Bright mind, moral mind? Intelligence is unrelated to consequentialist moral judgment in sacrificial moral dilemmas

Moral dilemmas and moral rules.

Recent work shows an important asymmetry in lay intuitions about moral dilemmas. Most people think it is permissible to divert a train so that it will kill one innocent person instead of five, but most people think that it is not permissible to push a stranger in front of a train to save five innocents. We argue that recent emotion-based explanations of this asymmetry have neglected the contrib...

The Status of Moral Emotions in Consequentialist Moral Reasoning by

Sidetracked by trolleys: Why sacrificial moral dilemmas tell us little (or nothing) about utilitarian judgment

Research into moral decision-making has been dominated by sacrificial dilemmas where, in order to save several lives, it is necessary to sacrifice the life of another person. It is widely assumed that these dilemmas draw a sharp contrast between utilitarian and deontological approaches to morality, and thereby enable us to study the psychological and neural basis of utilitarian judgment. Howeve...

Moral Vegetarianism and the Philosophy of Mind

Most arguments for moral vegetarianism rely on the premise that non-human animals can suffer. In this paper I evaluate problems that arise from Peter Carruthers’ Higher-Order Thought theory of consciousness. I argue that, even if we assume that these problems cannot be overcome, it does not follow that we should not subscribe to moral vegetarianism. I conclude that we should act as if non-human...

Theory of Mind and Moral Cognition

It is widely recognized that people sometimes use theory-of-mind judgments in moral cognition. A series of recent studies show that the connection also goes in the opposite direction. It appears that moral judgments can sometimes be used in theory-of-mind cognition. Thus, there appear to be cases in which people’s moral judgments actually serve as input to the process underlying their applicati...