ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that moral theories are rationalizations; attempts to clarify and generalize engineers adaptive moral grammar. Moral philosophers have spent centuries developing sophisticated theories like utilitarianism and libertarianism to go beyond engineers intuitive moral judgments in making predictions about which actions are wrong or permissible. There is an infinite number of internally consistent but completely ridiculous moral theories. The theories that people take seriously aren't just internally consistent; they also match most of engineers pre-theoretical intuitions about which actions are wrong and right. Theories like Kantian ethics and libertarianism appear to be about real entities like rights and dignity but these entities don't really exist. Instead, they are rationalizations created to clarify and generalize the moral grammar and maximize individual interests in repeated cooperation games. Joshua Greene has argued that moral theories based on rights are better explained as rationalizations of the moral psychology than by reference to actual objects in the world called "rights".
