What cognitive science brings to ethics

Abstract

Empirical research on the nature of mind, thought, and language has profound implications for our understanding of morality. From a critical perspective, this research constrains the range of acceptable theories by showing that our abstract moral concepts are grounded in our bodily experience, are defined relative to prototypes, are structured by metaphor, and are tied to emotions. The new view of moral deliberation that emerges from this conception of embodied mind reveals important similarities between moral reasoning and what has traditionally been thought of as aesthetic judgment. Moral reasoning is an imaginative process of problem solving. © 2009 Springer-Verlag US.