# At the Heart of Morality Lies Folk Psychology

*Guglielmo, Monroe & Malle · Trust & Interpersonal, Critique & Boundary · Inquiry · 2009 · Open access*

Guglielmo, Monroe and Malle argue that moral judgement, and blame in particular, is built on folk psychology, the everyday theory of mind with which people infer others' intentions, choices and reasons. Blame, on their account, is not a raw emotional reflex but a structured, ordered assessment: people move through a sequence of folk-psychological questions, whether there was an agent who caused the outcome, then whether the act was intentional, then, depending on that answer, either what reasons the agent had (for intentional acts) or whether they could and should have prevented it (for unintentional ones). Each step gates the next, so that, for instance, questions of intentionality are moot until an agent is identified as having caused the harm; the authors and their collaborators later formalise this as a step model of blame. The upshot is that blame is a reasoned attribution grounded in beliefs about mind, which is precisely why it is so sensitive to context: change what is understood about intention, capacity or the available alternatives and the blame changes with it. For a corpus that treats blame as accountability stripped of context, this supplies the cognitive anatomy underneath that claim: it shows that blame depends, step by step, on judgements about what a person meant, chose and could have done, and therefore that the reflexive rush to blame at the sharp end is a failure to run the very process the mind is capable of. The limits are ones of domain and level: this is a paper in moral and philosophical psychology built on judgement experiments, not an organisational study, so its application to workplace accountability and psychological safety is an extension rather than a finding. (Text drawn from the 2009 Inquiry paper, 52(5), pp. 449-466.)

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