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  3. Who would you trust more, someone whose moral principles are absolute, black and white, or someone who carefully considers the r

Who would you trust more, someone whose moral principles are absolute, black and white, or someone who carefully considers the r

admin2017-02-28  25
问题     Who would you trust more, someone whose moral principles are absolute, black and white, or someone who carefully considers the rights and wrongs of specific situations before leaping to judgment? My guess is that most people reading this would say the former. " Rigidity" is a dirty word for most thinking folk, and being comfortable with ambiguity the hallmark of sophistication. But according to new research by experimental psychologists at Oxford and Cornell, in practice most people trust the absolutists more than the ponderers.
    In fact, all the experiments show is that people who refuse to kill an innocent person to save the lives of many others are considered more trustworthy than those who would do so for the greater good. It’s quite an inferential leap to go from that to the view that rigidity in general confers trust.
    Nonetheless, there is something suggestive in these findings that challenges an assumption we’ve inherited from the kind of religious ethics most in Britain no longer follow. It’s the idea that morality in some sense stands above human behaviour, representing an external standard we have to conform to. Our goal is to do the right thing, to make the choice that is judged as the best one from some kind of impartial viewpoint. But what if this is profoundly misguided? What if morality is in fact nothing more than a system for managing social interaction, a way of promoting harmony and keeping us from each other’s throats?
    We have very good reasons for thinking this is precisely how we should view morality, and it is none the worse for it. Morality is primarily a matter of how we should treat others, for the good of everyone. You don’t need to posit any kind of transcendental source for the principles that should govern this. All you need to think about is what helps us to live and flourish.
    If this is what morality is, then it is not difficult to see why we should prefer simple, fixed rules to case-by-case calculations. First, for morality to work as a social system we need others to be predictable. If we cannot be sure whether someone might decide to kill us tomorrow in order to save others, we can never be sure that we are safe from anyone. We can have no faith in a justice system that allows the odd innocent to be punished in order to deter those who might otherwise harm even more. So although having a fixed rule that we should never harm the innocent might sometimes result in more innocent people being harmed, on balance the price we pay for that is much less than the cost of uncertainty. From a social point of view, the predictability and reliability of moral behaviour are much more important than getting it right from some abstract, intellectual perspective.
It can be safely concluded from the text that most people are much attracted to
选项 A、those who do no harm to the common good.
B、people who follow religious rituals.
C、those of great reliability rather than intellectuals.
D、victims whose sufferings are predictable.
答案C
解析 (1)本题难度很大。根据题目顺序，出处可定位至最后一段(第5段)。(2)根据文章，“如果人们遵从的是常识道德观，难怪偏爱的是简单和僵化的准则”(第5段：prefer simple，fixed rules)——照应了篇首的absolutists。之后作者进行了分析：其一，“这种社会体系下的道德观有有效，他人是可以预测的”(第5段：predictable)，之后作者强调了“可预测性和确定性”的重要性(第5段：sure)；其二，“尽管僵化的准则有弊端”(第5段：a fixed rule)，“这是为了获得确定性付出的代价”(第5段：pay for，uncertainty)。(3)最后，作者的结论便是：“可预测性和可靠性”更为重要。因此，最合理的推断便是选项[C]。
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