How Should We Conceptualize the World for the Purposes of Moral Theory?

Suppose there is a clash between the verdicts we get when we train our evaluative focus on the world as conceptualized in ordinary ways — i.e. in terms of doing and allowing, harm, intention, consent, property, speech, and so on — and those we get when we focus on the world as conceptualized in the colder, more alien ways afforded by analyses of these ordinary concepts. Should either way of framing or conceptualizing the world be granted priority in ethical theory? This paper aims to make a bit of progress on this question, using Jonathan Bennett’s argument against the moral significance of the making/allowing distinction as a case study. I argue that we should give priority to the colder, more analytic framings — certainly in the context of Bennett’s argument, and perhaps elsewhere, too; I adduce evidence from the psychology and neuroscience of moral judgment in support of the idea that such framings may be free from biases that infect framings/descriptions in terms of the aforementioned ordinary concepts.