The psychology of moral reasoning
By Monica Bucciarelli, Sangeet S. Khemlani, Philip N. Johnson-Laird. Judgment and Decision Making, 2008
114 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article presents a theory of reasoning about moral propositions that is based on four fundamental principles. First, no simple criterion picks out propositions about morality from within the larger set of deontic propositions concerning what is permissible and impermissible in social relations, the law, games, and manners. Second, the mechanisms underlying emotions and deontic evaluations are independent and operate in parallel, and so some scenarios elicit emotions prior to moral evaluations, some elicit moral evaluations prior to emotions, and some elicit them at the same time. Third, deontic evaluations depend on inferences, either unconscious intuitions or conscious reasoning. Fourth, human beliefs about what is, and isn’t, moral are neither complete nor consistent. The article marshals the evidence, which includes new studies, corroborating these principles, and discusses the relations between them and other current theories of moral reasoning.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Information Systems and Management, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a5e7330f3fed7bcf4fe7afbd3b00805e2519c5b8
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Citations in the corpus
- Mental models and human reasoning (2010, unknown): “solve moral dilemmas suggest that they do reason, although they are also affected by the emotions that the dilemmas elicit (53, 74, 75).”
- What is moral reasoning? (2015, background): “[15] Some theorists, notably Bucciarelli et al. (2008), following Johnson-Laird (2006), hold that the capacities for moral intuition, moral emotions, and conscious moral reasoning are all properly analyzed as forms of reasoning and all properly referred to as moral reasoning.”
- Logic, probability, and human reasoning. (2015, unknown): “In daily life, deductions yield the consequences of rules, laws, and moral principles [2].”
- The Perceived Objectivity of Ethical Beliefs: Psychological Findings and Implications for Public Policy (2010, background): “…theorists have argued for the dual role of cognitive and emotional processes in moral judgment (e.g., Greene et al. 2001, 2004; Moore et al. 2008; Bucciarelli et al. 2008; see also Cushman et al. 2006; Hauser et al. 2007), although there is no great agreement between these authors about the…”