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ETHICAL_FACULTY

                                             April     02, 2013
                                             September 01, 2013



                                     http://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n23/colin-mcginn/in-and-out-of-the-mind

Colin McGinn,"In and out of the mind"
London Review of Books,
Vol. 15 No. 23 · 2 December 1993
(A review of "Philosophy" by Hilary Putnam):

  "Moreover, according to Chomsky, it is plausible to see our
  ethical faculty as analogous to our language faculty: we
  acquire ethical knowledge with very little explicit
  instruction, without great intellectual labour, and the
  end-result is remarkably uniform given the variety of ethical
  input we receive. The environment serves merely to trigger and
  specialise an innate schematism. Thus the ethical systems of
  different cultures or epochs are plausibly seen as analogous to
  the different languages people speak-- an underlying universal
  structure gets differentiated into specific cultural
  products. So, while science must depend on faculties whose
  biological purpose is not itself science-- or anything very
  close to science-- ethics seems far more deeply embedded in our
  original mental design. Perhaps the innate system of
  commonsense psychology, installed to negotiate our social
  relations, contains the resources for generating the basic
  principles of ethics. But there is surely no prospect that
  knowledge of quantum physics or evolutionary theory will be
  found to stem thus directly from anything with a well-defined
  biological function. On the Chomskyan model, both science and
  ethics are natural products of contingent human psychology,
  constrained by its specific constitutive principles; but ethics
  looks to have the securer basis in our cognitive
  architecture. There is an element of luck to our possession of
  scientific knowledge that is absent in the case of our ethical
  knowledge."



                               (But whoever heard
                                of an ethical faculty?)



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