Duke University, Social Science Research Institute, Durham, NC, USA.
Duke University, Department of Philosophy, Durham, NC, USA.
Cognition. 2016 May;150:20-5. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.01.013. Epub 2016 Feb 2.
Recently, psychologists have explored moral concepts including obligation, blame, and ability. While little empirical work has studied the relationships among these concepts, philosophers have widely assumed such a relationship in the principle that "ought" implies "can," which states that if someone ought to do something, then they must be able to do it. The cognitive underpinnings of these concepts are tested in the three experiments reported here. In Experiment 1, most participants judge that an agent ought to keep a promise that he is unable to keep, but only when he is to blame for the inability. Experiment 2 shows that such "ought" judgments correlate with judgments of blame, rather than with judgments of the agent's ability. Experiment 3 replicates these findings for moral "ought" judgments and finds that they do not hold for nonmoral "ought" judgments, such as what someone ought to do to fulfill their desires. These results together show that folk moral judgments do not conform to a widely assumed philosophical principle that "ought" implies "can." Instead, judgments of blame play a modulatory role in some judgments of obligation.
最近，心理学家们研究了包括义务、责备和能力在内的道德概念。虽然很少有实证研究探讨这些概念之间的关系，但哲学家们普遍认为，在“应该”意味着“能够”的原则中存在这种关系，该原则指出，如果某人应该做某事，那么他必须能够做这件事。这里报告的三个实验测试了这些概念的认知基础。在实验 1 中，大多数参与者判断，一个代理人应该遵守他无法遵守的承诺，但只有当他对无法遵守的情况负责时才会这样判断。实验 2 表明，这种“应该”的判断与责备的判断相关，而不是与代理人能力的判断相关。实验 3 复制了这些关于道德“应该”判断的发现，并发现它们不适用于非道德的“应该”判断，例如某人应该做什么来满足他们的欲望。这些结果共同表明，民间道德判断不符合普遍假设的哲学原则，即“应该”意味着“能够”。相反，责备的判断在某些义务判断中起着调节作用。
