Moral cognition: Introduction

Abstract

Research on moral cognition is a growing and heavily multidisciplinary field. This section contains chapters addressing foundational psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical issues of research on moral decision-making. Furthermore, beyond summarizing the state of the art of their respective fields, the authors formulate their own proposals to answer open questions such as those on the relation between emotion and cognition in moral psychology, the idea that there is a “moral module” in the human brain, the relevance of this research for ethics and meta-ethics, the various psychological and philosophical meanings of “intuition” and how intuitions can have a justificatory role, or the connection between the psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical levels in popular experiments on moral cognition. Research on moral decision-making is challenging, for empiricists as well as theoreticians, and is related to several applied questions of neuroethics which are briefly addressed at the end of this introduction.