will try to show that nativist conceptions of moral cognition are relevant to deciding the
plausibility of pluralism and absolutism.
Cognitive Science: Nativism
Nativism is the view that specific properties of the mind are constrained by biologically
innate factors. Moral nativism is the view that human moral judgments are largely constrained
by innate factors (1). In time, a more specific conception of moral nativism may develop as we
learn more about the precise forms that these constraints take. There are good reasons for
believing in moral nativism, and this is relevant in deciding whether or not there may be
irresolvable moral conflicts. At first blush, it might seem that moral nativism militates against
pluralism. But maybe not; in fact, moral nativism may help us better understand how value
conflicts can be irresolvable.
The classic case for nativism in the cognitive sciences is Noam Chomsky’s poverty-of-
the-stimulus argument for syntactic nativism (1980: 34). According to Chomsky, if a perceptual
stimulus contains less information than the response, then the response is partly due to
information already encoded in the organism. In the case of language, the poverty-of-the-
stimulus argument is the claim that the knowledge acquired in mastering a language is much
greater than the information found in the environment. It is obvious that the environment plays a
crucial role in language acquisition, but, for Chomsky, the environment alone cannot explain the
richness and complexity of the linguistic knowledge acquired. Nor can it fully account for the
sameness of what is acquired from one child to another (Laurence and Margolis, 2001).
Chomsky speaks of the linguistic input, the data that the child receives, as “degenerate,”
meaning that the child hears misleading or incomplete utterances. Children hear utterances
which are broken off by hesitation or interrupted by coughing or distorted by a stammer, or the