The Moral Dyad: A Fundamental Template Unifying Moral Judgment

The Moral Dyad: A Fundamental Template Unifying Moral Judgment

Felix Mendelssohn, the famous Romantic composer, sought to take the unique experiences of each human life—distinctive sorrows and personal pleasures—and give them universal expression in his music. Likewise, a key goal of science is to take diverse phenomena and ask whether such diversity can be unified at a deeper level. Darwin, for instance, saw a common process underlying the diversity of sp...

The Unifying Moral Dyad: Liberals and Conservatives Share the Same Harm-Based Moral Template.

Do moral disagreements regarding specific issues (e.g., patriotism, chastity) reflect deep cognitive differences (i.e., distinct cognitive mechanisms) between liberals and conservatives? Dyadic morality suggests that the answer is "no." Despite moral diversity, we reveal that moral cognition--in both liberals and conservatives--is rooted in a harm-based template. A dyadic template suggests that...

Kant on the Rationality of Moral Judgment

Maldynia as a moral judgment?

Lippe rejected out of hand the idea advanced by Morris [5] that pain was a pluralistic concept. Rather, he asserted “the biomedical basis of maldynia.” In Lippe’s medicocentric view of pain, “maldynia” was neither a symptom nor a syndrome but an “illness with endogenous and exogenous components.” Thus defined, “eudynia” becomes a teleologically beneficial mechanism, whereas “maldynia” is “usele...

Time and moral judgment.

Do moral judgments hinge on the time available to render them? According to a recent dual-process model of moral judgment, moral dilemmas that engage emotional processes are likely to result in fast deontological gut reactions. In contrast, consequentialist responses that tot up lives saved and lost in response to such dilemmas would require cognitive control to override the initial response. C...