How do humans make moral judgments about others' behavior? This article reviews dominant models of moral judgment, organizing them within an overarching framework of information processing. This framework poses two distinct questions: (1) What input information guides moral judgments? and (2) What psychological processes generate these judgments? Information Models address the first question, i...

Typically, adults give a primary role to the agent's intention to harm when performing a moral judgment of accidental harm. By contrast, children often focus on outcomes, underestimating the actor's mental states when judging someone for his action, and rely on what we suppose to be intuitive and emotional processes. The present study explored the processes involved in the development of the ca...

In the hope to resolve the two sets of opposing results concerning the effects of psychological distance and construal levels on moral judgment, Žeželj and Jokić (2014) conducted a series of four direct replications, which yielded divergent patterns of results. In our commentary, we first revisit the consistent findings that lower-level construals induced by How/Why manipulation lead to harsher...

Although linguistic nativism has received the bulk of attention in contemporary innateness debates, moral nativism has perhaps an even deeper ancestry. If linguistic nativism is Cartesian, moral nativism is Platonic. Moral nativism has taken a backseat to linguistic nativism in contemporary discussions largely because Chomsky made a case for linguistic nativism characterized by unprecedented ri...

In his Essays on the Active Powers, Thomas reid criticises Hume’s theory of moral judgment and argues that it is untenable. The aim of this paper is to show that reid shares more with his target than is ordinarily acknowledged. The author suggests that the opposition between “cognitivism” and “non-cognitivism” concerning the role of feelings in moral judgment tends to obscure (disputable) assum...

We present a model of moral judgment, Charon, which adds to previous models several factors that have been shown to influence moral judgment: 1) a more sophisticated account of prior mental state, 2) imagination, 3) empathy, 4) the feedback process between emotion and reason, 5) selfinterest, and 6) self-control. We discuss previous classes of models and demonstrate Charon’s extended explanator...

Empathy’s role in moral judgment has not received as much attention as its role in moral motivation. Yet given that emotions have at least a causal influence on moral belief, it is plausible that empathy makes an important difference. However, critics like Jesse Prinz point to empathy’s inherent partiality and limitations as reasons to think that it has only a limited explanatory role and that ...