Is moral judgment accomplished by intuition or conscious reasoning? An answer demands a detailed account of the moral principles in question. We investigated three principles that guide moral judgments: (a) Harm caused by action is worse than harm caused by omission, (b) harm intended as the means to a goal is worse than harm foreseen as the side effect of a goal, and (c) harm involving physica...

There is a compelling simplicity to the theoretical approach to moral judgment proposed by Gray, Young, and Waytz (this issue; henceforth GYW). On 10 their approach, all that is needed to account for the large body of empirical findings on moral judgment is a description of the prototypical moral encounter—a moral agent who brings harm to a moral patient. This is what psychological theorizing o...

The search for the neural correlates of moral judgment has been rapidly expanding in recent years. Perhaps the best-known search technique is neuroimaging, but significant contributions have also been made by fields including neuroendocrinology, neuropharmacology, neuropathology, and neurogenetics. In addition to the value this multidisciplinary search holds for social, cognitive, and affective...

Human moral judgment depends critically on "theory of mind," the capacity to represent the mental states of agents. Recent studies suggest that the right TPJ (RTPJ) and, to lesser extent, the left TPJ (LTPJ), the precuneus (PC), and the medial pFC (MPFC) are robustly recruited when participants read explicit statements of an agent's beliefs and then judge the moral status of the agent's action....

A new framework for the study of the human moral faculty is currently receiving much attention: the so-called 'universal moral grammar' framework. It is based on an intriguing analogy, first pointed out by Rawls, between the study of the human moral sense and Chomsky's research program into the human language faculty. To assess UMG, we ask: is moral competence modular? Does it have an underlyin...

Moral judgment often requires making difficult tradeoffs (e.g., is it appropriate to torture to save the lives of innocents at risk?). Previous research suggests that both emotional appraisals and more deliberative utilitarian appraisals influence such judgments and that these appraisals often conflict. However, it is unclear how these different types of appraisals are represented in the brain,...

There is a large tradition of work in moral psychology that explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g., hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g., playing with your food). However, only recently have there been attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgment (e.g., Blair 1995, Gold...

To not harm others is widely considered the most basic element of human morality. The aversion to harm others can be either rooted in the outcomes of an action (utilitarianism) or reactions to the action itself (deontology). We speculated that the human moral judgments rely on the integration of neural computations of harm and visceral reactions. The present research examined whether utilitaria...

There is a large tradition of work in moral psychology that explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g. hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g. playing with your food). However, only recently have there been attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgment (e.g. Cognition 57 (1995)...

This study aimed at assessing whether and to what extent moral judgment and behaviour were: 1. situation-dependent; 2. selectively dependent on cognitive and affective components; 3. influenced by gender and age; 4. reciprocally congruent. In order to achieve these aims, four different types of moral dilemmas were construed and five types of thinking were presented for each of them – representi...