moral heuristics are pervasive, and they produce moral errors. we can identify those errors as such even if we do not endorse any contentious moral view. to accept this point, it is also unnecessary to make controversial claims about moral truth. but the notion of moral heuristics can be understood in diverse ways, and a great deal of work remains to be done in understanding the nature of moral intuitions, especially those that operate automatically and nonreflectively, and in exploring the possibility of altering such intuitions through modest changes in context and narrative.

the experiments proposed in the article by steels & belpaeme (s&b) can be considered as a starting point toward a general methodology for the automatic learning of conceptual spaces.

consideration of color alone can give a misleading impression of the three approaches to category coordination: the nativist, empiricist and culturalist models. empiricist models can benefit from a wider range of correlational information in the environment. also, all three approaches may explain a set of perceptual categories within the human repertoire. finally, a suggestion is offered for supplementing the naming game by varying the social status of agents.

to vallortigara & rogers's (v&r's) evidence of everyday directional asymmetries in the natural environment of a variety of species, we offer one more example for human beings. it is the bias for holding an infant on the left side, and it illustrates several themes in the target article.

Studies with humans have failed to produce evidence that any direct causal relation exists between the asymmetry of one function in an individual and the asymmetry of a different function in that individual. Without such evidence, factors external to an individual’s nervous system, such as social interactions, may play crucial roles in explaining the directions of all asymmetries at all levels.

an evolutionarily stable strategy (ess) may apply to characters expressed across species for predation and feeding, because these characters are conservative. however, the evolution of complex, polymorphic behaviors is more difficult to define as an ess. lateralization may be selective for certain simple traits, but lateralization of complex traits is likely the result of coadaptation of otherwise non-lateralized features.

i suggest that a communicative context that has the potential to establish and maintain a shared advantage of behavioral lateralization should be identified in the domain of sexual selection, specifically in the interactions that individuals exploit to assess the fitness of potential mates.

the general structure of steels & belpaeme's (s&b's) central premise is appealing. theoretical stances that focus on one type of mechanism miss the fact that multiple mechanisms acting in concert can provide convergent constraints for a more robust capacity than any individual mechanism might achieve acting in isolation. however, highlighting the significance of complex constraint interactions raises the possibility that some of the relevant constraints may have been left out of s&b's own models. although abstract modeling can help clarify issues, it also runs the risk of oversimplification and misframing. a more subtle implication of the significance of interacting constraints is that it calls for a close relationship between theoretical and empirical research.

Similar to directional asymmetries in animals, language lateralization in humans follows a bimodal distribution. A majority of individuals are lateralized to the left and a minority of individuals are lateralized to the right side of the brain. However, a biological advantage for either lateralization is lacking. The scenario outlined by Vallortigara & Rogers (V&R) suggests that language lateralization in humans is not specific to language or human speciation but simply follows an evolutionarily conserved organizational principle of the brain.

sunstein argues that heuristics misguide moral judgments. principles that are normally sound falter in unusual cases. in particular, heuristics generate erroneous judgments about regulation of risks. sunstein's map of moral reasoning omits some prominent contours. the simple heuristics he suggests neglect a reasoner's attempt to balance the pros and cons of regulating a risk.

Vallortigara & Rogers (V&R) assume that the alignment of escape responses in gregarious species is the central evolutionary organizer of a wide range of cerebral asymmetries. Although it is indeed likely that the benefits of a population asymmetry in social species outweigh its costs, it is hard to see (a) why the population should not oscillate between two subgroups with mirror-image asymmetries, (b) why solitary animals should keep their inherited population asymmetry despite a resulting fitness reduction, and (c) and why so many vertebrate species have comparable cerebral asymmetries.

steels & belpaeme's (s&b's) simulations contain all the right components, but they are put together wrongly. color categories are unrepresentative of categories in general and language is not merely naming. language evolved because it provided a powerful new way to acquire categories (through instruction, rather than just the old way of other species, through trial-and-error experience). it did not evolve so that multiple agents looking at the same objects could let one another know which of the objects they had in mind, co-coining names for them on the fly.

We present behavioral lateralizations of spiders and ants and their probable survival value. They clearly conform to the vertebrate lateralizations reviewed by Vallortigara & Rogers (V&R) and to earlier arthropod studies. We suggest two complementary reviews: (1) differences in lesion susceptibility and muscle strength between left and right body side, and (2) perceptual biases and predator inspection in invertebrates.

if language is crucial to the development of shared colour categories, how might cultural constraints influence the development of divergent category sets? we propose that communities arrive at different sets of categories because the tendency to group by perceptual similarity interacts with environmental factors (differential access to dying and printing technologies), to make different systems optimal for communication in different situations.

Natural selection of asymmetric traits operates at multiple levels. Some asymmetric traits (like having a dominant eye) are tied to more universal aspects of the environment and are coded genetically, while others (like pedestrian turning biases) are tied to more ephemeral patterns and are largely learned. Species-wide trends of asymmetry can be better modeled when different levels of natural selection are specified.

a common objection to utilitarianism is that it clashes with our common moral intuitions. understanding the role that heuristics play in moral judgments undermines this objection. it also indicates why we should not use john rawls' model of reflective equilibrium as the basis for testing normative moral theories.

although there are some common underlying mechanisms for many nonhuman behavioural asymmetries, the evidence at present is not compelling for commonalities in cerebral organisation across vertebrates. phylogenetic analysis of detour behaviour in fish suggests that more closely related species are not particularly similar in the direction of turning; contingency and demands of ecological niches may better explain such asymmetries.

by emphasizing that color categories are the collective achievement of a language community, the methodology of steels & belpaeme (s&b) suggests a number of corollaries. it focuses attention on whether a system of categories is optimized to match color experience. if a hypothesis can be operationalized about the nature of the optimality – about how color language becomes standardized – it becomes testable.

crossing the border into the moral domain changes moral thinking in two ways: (1) the facts at hand become “anthropocentric” facts not easily open to revision, and (2) moral reasoning is often the servant of moral intuitions, making it difficult for people to challenge their own intuitions. sunstein's argument is sound, but policy makers are likely to resist.

the heuristics-and-biases approach requires a clear separation of normative and descriptive models. normative models cannot be justified by intuition, or by consensus. the lack of consensus on normative theory is a problem for prescriptive approaches. one solution to the prescriptive problem is to argue contingently: if you are concerned about consequences, here is a way to make them better.