Cognitive Models of Moral Decision Making

The study of moral decision making by cognitive scientists is coming of age. The earlier years of research were characterized by bold claims regarding the evolutionary origins of morality, the primacy of unconscious mechanisms over reasoning in determining moral behavior, and the relationship between various features of neurophysiology and moral agency. In turn, these claims generated criticism from other scholars as being premature, based on inherently confusing methodologies, or founded in misunderstanding of moral philosophy. In any young science, collegial criticism can be expected to improve the quality of empirical investigations. That has certainly been the case for cognitive scientists interested in deepening our understanding of the psychology underlying moral decisions. Richer and more focused experiments are being designed. Carefully constructed philosophical arguments accompany the claims made for empirical findings. In recent years, there has been a steady stream of research on the ways in which emotions and moral sentiments, intuitions, framing effects and implicit biases, heuristics, or an innate moral grammar influence behavior in morally significant situations. There remains, however, some confusion as to when these categories should be seen as overlapping or as distinct collections of cognitive processes. Furthermore, this early research is by necessity piecemeal. Well-designed experiments that focus on the role, structure, or function of a particular aspect of cognition can overemphasize the importance of those features. Is there a specific set of cognitive processes responsible for the explicitly ethical dimension of decisions? Will, for example, the understanding of how judgments link