Moral Intuition

Moral Intuition versus Moral Reasoning in the Brain

Humans express complex moral behaviour, from altruism to antisocial acts. The investigation of the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying our moral minds is of profound importance for understanding these behaviours. By reviewing recent findings in cognitive and moral neuroscience, along with other relevant areas of research, the current study aims to: (1) Investigate the neural correlates o...

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...

Moral Intuition, Moral Theory, and Practical Ethics

Moral intuition: its neural substrates and normative significance.

Philosophers use the phrase "moral intuition" to describe the appearance in consciousness of moral judgments or assessments without any awareness of having gone through a conscious reasoning process that produces this assessment. This paper investigates the neural substrates of moral intuition. We propose that moral intuitions are part of a larger set of social intuitions that guide us through ...

Ideology and Intuition in Moral Education

We propose that social psychological findings on the intuitive bases of moral judgment have broad implications for moral education. The “five foundations theory of intuitive ethics” is applied to explain a longstanding rift in moral education as an ideological disagreement about which moral intuitions should be endorsed and cultivated. The Kohlbergian moral reasoning side has sought to limit th...

Moral Complexity: The Fatal Attraction of Truthiness and the Importance of Mature Moral Functioning.

Recently, intuitionist theories have been effective in capturing the academic discourse about morality. Intuitionist theories, like rationalist theories, offer important but only partial understanding of moral functioning. Both can be fallacious and succumb to truthiness: the attachment to one's opinions because they "feel right," potentially leading to harmful action or inaction. Both intuitio...