The Push and Pull of Opposing Moral Dilemmas (original) (raw)

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

2012

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 across studies, thus making a metaanalysis manifestly impossible; and second, they overlook control of relevant design parameters.

The neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment

Neuron, 2004

Department of Psychology consider a moral violation to be personal if it meets Princeton University three criteria: First, the violation must be likely to cause 2 Center for the Study of Brain, serious bodily harm. Second, this harm must befall a Mind, and Behavior particular person or set of persons. Third, the harm must Princeton University not result from the deflection of an existing threat onto Princeton, New Jersey 08544 a different party. One can think of these three criteria in terms of "ME HURT YOU." The "HURT" criterion picks out the most primitive kinds of harmful violations (e.g., Summary assault rather than insider trading) while the "YOU" criterion ensures that the victim be vividly represented as Traditional theories of moral psychology emphasize an individual. Finally, the "ME" condition captures a noreasoning and "higher cognition," while more recent tion of "agency," requiring that the action spring in a work emphasizes the role of emotion. The present direct way from the agent's will, that it be "authored" fMRI data support a theory of moral judgment acrather than merely "edited" by the agent. Dilemmas that cording to which both "cognitive" and emotional profail to meet these three criteria are classified as "impercesses play crucial and sometimes mutually competisonal." As noted previously (Greene et al., 2001), these tive roles. The present results indicate that brain three criteria reflect a provisional attempt to capture regions associated with abstract reasoning and cogniwhat we suppose is a natural distinction in moral psytive control (including dorsolateral prefrontal cortex chology and will likely be revised in light of future reand anterior cingulate cortex) are recruited to resolve search.

The Neuroscience of Moral Judgment

The Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology, 2018

This chapter examines the relevance of the cognitive science of morality to moral epistemology, with special focus on the issue of the reliability of moral judgments. It argues that the kind of empirical evidence of most importance to moral epistemology is at the psychological rather than neural level. The main theories and debates that have dominated the cognitive science of morality are reviewed with an eye to their epistemic significance.

The Neuroscience of Moral Judgment: Empirical and Philosophical Developments

2020

We chart how neuroscience and philosophy have together advanced our understanding of moral judgment with implications for when it goes well or poorly. The field initially focused on brain areas associated with reason versus emotion in the moral evaluations of sacrificial dilemmas. But new threads of research have studied a wider range of moral evaluations and how they relate to models of brain development and learning. By weaving these threads together, we are developing a better understanding of the neurobiology of moral judgment in adulthood and to some extent in childhood and adolescence. Combined with rigorous evidence from psychology and careful philosophical analysis, neuroscientific evidence can even help shed light on the extent of moral knowledge and on ways to promote healthy moral development.

Methodological Issues in the Neuroscience of Moral Judgement

Mind and Language, 2010

Neuroscience and psychology have recently turned their attention to thestudy of the subpersonal underpinnings of moral judgment. In this article we criticallyexamine an influential strand of research originating in Greene’s neuroimaging studiesof ‘utilitarian’ and ‘non-utilitarian’ moral judgement. We argue that given that theexplananda of this research are specific personal-level states—moral judgments withcertain propositional contents—its methodology has to be sensitive to criteria forascribing states with such contents to subjects. We argue that current research has oftenfailed to meet this constraint by failing to correctly ‘fix’ key aspects of moral judgment,criticism we support by detailed examples from the scientific literature.