Studies of normal individuals reveal an asymmetry in the folk concept of intentional action: an action is more likely to be thought of as intentional when it is morally bad than when it is morally good. One interpretation of these results comes from the hypothesis that emotion plays a critical mediating role in the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status. Accord...

Abstract This paper argues that applied ethics can itself be morally problematic. As illustrated by the case of Peter Singer’s criticism social practice, loaded communication ethicists lead to protests, backlashes, and aggression. By reviewing psychological literature on self-image, collective identity, motivated reasoning three categories problematic consequences ethical are identified: seriou...

Characterizing how representations of moral violations are organized, cognitively and neurally, is central to understanding how people conceive and judge them. Past work has identified brain regions that represent morally relevant features and distinguish moral domains, but has not yet advanced a broader account of where and on what basis neural representations of moral violations are organized...