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Conclusion

Discoveries in moral psychology can undermine, and support, ethical principles if either or both of Foot’s or Kamm’s broad approaches are not entirely misguided. Does this mean Kant (1870, p. AK 4:425–6) was wrong? Not obviously. If we adopt Thomson’s other method of trolley cases, there is no straightforward role for discoveries in moral psychology. Nor do arguments from framing effects appear sufficient to establish that discoveries in moral psychology are ethically relevant (contra Rini, 2013 and Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008). But perhaps our perspective will change when we attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the psychology of ethical judgements.

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Notes

References

Kant, I. (1870). Grundlegung zur metaphysik der sitten. Berlin: L. Heimann.
Rini, R. A. (2013). Making psychology normatively significant. The Journal of Ethics, 17(3), 257–274.
Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2008). Reply to tolhurst and shafer-landau. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology: Intuition and diversity. The cognitive science of morality (Vol. 2, pp. 97–105). Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press.