Modern societies are characterized by group-based hierarchies. Similar to attackers, disadvantaged-group members wish to change the status quo; like defenders, advantaged-group members wish to protect it. However, the psychological arrays that are typical of disadvantaged- and advantaged-group members are opposite to those of attackers and defenders – suggesting that the Attacker-Defender Game does not capture the dynamics between advantaged and disadvantaged groups.

The contribution by De Dreu and Gross oversimplifies the complexity of the topic. I provide counterarguments that undermine the two sweeping contentions on which the article's argument depends, and I argue that asymmetric conflict is best understood at the finer-grained level of studying the sequences of strikes and counterstrikes that the rival actors have in store for one another.

De Dreu and Gross offer novel solutions to discouraging attackers via political sanctions. We offer insights from social psychological and criminological research on when such sanctions would work and when they could backfire. We argue that the influence of such sanctioning ultimately rests upon the extent to which such authorities can claim to represent the society that they serve.

In many conflict situations, defense is easier to mobilize than attack. However, a number of factors, namely, the initial endowments available to each side, the stakes of the conflict, the respective costs of defense and attack, and the way that conflict is framed and perceived, may make attacking more attractive than defending.

Our target article modeled conflict within and between groups as an asymmetric game of strategy and developed a framework to explain the evolved neurobiological, psychological, and sociocultural mechanisms underlying attack and defense. Twenty-seven commentaries add insights from diverse disciplines, such as animal biology, evolutionary game theory, human neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and political science, that collectively extend and supplement this model in three ways. Here we draw attention to the superordinate structure of attack and defense, and its subordinate means to meet the end of status quo maintenance versus change, and we discuss (1) how variations in conflict structure and power disparities between antagonists can impact strategy selection and behavior during attack and defense; (2) how the positions of attack and defense emerge endogenously and are subject to rhetoric and propaganda; and (3) how psychological and economic interventions can transform attacker-defender conflicts into coordination games that allow mutual gains and dispute resolution.

Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind argues that a careful examination of the scientific literature reveals a foundational role for reasoning in moral thought and action. Grounding moral psychology in reason then paves the way for a defense of moral knowledge and virtue against a variety of empirical challenges, such as debunking arguments and situationist critiques. The book attempts to provide a corrective to current trends in moral psychology, which celebrate emotion over reason and generate pessimism about the psychological mechanisms underlying commonsense morality. Ultimately, there is rationality in ethics not just despite but in virtue of the neurobiological and evolutionary materials that shape moral cognition and motivation.

Reasoning is the iterative, path-dependent process of asking questions and answering them. Moral reasoning is a species of such reasoning, so it is a matter of asking and answering moral questions, which requires both creativity and curiosity. As such, interventions and practices that help people ask more and better moral questions promise to improve moral reasoning.

We support May's criticism of attempts to reduce morality to being primarily based on evolved emotional reactions. However, we question the clarity and consistence of his own position and suggest taking a developmental approach. We focus on providing a developmental approach to the role of emotions in the social origin of moral norms.

May provides a compelling case that reasoning is central to moral psychology. In practice, many morally significant decisions involve several moral agents whose actions are interdependent – and agents embedded in society. We suggest that social life and the rich patterns of reasoning that underpin it are ethical through and through.

Moral cognition, by its very nature, stems from intuitions about what is good and bad, and these intuitions influence moral assessments outside of conscious awareness. However, because humans evolved a shared set of moral intuitions, and are compelled to justify their moral assessments as good and rational (even erroneously) to others, moral virtue and moral progress are still possible.

May assumes that if moral beliefs are counterfactually dependent on irrelevant factors, then those moral beliefs are based on defective belief-forming processes. This assumption is false. Whether influence by irrelevant factors is debunking depends on the mechanisms through which this influence occurs. This raises the empirical bar for debunkers and helps May avoid an objection to his Debunker's Dilemma.

In this commentary on May's Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind, I argue that many of the interdisciplinary moral psychologists whom May terms “pessimists” are often considerably more optimistic about the prospects for progress in moral inquiry than he contends.

I welcome many of the conclusions of May's book, but I offer a suggestion – and with it what I take to be a complementary strategy – concerning the core commitments of rationalism across the domains of moral psychology in the hopes of better illuminating why a rationalist picture of the mind can deliver us from pessimism.

Joshua May responds to skepticism about moral knowledge via appeal to empirical work on moral foundations. I demonstrate that the moral foundations literature is not able to do the work May needs. It demonstrates shared moral cognition, not shared moral judgment, and therefore, May's attempt to defeat general skepticism fails.

May cites a body of evidence suggesting that participants take consequences, personal harm, and other factors into consideration when making moral judgments. This evidence is used to support the conclusion that moral cognition relies on rule-based inference. This commentary defends an alternative interpretation of this evidence, namely, that it can be explained in terms of domain general valuation mechanisms.

May's careful examination of empirical evidence makes a compelling case against the primacy of emotion in driving moral judgments. At the same time, emotion certainly is involved in moral judgments. We argue that emotion interacts with beliefs, values, and moral principles through a process of coherence-based reasoning (operating at least partially below the level of conscious awareness) in generating moral judgments and decisions.

May argues successfully that many claims about the causal influence of affect on moral judgment are overblown. But the findings he cites are compatible with many of the key arguments of philosophical sentimentalists. His account of rationalism, in turn, relies on an overly broad notion of inference, and leaves open crucial questions about how we reason to moral conclusions.

Recent work by emotion researchers indicates that emotions have a multilevel structure. Sophisticated sentimentalists should take note of this work – for it better enables them to defend a substantive role for emotion in moral cognition. Contra May's rationalist criticisms, emotions are not only able to carry morally relevant information, but can also substantially influence moral judgment and reasoning.

May expresses optimism about the source, content, and consequences of moral judgments. However, even if we are optimistic about their source (i.e., reasoning), some pessimism is warranted about their content, and therefore their consequences. Good reasoners can attain moral knowledge, but evidence suggests that most people are not good reasoners, which implies that most people do not attain moral knowledge.

Joshua May offers four principles that might serve as the rational foundations of moral judgments. I argue that these principles, if they are independent of affect, are too weak to be the basis of any substantive moral judgment and do not fit with the idea that morality is categorical.