Ethics and Intuitions

Intuitions, principles and consequences.

Some approaches to the assessment of moral intuitions are discussed. The controlled ethical trial isolates a moral issue from confounding factors and thereby clarifies what a person's intuition actually is. Casuistic reasoning from situations, where intuitions are clear, suggests or modifies principles, which can then help to make decisions in situations where intuitions are unclear. When intui...

The armchair and the trolley: an argument for experimental ethics

Ethical theory often starts with our intuitions about particular cases and tries to uncover the principles that are implicit in them; work on the 'trolley problem' is a paradigmatic example of this approach. But ethicists are no longer the only ones chasing trolleys. In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have also turned to study our moral intuitions and what underlies them. The re...

Moral intuitions , end - of - life acts and empirical ethics

Moral Intuitions and Religiosity as Spuriously Correlated Life History Traits

Religions promote moral rules of behavior and religiosity is associated with some types of moral intuitions, but there is no ultimate-level explanation for this association. Religiosity has recently been used as an indicator of a multivariate measure of slow Life History (LH) strategy. In this study, we predicted that LH strategy relates to increased strength of moral intuitions as measured by ...

The Fragmented Folk: More Evidence of Stable Individual Differences in Moral Judgments and Folk Intuitions

In a series of five experiments, we demonstrate that moral judgments and folk intuitions are often predictably fragmented. Drawing on the domains of ethics and action theory, we illustrate ways in which judgment tends to be associated with stable individual differences such as personality traits and reflective cognitive styles. We argue that these individual differences pose several unique chal...