Moral Th inking

This chapter presents several current models of moral thinking, with a focus on the cognitive processes that support people’s moral judgments and justifications. These models are not mutually exclusive; rather, based on recent evidence from psychology and neuroscience, they posit different cognitive processes as the primary source of moral thinking. This chapter therefore does not quantify the evidence for one model versus another but instead reviews evidence for each model separately. These models, discussed in turn, emphasize the role of conscious principled reasoning, emotional processing, theory of mind, and a domain-specific “moral faculty” that integrates information from other cognitive systems to compute specifically moral judgments.