A theory of moral categorization: The conceptual performance of moral cognition

Abstract

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According to some traditional theories of categorization, human beings conceptually represent reality through judgments of similarity between the relevant features of some case, and the well-defined features of the concept that stands for the case. However, abstract concepts used with a moral sense do not have phenomenological resemblance with the cases they denote. In addition, concepts typically deployed in moral judgments are subject to semantic variation. Instead, this article proposes that moral categorization is based on an operational test that verifies whether certain impersonal (generic) and unconditional commands are observed or not in each specific case. The process of moral categorization is described using a cognitive procedure called "categorization by testing the command", consisting of five steps, namely: Descriptive stage, non-normative evaluation, normative question, conditional rule, and categorial construal. Finally, the phenomena of semantic polarity and semantic variation applied to the field of moral cognition are analyzed, to show how the proposed model can address the effects of these interpretive mechanisms.