Moral perception, inference, and intuition

Moral Intuition

Suppose we wish to understand a particular moral problem – for example, abortion. One way of proceeding is to reason on the basis of our existing substantive moral beliefs. We may, however, suspect that our moral beliefs about abortion, insofar as we have any prior to serious reflection, are unreliable. We may suspect, for example, that our beliefs about abortion reflect the influence of a reli...

Moral Intuition, Moral Theory, and Practical Ethics

Perception and Mathematical Intuition

A functional imaging investigation of moral deliberation and moral intuition

Prior functional imaging studies of moral processing have utilized 'explicit' moral tasks that involve moral deliberation (e.g., reading statements such as 'he shot the victim' and rating the moral appropriateness of the behavior) or 'implicit' moral tasks that involve moral intuition (e.g., reading similar statements and memorizing them for a test but not rating their moral appropriateness). A...

Reasoning, cognitive control, and moral intuition

Recent Social Intuitionist work suggests that moral judgments are intuitive (not based on conscious deliberation or any significant chain of inference), and that the reasons we produce to explain or justify our judgments and actions are for the most part post hoc rationalizations rather than the actual source of those judgments. This is consistent with work on judgment and explanation in other ...