Shaun Nichols is Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University.

• Preface


• PART I: RATIONALITY AND RULES


• 1: Rationality and morality: Setting the stage


• 2: The wrong and the bad: On the nature of moral representations


• PART II: STATISTICAL LEARNING OF NORM SYSTEMS


• 3: Scope


• 4: Priors


• 5: Closure


• 6: Status


• PART III: PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS


• 7: Moral empiricism


• 8: Rational rules and normative propriety


• 9: Rational rules, relativism, and universalism


• 10: Is it rational to be moral?

Rational Rules argues that moral learning can be understood in terms of general-purpose rational learning procedures. Nichols provides statistical learning accounts of some fundamental aspects of moral development, combining aspects of traditional empiricist and rationalist approaches.