Inductive reasoning: Competence or skill?

alleged fallacy is in interpreting experiments according to what is advocated by Western moral experts. However, we believe that this argument in fact also provides good grounds for the case of minority intuitions. It has long been maintained that affect and cognition play complementary rather than opposite roles in higher-order psychological processes (Hilgard 1980). The moral expert who views justice in terms of fairness and rationality advocates generalizable decisions made by assuming the role of disadvantaged persons (Kohlberg 1973). To do this effectively requires both cognitive and affective skills. Again, base rate information may be less relevant to expert intuitions than the possession of a rich and varied sociocultural experience, possibly one that draws from extensive anthropological work (Shweder, Turiel & Much 1981). On the one hand, it may be that because of ignorance or lack of education, persons in some cultures would appear less able to take the role of the other in making moral judgments. On the other hand, given the difficulty of designing culture-free tests of moral development (Siegal 1982), it may be that all cultures are equally ignorant or defective in education and that empirical measures are not sensitive enough to give clear indications of the cognitive and affective elements in moral behaviour. However, in either case, irrationality cannot be experimentally demonstrated, and we need the minority intuitions of skilled moral experts to make progress in designing and interpreting experiments on these normative questions.