Nothing More than Feelings? The Role of Emotions in Moral Judgment

Philosophical Explorations, 2006

Recent work in cognitive science provides overwhelming evidence for a link between emotion and moral judgment. I review findings from psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and research on psychopathology and conclude that emotions are not merely correlated with moral judgments but they are also, in some sense, both necessary and sufficient. I then use these findings along with some anthropological observations to support several philosophical theories: first, I argue that sentimentalism is true: to judge that something is wrong is to have a sentiment of disapprobation towards it. Second, I argue that moral facts are response-dependent: the bad just is that which cases disapprobation in a community of moralizers. Third, I argue that a form of motivational internalism is true: ordinary moral judgments are intrinsically motivating, and all non-motivating moral judgments are parasitic on these.

Emotion, 2012

presented at the 2008 Australasian Association of Philosophy Meetings, Melbourne

What roles do emotions and reason play in moral judgment? This question was at the centre of the disputes between moral rationalists and moral sentimentalists three centuries ago and it still divides contemporary philosophers. While some believe that 'cool' reflection is the key to morality, others claim that 'hot' emotions are the essential constituents of moral judgment.

2008

Recent work in the cognitive and neurobiological sciences indicates an important relationship between emotion and moral judgment. Based on this evidence, several researchers have argued that emotions are the source of our intuitive moral judgments. However, despite the richness of the correlational data between emotion and morality, we argue that the current neurological, behavioral, developmental and evolutionary evidence is insufficient to demonstrate that emotion is necessary for making moral judgments. We suggest instead, that the source of moral judgments lies in our causal-intentional psychology; emotion often follows from these judgments, serving a primary role in motivating morally relevant action.

Journal of Value Inquiry, 2005

The Many Moral Rationalisms (eds. K. Jones & F. Schroeter), 2018

I argue that our best science supports the rationalist idea that, independent of reasoning, emotions aren't integral to moral judgment. There's ample evidence that ordinary moral cognition often involves conscious and unconscious reasoning about an action's outcomes and the agent's role in bringing them about. Emotions can aid in moral reasoning by, for example, drawing one's attention to such information. However, there is no compelling evidence for the decidedly sentimentalist claim that mere feelings are causally necessary or sufficient for making a moral judgment or for treating norms as distinctively moral. I conclude that, even if moral cognition is largely driven by automatic intuitions, these shouldn't be mistaken for emotions or their non-cognitive components. Non-cognitive elements in our psychology may be required for normal moral development and motivation but not necessarily for mature moral judgment.

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2017

How do we form our moral judgments, and how do they influence behavior? What ultimately motivates kind versus malicious action? Moral psychology is the interdisciplinary study of such questions about the mental lives of moral agents, including moral thought, feeling, reasoning, and motivation. While these questions can be studied solely from the armchair or using only empirical tools, researchers in various disciplines, from biology to neuroscience to philosophy, can address them in tandem. Some key topics in this respect revolve around moral cognition and motivation, such as moral responsibility, altruism, the structure of moral motivation, weakness of will, and moral intuitions. Of course there are other important topics as well, including emotions, character, moral development, self-deception, addiction, well-being, and the evolution of moral capacities.

It has long been claimed that moral judgements are dominated by reason. In recent years, however, the tide has turned. Many psychologists and philosophers now hold the view that there is a close empirical association between moral judgements and emotions. In particular, they claim that emotions (1) co-occur with moral judgements, (2) causally influence moral judgements, (3) are causally sufficient for moral judgements, and (4) are causally necessary for moral judgements. At first sight these hypotheses seem well-supported. In this paper I show, however, that appearances are deceiving. If one considers the relevant scientific studies in detail, one finds that in many interpretations the above hypotheses are either not supported or even contradicted by the available evidence. This conclusion is significant both for our understanding of moral judgements qua empirical phenomena and for normative ethics and metaethics.

Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2015

Within the past decade, the field of moral psychology has begun to disentangle the mechanics behind moral judgments, revealing the vital role that emotions play in driving these processes. However, given the well-documented dissociation between attitudes and behaviors, we propose that an equally important issue is how emotions inform actual moral behaviora question that has been relatively ignored up until recently. By providing a review of recent studies that have begun to explore how emotions drive actual moral behavior, we propose that emotions are instrumental in fueling real-life moral actions. Because research examining the role of emotional processes on moral behavior is currently limited, we push for the use of behavioral measures in the field in the hopes of building a more complete theory of real-life moral behavior.

Open Journal of Philosophy, 2018

The affective though and the intuition in moral judgment has been discovered lately . This article analyzes the Moral Judgment theory and the basic logical operations . The rational stages with a few intervention of emotion have been historically assumed by moral judgment theory, which judges the affective as a mistaken notion and as a simple cognitive extension . This paper demonstrates that the Piagetian basic operations, seriation and categorization are applicable to an affective system. In addition, the intuition is a moral determinant and finally, that neuronal activity confirms an intuitional cognition for the resolution of social problems. It is expected that the present deliberation guides and stimuli researches on the intuition and emotion in moral judgment.