Le Pargneux Arthur
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Behavioural Science Group, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci. 2025 Jul-Aug;16(4):e70011. doi: 10.1002/wcs.70011.
Contractualist moral theories view morality as a matter of mutually beneficial agreements among rational agents. Compared to its rivals in moral philosophy-consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics-contractualism has only recently started to attract attention in empirical work on the cognitive science of morality. Is it fruitful to adopt a contractualist lens to better understand how moral cognition works? After introducing the main contractualist theories in contemporary moral philosophy, I present five reasons to take inspiration from this family of normative theories to develop descriptive accounts of morality. Then, I review how the contractualist framework has been used to contribute to our understanding of moral cognition at three interrelated levels of analysis: Morality's evolutionary logic, its cognitive organization, and the specific cognitive processes and forms of reasoning involved in moral judgment and decision making. First, several evolutionary accounts of morality argue that its evolutionary logic must be understood in contractualist terms. Second, resource-rational contractualism proposes that the subcomponents of moral cognition-including well-studied rule- and outcome-based mechanisms, and much less studied agreement-based processes-are organized to efficiently approximate the outcome of explicit negotiation under resource constraints. Third, recent empirical developments suggest that three characteristically contractualist forms of reasoning-virtual bargaining, we-reasoning, and universalization-can be involved in producing moral judgments and decisions in a variety of contexts. Beyond the traditional distinction between rules and consequences, these various research programs open a third way for the cognitive science of morality, one based on agreement. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making Economics > Interactive Decision-Making Philosophy > Value.
契约主义道德理论将道德视为理性主体之间互利协议的问题。与道德哲学中的竞争对手——后果主义、义务论和美德伦理学相比，契约主义直到最近才开始在道德认知科学的实证研究中受到关注。采用契约主义视角来更好地理解道德认知是如何运作的，这是否富有成效？在介绍当代道德哲学中的主要契约主义理论后，我提出了五个理由，以从这一规范性理论家族中汲取灵感，来发展对道德的描述性解释。然后，我回顾了契约主义框架是如何在三个相互关联的分析层面上被用于增进我们对道德认知的理解的：道德的进化逻辑、其认知组织，以及道德判断和决策中涉及的具体认知过程和推理形式。首先，几种关于道德的进化解释认为，其进化逻辑必须从契约主义的角度来理解。其次，资源理性契约主义提出，道德认知的子成分——包括经过充分研究的基于规则和结果的机制，以及研究较少的基于协议的过程——是为了在资源限制下有效地近似明确谈判的结果而组织起来的。第三，最近的实证进展表明，三种典型的契约主义推理形式——虚拟讨价还价、我们推理和普遍化——可以在各种情境中参与产生道德判断和决策。除了规则和后果之间的传统区别之外，这些不同的研究项目为道德认知科学开辟了第三条道路，一条基于协议的道路。本文分类如下：心理学>推理与决策；经济学>交互式决策；哲学>价值。
