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Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2024

Sydney Levine Open the ORCID record for Sydney Levine [Opens in a new window] ,
Nick Chater ,
Joshua Tenenbaum  and
Fiery Cushman
Sydney Levine*
Affiliation:
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA smlevine@mit.edu jbt@mit.edu Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA cushman@fas.harvard.edu Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Seattle, WA, USA
Nick Chater
Affiliation:
Warwick Business School, The University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Nick.Chater@wbs.ac.uk
Joshua Tenenbaum
Affiliation:
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA smlevine@mit.edu jbt@mit.edu Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Fiery Cushman
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA cushman@fas.harvard.edu
*
Corresponding author: Sydney Levine; Email: smlevine@mit.edu
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Short abstract

We present a novel theory of moral cognition organized around resource-rational contractualism. From a contractualist perspective, ideal moral judgments are those that would be agreed to by rational bargaining agents—an idea with widespread 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.

Keywords

contractualismethicsmoral psychologyresource-rationalitysocial cognition

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Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 49 , 2026 , e133
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© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

Joint senior author

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