ules of linguistic grammars. It is implausible to think they are acquired by means of explicit verbal instruction or examples in the child puma trionfo uk shops ’s environment (Harman, 2000a; Mikhail, 2000). Thus far I have focused mainly on the question of ontogeny, and I have defended the existence of a “Universal Moral G puma trainers for men rammar” analogous to the linguist’s notion of “Universal Grammar” (UG), that is, an innate function or morality acquisition device that maps the child’s early experience into the system of principles that constitutes the mature state of her moral competence (Mikhail, 2000, 2002a, 2002b; M pumas shoes 2011 ikhail, Sorrentino, & Spelke, 1998). A different set of issues emerges when we consider multiple individuals and the question of moral diversity (see figure 6.2.1.). In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus implies that some knowledge is innate, but the variety of human languages provides an upper bound on this hypothesis; what is innate must be consistent with the observed diversity of human languages. Because every child will acquire any natural language merely upon being placed in a suitable environment, UG must be rich and specifi c enough to get her over the learning hump but flexible enough to enable her to acquire different grammars in diff puma store canada erent linguistic contexts (Baker, 2001; Chomsky, 1986). John Mikhail CHILD’S LINGUISTIC DATA ? UG CHILD’S MORAL DATA ? UMG LINGUISTIC GRAMMAR English Japanese Zapotec Malagasy Arabic …… …… MORAL GRAMMAR How much diversity? Figure 6.2.1 Acquisition models for language and morality (Mikhail, 2002a). UG, Universal Grammar; UMG, Universal Moral Grammar. In the case of moral competence, it is unclear whether a similar tension exists between the goals of descriptive and explanatory adequacy. What we need are answers to two questions: (1) what are th cheap puma trainers e properties of the rule systems or “moral grammars” people do in fact acquire, and (2) how diverse are they? Sripada suggests there may be “too much variation in the contents of moral norms across human groups for a Principles and Parameters Model to accommodate” (p. 329), but this claim seems untenable; even a superficial comparison of morality and language reveals that moral competence is more constrained than linguistic competence. The systems of linguistic intuition children in diverse cultures acquire are not only discrepant but, in the normal course of events, mutually unintelligible. A child who grows up speaking English is typically unable to locate the word boundaries of Japanese or Arabic—let alone to decide whether novel expressions in these languages are grammatical or ungrammatical. Nothing comparabl pumas shoes 2011 e exists in the moral domain, where the same event— say, a man shooting at someone he thinks is a tree stump—often triggers equivalent intuitions in persons of culturally divergent backgrounds (Mikhail, 2002b). Comment on Sripada Furthermore, individuals frequently agree on how to analyze human actions into their main components: act, intent, motive, cause and effect, proximate and remote consequences, and other material (and immaterial) circumstances. If Sripada were correct, international human rights norms would be impossible, because the moral intuitions they embody, and their conceptual building blocks, would admit of too much variation. Yet the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Criminal Court, and other human rights instruments are real phenomena, which our theories must be consistent with, if not explain. Collectively, these agreements evince a degree of shared moral intuition which goes well beyond anything comparable in the case of language. Sripada considers a moral rule to be innate if it “reliably emerges . . . in a wide range of environmental conditions,” that is, “if the development of the rule does not depend on any specifi puma trionfo shoes c pattern of cultural input” (p. 323). If there are innate norms in this sense, he observes, we should expect to find them in all human groups. Are there any moral universals of this sort? Sripada writes: This question must be handled with some care since many candidate norm universals are problematic because they verge on being analytic—true in virtue of meaning alone. For example “Murder is wrong” and “Theft is wrong” don’t count as legitimate universals since, roughly speaking, “murder” simply means killing someone else in a way which is not permissible, and “theft” simply means taking something from another in a way which is not permissible. For this reason, it is important, whenever possib puma trainers for men le, to frame the contents of norms in a non-normative vocabulary. While analytic principles like “Murder is wrong” . . . may be universals, the specifi c rules that regulate the circumstances under which killing . . . is permitted are not so nearly uniform across groups. (p. 323) There are two fallacies speed ca Puma canada t big 2011 in this passage, one concerning analyticity and the other diversity. First, Sripada is mistaken to assume that propositions like “Murder is wrong” are analytic, that is, true in virtue of meaning alone. In fact, they are synthetic: the predicate “wrongful” (“impermissible,” etc.) is not built into the concept of murder—as Locke2 and Hume,3 among others, emphasized, and as any well-functioning criminal code will attest.4 Second, the specific circumstances in which intentional killing is held to be justifiable or excusable are not as diverse as Sripada suggests. In fact, the justifications and excuses one finds in the literature on legal anthropology and comparative criminal law are remarkably similar and consist of a finite list of familiar patterns: mistake of fact, necessity, self-defense, defense of others, duress, insanity, provocation, and a handful of others. Moreover, their intersection is non-null: there are at least some acts of John Mikhail killing which all nations permit and at least some which all nations condemn (for extended discussion of these issues, see Mikhail, 2002b). Finally, it is important to note that the fact that “murder is wrong” is a synthetic proposition and thus signifies something more than an empty tautology (“wrongful killing is wrong”) is a property shared by other common moral and legal prohibitions. Theft, battery, rape, fraud—in each case, the defi niendum is complex but can be explicated in a non-normative vocabulary. Each of these concepts consists of the concurrence of specifi c acts and mental states and of the absence of specified justifying or excusing conditions. Although not widely appreciated, the significance of this observation for the theory of moral cognition should not be underestimated. Among other things, it implies that moral judgment exhibits the poverty of the stimulus at the level of perceptual processes themselves. In eac puma speedcat suede h of these examples, there is “more information in [the] perceptual response than there is in the proximal stimulus that prompts the response; hence perceptual integration must somehow involve contribution of information by the perceiving organism” (Fodor, 1985, p. 2). We puma trionfo are thus led to inquire about the nature of this contribution. What are the precise character and scope of these prohibitions? What are the properties of the mental representations they presuppose? What is the chain of operations by which the mind converts the undifferentiated stimulus into a representation which has these properties, and to what extent is this process informationally encapsulated? Why, among logically possible alternatives, are these computations used and not others? Questions like these do not admit of easy answers, but I believe they are the right place to start if we are to make progress in understanding the nature and origin of moral knowledge. Whether models incorporating parametric variation will ultimately play a role in this endeavor is yet to be determined. What seems clear, however, is that moral psychology must begin by isolating and describing as accurately as possible the system of moral competence that underlies the intuitive moral judg Puma online canada ments which people do in fact make, and to do so within a mentalistic framework. Viewed from this perspective, and in light of the available evidence, Sripada’s rejection of the argument from the poverty of the moral stimulus seems both premature and unfounded. Notes 1. Rawls operationalizes the notion of a considered judgment by stipulating a set of necessary conditions moral judgments must satisfy to be a member of this class. Comment on Sripada Among other features, considered judgments must be spontaneous, stable, impartial, intuitive, fully informed, and made with certitude. They also must not be made under duress, “when we are upse