Shaun Nichols’s new book, Rational Rules, is the most creative and interesting response to moral nativism to appear since the naturalistic turn in moral psychology that began several decades ago. Moral nativism holds that the best explanation of how children acquire the moral grammars that generate their moral intuitions entails that at least some of their core attributes have an innate basis. Inspired by classical rationalism, its main argument is the poverty of the stimulus. Nichols accepts the basic nativist observation that the moral rules children acquire are surprisingly rich and complex in relation to the relevant evidence, but he maintains that the acquisition process can be explained by statistical learning, rather than innate endowment. His key argument is that the same principles that underpin statistical learning in other domains can explain how children acquire their moral rules. The picture that emerges on Nichols’s account is thus empiricist rather...
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