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

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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 is generally believed that "rigidity" connotes something
选项 A、sophisticated.
B、mechanical.
C、changeable.
D、sociable.
答案B
解析 (1)根据题目顺序，本题出处定位在第1段。注意题干询问的是大众的观点。(2)根据文章，第一类人“持有绝对道德原则，是非分明”(第1段：absolute)，第二类人“在判断之前，权衡是非”(第1段：rights and wrongs)，哪一类人能够获得更多的信任?(3)作者推测，许多人会认为第一类人更易获得信任。“刻板”(第1段：Rigidity)被视为含有贬义，而“含糊其辞”被视为世故。第1段中，absolute，black and white，rigidity这些词相互照应，其内涵为“缺乏变通，呆板，机械式的”。因此，选项[B]为最佳答案。
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