The origins of moral principles

I present a model of the origin of explicit moral principles, focusing on a case study of three deontic principles prohibiting harmful behaviors. People construct and revise moral principles in response to their own intuitive judgments of particular cases Explicit moral principles therefore reflect the basic structure of the cognitive systems that generate our intuitive moral judgments. Because intuitive moral judgments depend critically on an assessment of causal responsibility and mental culpability, those same causal and mental state analyses figure prominently in explicit moral theories. But our moral theories also seem to draw distinctions that may not be explicitly represented in cognitive mechanism specific to the moral domain, even though they are present in our moral judgments. Some distinctions in our moral judgments are actually derived from general mechanisms of causal and mental state attribution. These distinctions carry over to affect our moral judgments because domain-specific mechanisms of moral judgment draw on non-moral causal and mental state representations. This model does not account for the origins of all moral principles, but it does illustrate the ways in which the structure of certain explicit theories and principles may ultimately reflect not the structure in the world, but rather the structure of our minds.