Abstract It is widely agreed upon that morality guides people with conflicting interests towards agreements of mutual benefit. We therefore might expect numerous proposals for organizing human moral cognition around the logic of bargaining, negotiation, and agreement. Yet, while “contractualist” ideas play an important role in moral philosophy, they are starkly underrepresented in the field of moral psychology. From a contractualist perspective, ideal moral judgments are those that would be agreed to by rational bargaining agents—an idea with wide-spread support in philosophy, psychology, economics, biology, and cultural evolution. As a practical matter, however, investing time and effort in negotiating every interpersonal interaction is unfeasible. Instead, we propose, people use abstractions and heuristics to efficiently identify mutually beneficial arrangements. We argue that many well-studied elements of our moral minds, such as reasoning about others’ utilities (“consequentialist” reasoning) or evaluating intrinsic ethical properties of certain actions (“deontological” reasoning), can be naturally understood as resource-rational approximations of a contractualist ideal. Moreover, this view explains the flexibility of our moral minds—how our moral rules and standards get created, updated and overridden and how we deal with novel cases we have never seen before. Thus, the apparently fragmentary nature of our moral psychology—commonly described in terms of systems in conflict—can be largely unified around the principle of finding mutually beneficial agreements under resource constraint. Our resulting “triple theory” of moral cognition naturally integrates contractualist, consequentialist and deontological concerns.

Sydney Levine

Nick Chater

Joshua B Tenenbaum

Fiery Cushman

Behavioral and Brain Sciences

BBS 是国际知名期刊，采用开放同行评论的创新格式。心理学、神经科学、行为生物学或认知科学的任何领域的研究人员发表了特别重要和有争议的作品，以及这些学科内和跨学科专家对每篇文章的 10-25 条评论，以及作者对它们的回应. 结果是一个引人入胜的独特论坛，用于交流、批评、刺激，特别是从分子神经生物学到人工智能和心灵哲学的行为和脑科学研究的统一。

Behavioral and Brain Sciences is an internationally renowned journal that employs an innovative open peer review format. Researchers from fields such as psychology, neuroscience, behavioral biology, and cognitive science publish particularly significant and controversial works here. Each article receives 10 to 25 comments from experts within and across disciplines, to which the authors respond. The result is an engaging and unique forum for communication, critique, and stimulation, particularly in the unified study of behavioral and brain sciences, ranging from molecular neurobiology to artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind.

《Behavioral and Brain Sciences》是一本国际知名的期刊，采用开放同行评审的创新格式。心理学、神经科学、行为生物学和认知科学等领域的研究人员在此发表特别重要和有争议的研究成果。每篇文章都会收到10到25条来自该领域内及跨学科专家的评论，作者也会对此进行回应。最终形成了一个引人入胜的独特论坛，促进了从分子神经生物学到人工智能和心灵哲学等领域的行为与脑科学研究的交流与批评。

Category	Quartile
心理学	1
心理学, 行为科学	1
心理学, 神经科学	1
心理学, 心理学生物	1

Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition

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Journal Info

Category	Quartile
PSYCHOLOGY, BIOLOGICAL	1