Moral and Cognitive Dilemmas in History Education

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...

Sentimentalism and Moral Dilemmas

It is sometimes said that certain hard moral choices constitute tragic moral dilemmas in which no available course of action is justifiable, and so the agent is blameworthy whatever she chooses. This paper criticizes a certain approach to the debate about moral dilemmas and considers the metaethical implications of the criticisms. The approach in question has been taken by many advocates as wel...

Finding faults: how moral dilemmas illuminate cognitive structure.

Philosophy is rife with intractable moral dilemmas. We propose that these debates often exist because competing psychological systems yield different answers to the same problem. Consequently, philosophical debate points to the natural fault lines between dissociable psychological mechanisms, and as such provides a useful guide for cognitive neuroscience. We present two case studies from recent...

Moral dilemmas in cognitive neuroscience of moral decision-making: a principled review.

Moral dilemma tasks have been a much appreciated experimental paradigm in empirical studies on moral cognition for decades and have, more recently, also become a preferred paradigm in the field of cognitive neuroscience of moral decision-making. Yet, studies using moral dilemmas suffer from two main shortcomings: they lack methodological homogeneity which impedes reliable comparisons of results...

Moral dilemmas and nonmonotonic logic