Freedom and Moral Judgment. A Cognitive Model of Permissibility

Contemporary research in the fields of moral psychology and cognitive philosophy has provided considerable data supporting the claim that there are important similarities in the ways in which different people conceive of morality and produce moral judgments. However, one of the more pressing questions is how to account for the fact that, despite these similarities, moral judgments appear to be highly variable both on a cultural and individual level. This paper addresses this issue by developing a model which is inverted with respect to the one usually embraced by the cognitive literature on morality. Instead of analyzing the problem of moral judgment starting from all the actions that are considered impermissible, this work assumes that people first judge which actions are morally permissible. Permissibility is interpreted in terms of what each subject feels he/she must be free to do. The advantage of this inversion is that it allows us to make a connection between two lines of research that are usually considered unrelated: research on the processes underlying the production of moral judgments and research on the problem of determining how people understand ‘freedom’. Regarding this latter issue, the article focusses specifically on George Lakoff’s cognitive analysis of how humans develop their concepts of freedom. The starting point of Lakoff’s analysis is that different groups and different individuals do not have the same understanding of ‘freedom’, even though everybody shares the common empirical core concept. Lakoff puts forward a model which aims to explain both the common cognitive ground of the various concepts of freedom and how these concepts depending on other cognitive elements connected to them. In this work we try to show that Lakoff’s model can provide an explanation of moral judgment that accounts for both the cross-cultural and trans-individual similarities and the cultural, individual and situational differences.