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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  21
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.
To put morality in perspective, it is crucial that you should
选项 A、stick to commonsense morality.
B、rise above moral principles.
C、show sympathy for the innocent.
D、have faith in the justice system.
答案A
解析 (1)本题与上一题的解题思路一致。(2)第3段否定了宗教玄奥的道德观，提出了道德观应该是“支配人际交往的原则”的观点。第4段继而提出“这才是我们应该看待道德观的方式”(第4段：precisely，none the worse)，这就是题干To put morality in perspective的内容。(3)之后作者提出了建议，“你无需假设任何超验的准则参考”(第4段：transcendental source for the principles)，“你只需要考虑让我们生存和繁荣的因素”(第4段：to live and flourish)。言外之意便是“常识性的观念”。(4)其实，第2段的to save the lives of many others(挽救生命)而非for the greater good(为了更伟大的善行)，就已经暗示出了人们道德观的“现实性、实际性”。综合这些分析，确定选项[A]为最佳答案。
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