Josh Green 2008-04-24

From OBTnotes

• from Harvard Psych
• Speaker's site

Abstract

In some cases people judge it morally acceptable to sacrifice one life in order to save several others. In many similar cases people judge such trade-offs to be morally unacceptable. I will present behavioral and neuroscientific evidence for a dual-process theory of moral judgment that partially explains this pattern of judgment: Intuitive emotional responses (sometimes) incline people to judge against such utilitarian trade-offs, while controlled cognitive processes incline people to approve of them. This is only a partial explanation because it doesn’t explain why people respond more emotionally to some cases rather than others. I will then discuss a series of behavioral experiments aimed at (a) isolating the features of harmful actions that trigger the aforementioned emotional responses and (b) understanding the cognitive mechanisms that govern these responses.