As argued by [9], moral decision making entails considering alternatives and assessing the pros and cons of their possible consequences for self and others. From the area of affective neuroscience the concept of moral emotions has been introduced [9] and neurobiological findings [7] show that moral emotions are used to judge the adequacy of actions and are central to moral behavior, decision ma...

Moral dilemmas engender conflicts between two traditions: consequentialism, which evaluates actions based on their outcomes, and deontology, which evaluates actions themselves. These strikingly resemble two distinct decision-making architectures: a model-based system that selects actions based on inferences about their consequences; and a model-free system that selects actions based on their re...

A key factor in legal and moral judgments is intent. Intent differentiates, for instance, murder from manslaughter. Is this true for all moral judgments? People deliver moral judgments of many kinds of actions, including harmful actions (e.g., assault) and purity violations (e.g., incest, consuming taboo substances). We show that intent is a key factor for moral judgments of harm, but less of a...

Drawing on an analogy to language, I argue that a suite of novel questions emerge when we consider our moral faculty in a similar light. In particular, I suggest the possibility that our moral judgments are derived from unconscious, intuitive processes that operate over the causal-intentional structure of actions and their consequences. On this model, we are endowed with a moral faculty that ge...

In the fall 2009 issue of Teaching Ethics C.E. Harris wrote an article with a question as the title, “Is Moral Theory Useful in Practical Ethics?” which he answered in the affirmative.1 In Harris’ article he considers two moral theories. “For utilitarianism the purpose of morality is to promote human well-being, and moral principles and judgments should be evaluated in terms of their effectiven...

An important consideration in judging the blameworthiness (or praiseworthiness) of an action is whether the agent had sufficient control over it. In three experiments, we investigated judgments of moral blame and praise elicited when individuals were presented with vignettes describing actions that were performed either carefully and deliberately or impulsively and uncontrollably. Experiment 1 ...

The aims of this systematic review were to determine: (a) which brain areas are consistently more active when making (i) moral response decisions, defined as choosing a response to a moral dilemma, or deciding whether to accept a proposed solution, or (ii) moral evaluations, defined as judging the appropriateness of another's actions in a moral dilemma, rating moral statements as right or wrong...

Morality—judging others’ behavior to be right or wrong, as well as behaving in a right or wrong manner towards others—is an essential component of social life. Morality depends critically on our ability to attribute minds to entities that engage in moral actions (towards ourselves and others) and the entities that experience these actions (our own actions and others’). The cognitive capacities ...