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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

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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.
When mentioning "people who refuse to kill an innocent person (Para. 2) ," the author is trying to make the point that
选项 A、public interests should be emphasized.
B、victims should be properly attended to.
C、great thinkers can win much respect.
D、absolutists may earn more trust.
答案D
解析 (1)根据题干关键词定位至第2段，但本题需要结合第1段的论点进行判断。(2)第1段提出，“许多善于思考的人会认为，‘刻板’具有贬义”，但“科研发现，多数人信任的是专断者，而非权衡者”(第l段：trust the absolutists)。(3)第2段提到了“为挽救他人生命，拒绝杀死无辜者的人，被认为更可信”(第2段：trustworthy)，“那么据此得出的推断便是，总体而言，这赋予了刻板者更多的信任”。换言之，作者讨论的观点是该项[D]的内容。
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