Got My Mind Set on You. Mental Model Theory and Deontics

In this paper, I comment upon some of the ideas that professors Bucciarelli and Johnson-Laird articulate in their essay Deontics: meaning, reasoning, and emotions. The paper is divided in two sections. In the first – devoted to examining some perplexities about their treatment of deontics – I detect a possible basic contradiction in their theory, I discuss the status of normative conditionals within their proposal, and cast some doubts on the corroboration of the mental model theory presumptively provided by the prediction of certain fallacies. In the second section, I elaborate on the identification of moral norms and the two first principles of morality discussed by the authors (viz. the principle of moral inconsistency and the principle of deontic reasoning).