particular deeds of particular people, but there is no way to see how
these apply to different situations unless one completes the story with
the appropriate inferences. It is all very well to know that a good
Samaritan gave away his coat to clothe the naked, but how does that
translate into quite different conditions of life? So models are good
only if you already have some intuitions about where and when they
should be followed, and in what way.
To say that codes are too general and models too specific is only
part of the explanation. There must be something else that makes the
"interested parties" connection plausible to human minds. So far, I
[174] have described these links from religion to morality as if morality was
a simple matter of what is proscribed and what is encouraged. But it is
far more complex than that.
MORAL REASONING AND MORAL FEELINGS
We all have moral intuitions ("My friend left her purse here, I must
give it back to her"), moral judgements ("He should have returned his
friend's purse"), moral feelings ("He stole his friend's purse, how
revolting!"), moral principles ("Stealing is wrong") and moral concepts
("wrong", "right"). How is all this organized in the mind? There are
two possible ways of describing the mental processes engaged. On the
one hand, moral judgements seem to be organized by a system of rules
and inferences. People seem to have some notion of very general prin-
ciples (e.g., "Do not harm other people unless they harmed you"; "Do
unto others as you would have them do unto you"; etc.). These pro-
vide very general templates. If you fill the placeholders in the tem-
plates with particular values—the names of the people involved, the
nature of the action considered—you reach a certain description of the
situation with a moral tag. This is called the moral reasoning model. On
the other hand, in many cases people just seem to feel particular emo-
tions when faced with particular situations and particular courses of
action. Without having a clear notion of why we have a particular
reaction, we know that doing this rather than that triggers emotional
effects that goad us in one direction rather than the other, or that
make us proud to have done the right thing, guilty if we did not,
revolted if others did not, etc. This is a moral feeling model.^2
If we follow people's explicit reasoning about the moral dimensions
of a particular situation, we observe a seeming mix of these twoRELIGION EXPLAINED