further
variation among the systems that admit humans and non-human animals into the special
class of the morally considerable: some such systems might assign different degrees of
moral considerability to different types of members of the class, ranking, say, human
‘Moral system’ does not mean particular normative theory. It is shorthand for something like typical
pattern of permissibility judgments made by a group of humans.
5
22
beings above non-human animals, kings above commoners, men above women, or cows
above frogs.
Let us then define a schweeb as ‘creature with the highest moral status’. A very
basic principle of all possible I-moralities might be ‘Schweebs are to be respected’ or
‘Given the choice of saving the life of a schweeb or saving the life of a non-schweeb,
always save the life of the schweeb.’ However, what counts as a schweeb might differ
community of moral agents to community of moral agents. Schweebhood might be
attributed only to women, or only to rational creatures, or only to sentient creatures. And
so moral agents raised in different moral communities would come to have their
schweebhood parameter set in one way rather than another. (In principle, there is no
barrier to some parameters allowing for more than two settings.)
How moral agents’ schweebhood parameter is set is, something, presumably, we
could discover by eliciting permissibility judgments, across a range of moral
communities, about a range of hypothetical actions involving different agents and
patients.6 Having one’s schweebhood parameter set in a particular way will be reflected
in one’s permissibility judgments, in ways that mirrors the cascading effects of linguistic
parameter-setting described above in sentences (7)-(9). And having one’s schweebhood
parameter set eliminates the need for considering the question of moral status anew each
time one makes a moral judgment.
The Moral Parameters model is an attractive way of beginning to cash out a
nativist moral psychology, if only because it makes vivid the sorts of things to which all
moral nativist accounts must pay attention. Nonetheless, even at this early stage of
6
On the not insubstantial assumption that familiar methods of eliciting permissibility judgments or moral
intuitions would work in other places. (check ref.)
23
inquiry, some concerns are likely to be raised. In the remainder of the paper, I want to
address a worry that might seem immediately apparent – namely, that the Moral
Parameters view (and perhaps any other way of pursuing the LA) entails moral
relativism. This will be a worry, of course, only for those who think moral relativism is
false. But it is related to a concern that even moral objectivists might have with
linguistically inspired approaches to moral psychology – namely, whether such
approaches can do justice to some phenomenological aspects of moral life. The
treatment will be far from complete. My present aim is quite modest: to investigate these
matters in a way that makes clear what the Moral Parameters model is not and other yetto-be-proposed LA approaches need not be committed to, and that renders them generally
instructive for nativist moral psychologists.
3. Moral Relativism and Moral Disagreement
To see why friends of moral relativism might take comfort in the apparent
potential of the Moral Parameters view to support their theoretical position, consider
again the following diagrams. (Fig 3a is the completed picture of Fig. 3 above, slightly
modified for comparative purposes; Fig. 4d is repeated.)
Language
INPUT 
COMPETENCE/I-LANGUAGE 
(Signals)
(Parameterized
principles)
Fig. 3a
24
OUTPUT
(Acceptability
judgments)
Morality
INPUT 
(Actions or
action descriptions)
COMPETENCE/I-MORALITY
(Parameterized
principles)
 OUTPUT
(Permissibility
judgments)
Fig. 4d
Modulo performance errors, if two speakers make different acceptability
judgments about the same string, they are thought to have different I-languages or
idiolects. As we saw above: English and Italian speakers make different acceptability
judgments about expressions with no overtly pronounced subject; English and Japanese
speakers make different acceptability judgments about expressions in which the Head is
preceded by modifying material. Insofar as the Moral Parameters model treats an agent’s
permissibility judgments as analogous to a speaker’s acceptability judgments, it would
seem to entail that, modulo performance errors, if two agents make different
permissibility judgments about the same practice, then those agents have different Imoralities.7 The moral relativist will press the sensed advantage in the following way.
Supposing that two speakers – Mary and Kumiko – have different I-languages, it
makes no sense for Mary to complain to Kumiko that she (Kumiko) has it wrong about
where Heads should go. Mary just has to and (of course) will recognize that Kumiko
simply speaks a different language. It would be foolish of Mary to ask Kumiko to
provide reasons for her acceptability judgments, and Kumiko’s inability to provide
justification will not be a source of concern to Mary. Similarly, then, if Mary and
7
Performance errors in the moral domain cover the usual cases of distraction, drunkenness, and processing
limitations as well as the possession of comforting but irrational prejudices and brute ignorance of the facts.
25
Kumiko have different I-moralities, then it makes no sense for Mary to complain about
Kumiko’s views about the permissibility of certain practices. Mary just has to accept that
Kumiko ‘has’ a different morality, and it would be foolish of her to ask Kumiko to
provide reasons for her permissibility judgments. If the Moral Parameters model is right
in treating an agent’s permissibility judgments as analogous to a speaker’s acceptability
judgments, then normative relativism is true. Agents make the permissibility judgments
they do, and controlling for performance errors, when those judgments diverge with
respect to a particular practice, there is nothing more to be said. No reasons can be
provided for saying that Mary is right and Kumiko is wrong, or vice versa.
At this point, someone without moral relativistic leanings might press a related
but quite different complaint, namely, that the Moral Parameters model is at odds with
the lived experience of moral life insofar as it seems to allow for neither genuine
disagreement (as opposed to mere diversity) nor for the fact we care about moral
differences in ways we don’t care about linguistic differences.
Mary and Kumiko do not really disagree about where the Head of an expression
should go. But genuine moral disagreement is a fact of life. Members of the same
families, exposed to virtually identical environments, disagree about the permissibility of
same-sex sex, abortion, and eating non-human animals. Moreover, most of us have
experienced intra-personal moral disagreement: we engage in inner dialogue about
whether we should eat pork; we used to think that abortion is morally permissible, now
we think not. And we care about these differences, often to the point of severing
relationships and experiencing considerable anxiety about our former selves.
26
An obvious line of response is to reject the idea that the requisite output of an
agent’s I-morality is a set of permissibility judgments. However, that move is neither
necessary nor sufficient to defend the Moral Parameters view from the current line of
criticism.
It is not necessary, for the hopeful moral relativist and the skeptical objectivist
rather overstate the disanalogies between language and morality. It is true that, in the
normal course of speaking and understanding one another, we do not typically ask for
justifications for why a speaker judges that a certain string is ‘OK’. But it is not true that
there is never cause to make normative recommendations regarding language. For
example, given the notorious ambiguity of the word ‘sanction’, one would advise a
student not to use that verb in writing an applied ethics paper, say. And native speakers
of English, who to all and intents and purposes have the same I-language – like
Americans and Australians, can and do disagree about whether one takes a bottle of wine
to a dinner party or whether one brings a bottle.
In any case, it is not clear that dispensing with the thought that an agent’s
permissibility judgments are among the outputs of her moral competence will be
sufficient to assuage the critic. For, the apparent problem is somewhat deeper: any view
that models human moral competence on human linguistic competence in the perfectly
general way described above (Figs. 1 & 2) seems to allow no ‘gap’ between what an
agent judges to be morally permissible and what she ought to judge to be morally
permissible. Mary’s mind/brain is structured in such a way that permits only a highly
constrained mapping between inputs and outputs; in some sense, she cannot be faulted for
the judgments she makes. However, such a ‘gap’ is precisely we must presuppose to
27
make sense of genuine moral disagreement and our belief that it is appropriate to
interrogate agents about the reasons for their permissibility judgments.
We have reached familiar and unavoidable questions about the relation between
descriptive psychology and normative theory that arise throughout cognitive science.
Most familiar with respect to the empirical study of human reasoning (see Stein 1996 for
useful review), it is no surprise that they arise for the empirical study of moral capacities
too. But it is not as if the questions get no grip with respect to language. This bears
emphasis, because it is too easy to assume that they don’t and, on that basis, infer that
there are special problems about the normativity involved in rationality and morality
which, at least with respect to the latter, render the LA implausible. To put the critic’s
point more specifically: pursuing the LA erases an ‘is-ought’ distinction that, while
irrelevant in linguistics, is essential to maintain in the study of morality.
The apparent irrelevance to linguistics of the questions concerning the relation
between descriptive psychology and normative theory is, I believe, an artifact of the way
in which linguistic inquiry proceeds. Linguists do not begin with a theory of right syntax
and then assess the extent to which speakers conform to that theory. Rather, the
principles that characterize a speaker’s linguistic competence are discovered by the
systematic study of signal-to-meaning mappings as evidenced in speaker’s acceptability
judgments. In sharp contrast, both the moral relativist’s embrace of the Moral Parameters
Model and the concern that that model cannot accommodate the fact of genuine moral
disagreement, presuppose the existence of theories of right action; the very idea that two
agents can be equally justified in making contradictory permissibility judgments and the
very idea that an agent can make a (non-performance error) mistake about the
28
permissibility of an action assume that there are accounts of what is permissible that
purport to be correct.
But this comparison is misleading. For, while it implicitly recognizes two types of
normative domain, it wrongly assigns language exclusively to one and morality
exclusively to the other. Instead, I believe we should recognize two levels of normativity:
there is the normativity that is the direct result of our mind/brains being built and
developing in certain ways – call this ‘brute normativity’, and there is the normativity
that is reflected the theories of right X-ing we construct – call this ‘sophisticated
normativity’. Brute normativity – the innately enabled structures and processes that
make judgment possible – is the proper target of linguistic and moral psychological
inquiry. Sophisticated normativity – the ways in which we think and talk about our
practices of judgment – is real enough, but it cannot be the subject of science. The
construction of sophisticated normative theories is motivated, no doubt, by the need to
facilitate communicative and social cooperation. But the factors that are relevant to those
tasks in any human community are too multifarious to capture in any universally valid
and systematic account.
In the absence of theories of right syntax, linguists have no option but to proceed
the way they do. But moral psychologists do. So, the approach I am encouraging here
asks and allows us to abandon our attachment to theories of right action when we do
moral psychology.
Theories of right action – like Utilitarianism and versions of duty ethics – are the
products of philosophical labor. The moral psychologist should neither presuppose them
in her empirical inquiry, nor should she expect her investigation into the structure of
29
brute moral normativity to vindicate a particular theory or principle of right action (cf.
Greene, prev. vol.).
It is logically possible, I suppose, that we will find that a common component of
the world’s I-moralities is some particular normative theory – Act Utilitarianism, say, or
some particular moral principle – the Categorical Imperative, say. That would be both
interesting and very, very surprising.
The acquisition of a competence that embodies either the Greatest Happiness
Principle or some version of the Categorical Imperative is consistent with neither
empiricist nor nativist accounts. Most of the world’s children, not being the offspring of
Western moral philosophers, will not be exposed to these principles of right action at all.
And we know that the permissibility judgments of (Western) moral agents are apt
sometimes to be accordance with Utilitarian considerations and sometimes to be
accordance with (roughly) Kantian considerations (Nagel 1972). Hence, no single
principle or theory of right action will do as the content of I-morality.8
With these remarks in place, I want to end by being as clear as I can about what
the proponent of the LA is not committed to.
It is very tempting to view the Moral Parameters model as a way of filling out the
details of Rawls’ early view. This is a mistake. In A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls
writes,
8
While I cannot do it justice here, it is crucial to note a further consequence of this discussion.
Experiments aimed at uncovering the nature of human moral ‘processing’ (to choose a suitably neutral
term) that are structured to elicit particular judgments of a roughly consequentialist and/or a roughly
deontological nature beg central questions in moral psychology. If inquirers are looking for contrasts
between judgments of these types, they will find them. Hence studies which seek to discover which parts
of the brain light up when an agent makes a judgment warranted by consequentialism and which parts light
up when she makes a judgment in accordance with some version of the categorical imperative are seriously
misleading and are unlikely to help us uncover the content of human I-moralities (cf. Greene et al. 2001,
Greene and Haidt 2002).
30
one may regard a theory of justice as describing our sense of justice. This
enterprise is very difficult. For by such a description is not meant simply
a list of the judgments or institutions and actions we are prepared to
render, accompanied with supporting reasons when these are offered.
Rather, what is required is a formulation of a set of principles which, when
conjoined with our beliefs and knowledge of the circumstances, would
lead us to make these judgments with their supporting reasons were we to
apply these principles conscientiously and intelligently. A conception of
justice characterizes our moral sensibility when the everyday judgments
we make are in accordance with its principles. . . . A useful comparison
here is with the problem of describing the sense of grammaticalness that
we have for the sentences of our native language (pp.46-7).
Talk of parameterized principles might then be misinterpreted as implying that the
content of an agent’s I-morality is a set of explicitly represented moral principles that are
consciously accessible to her for deployment in the activity of moral judgment and in the
practice of providing justifications for those judgments (see Nichols, prev. vol). But, as
in the case of language, the proponent of the Moral Parameters view need make no
particular claims about how the relevant principles are represented. As in the case of
language, we are to imagine that the relevant principles are simply a theorist’s way of
describing a set of constraints or cognitive structures.
More importantly, pace Rawls, the moral psychologist need have no truck with
the idea that the operation of an agent’s sense of justice (i.e., her moral competence) is a
conscious affair. Rawls mentions that the principles that characterize an agent’s sense of
justice can be applied ‘conscientiously and intelligently’. His picture characterizes the
operation of an agent’s moral competence as a sort of syllogistic machine: confronted
with a hypothetical or actual circumstance or practice, the agent searches for and applies
a relevant moral principle (or principles), and then out pops a judgment about the justice
31
of the circumstance or the permissibility of the practice.9 Furthermore, Rawls suggests,
the reasons for her judgments that an agent might be able to supply on demand mirror the
operation of this ‘machine’. Put another way: moral epistemology (the justification of
moral judgments) recapitulates moral psychology (the cognitive processes that actually
make those judgments possible.)
But there is little reason to believe that the content of an agent’s I-morality will be
recognizable to us or to her as anything like a set of moral principles. Again, as we know
from the study of language, speakers do not recognize the principles that characterize
their linguistic competence, and even savvy linguists do not consciously deploy
principles, like the Head Position Parameter, in speaking. And if it is right to posit an
epistemic relation between a speaker and the content of her linguistic competence, then
that relation must be tacit. There is no reason to deny the same possibility regarding an
epistemic relation between a moral agent and the content of her moral competence.
Indeed, both anecdotal and experimental evidence suggests that moral agents are
quite bad at providing reasons for their brute permissibility judgments; at a certain point
justification stops. I suspect we all judge that it is morally impermissible to torture
human infants for fun, but it is notoriously difficult to say why it is morally
impermissible (Haidt 20xx). 10
There is a direct parallel in linguistics. While (non-linguist) speakers of English
will immediately judge that (13) is ‘not-OK’
9
There are other more philosophical objections to this way of characterizing moral reasoning, see
especially McDowell 1979.
10
The difficulty agents have in providing justifications for their permissibility judgments is thought, by
some, to lend support to a view according to which moral judgments are the output of some affective (i.e.,
non-cognitive) system. Just as a speaker says of a *-ed sentence ‘it doesn’t sound right’, an agent might
say of a particular *-ed action, ‘it just doesn’t feel right’. However, it would be wholly unjustified to take
the dumbfounding of linguistic informants as evidence for the claim that their linguistic competence was
not something cognitive. I see no reason to make the related inference with respect to moral dumbfounding.
32
(13) *We congratulated themselves
they will not be able explain why it is. They’ll just say, ‘It doesn’t sound right’.
However, it is no count against linguistic inquiry aimed at uncovering the content of
speakers’ I-languages that speakers are unable to articulate parameterized principles that
‘justify’ their acceptability judgments. Linguists are expected to be able to articulate the
relevant principles. Even so, their job is not to justify speakers’ acceptability judgments,
but rather to explain them. Luigi makes the judgments he does because his idiolect is
characterized (in part) by the Null Subject Parameter being set to ‘on’. That is a
psychological fact about Luigi. He does not apply the relevant parameterized principle
either ‘intelligently’ or ‘conscientiously’ in his role as a native speaker of Italian; his
mind/brain just happens to be structured in a certain way.
Similarly, the moral psychologist who pursues the LA is concerned with what I
dubbed brute normativity, that is, the psychological structures and processes that underlie
the exercise of moral capacities. Arguably, these structures and processes can be
characterized, at some level of abstraction, in terms of explicit principles. But those
principles are formulated by the scholars who study moral capacities, not by the folk
studied. And crucially, we should not expect that, once articulated, these principles will
look anything like those products of philosophical labors – theories or principles of right
action.
I just said that the job of the linguist is not to justify speakers’ acceptability
judgments but to explain them, and I pressed the same point with respect to the moral
psychologist. However, one might wonder whether this is really kosher.
33
Linguists bootstrap their way to an articulation of the content of I-languages by
starting with speakers’ acceptability judgments. In this sense, it is correct to say that
acceptability judgments provide data for linguistic theory, and a theory that is radically at
odds with speakers’ judgments would fail on that account. Things seem to be quite
different with respect to morality because we expect a gap between agents’ permissibility
judgments and moral principles. Quite so. We cannot read a theory of right action off
the proffered judgments of agents and certainly not off their actions. But this does not
show that permissibility judgments cannot be treated as analogous to acceptability
judgments. Rather the point is simply illustrative of the distinction I described above
between brute and sophisticated normativity. The principles the linguist articulates are
intended as an abstract characterization of the structure of speakers’ competence; they are
not intended to provide speakers with guidance in their communicative endeavors.
Neither should we look to the principles the moral psychologist uncovers for moral
guidance. The moral psychologist’s job is to uncover the structures and processes that
make moral life possible. Pursuing the LA is, I have argued, the best way to go about
doing that. And, there is plenty of work left for moral philosophers.*
*Many thanks to . . .
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