Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-2lccl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T21:04:46.031Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Moral judgment as reasoning by constraint satisfaction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2019

Keith J. Holyoak Open the ORCID record for Keith J. Holyoak [Opens in a new window]  and
Derek Powell
Keith J. Holyoak
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563holyoak@lifesci.ucla.eduhttp://reasoninglab.psych.ucla.edu
Derek Powell
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2130.derekpowell@stanford.eduhttp://www.derekmpowell.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 42 , 2019 , e156
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Battaglia, P. W., Hamrick, J. B. & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2013) Simulation as an engine of physical scene understanding. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 110(45):18327–332. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1306572110.Google Scholar
Bolhuis, J. J., Brown, G. R., Richardson, R. C. & Laland, K. N. (2011) Darwin in mind: New opportunities for evolutionary psychology. PLoS Biology 9(7):e1001109. Available at: http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001109.Google Scholar
Brosnan, S. F., Schiff, H. C. & de Waal, F. B. M. (2005) Tolerance for inequity may increase with social closeness in chimpanzees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 272:253–58. Available at: http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2004.2947.Google Scholar
Cheng, P. W. (1997) From covariation to causation: A causal power theory. Psychological Review 104:367–405.Google Scholar
Clark, C. J, Chen, E. & Ditto, P. H. (2015) Moral coherence processes: Constructing culpability and consequences. Current Opinion in Psychology 6:123–28.Google Scholar
Engelmann, J. M., Clift, J. B., Herrmann, E. & Tomasello, M. (2017) Social disappointment explains chimpanzees' behaviour in the inequity aversion task. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 284(1861):20171502. Available at: http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1502.Google Scholar
Evans, J.St., B. T. (2009) How many dual-process theories do we need: One, two or many? In: In two minds: Dual processes and beyond, ed. St, J.. Evans, B. T. & Frankish, K., pp. 31–54. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Griffiths, T. L., Kemp, C. & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2008) Bayesian models of cognition. In: Cambridge handbook of computational cognitive modeling, ed. Sun, R., pp. 59–100. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Holyoak, K. J. (2019) The spider's thread: Metaphor in mind, brain, and poetry. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Holyoak, K. J. & Powell, D. (2016) Deontological coherence: A framework for commonsense moral reasoning. Psychological Bulletin 142(11):1179–1203.Google Scholar
Holyoak, K. J. & Simon, D. (1999) Bidirectional reasoning in decision making by constraint satisfaction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 128:3–31.Google Scholar
Horne, Z. & Powell, D. (2016) How large is the role of emotion in judgments of moral dilemmas? PLOS ONE 11(7): e0154780. Available at: http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0154780.Google Scholar
Horne, Z., Powell, D. & Hummel, J. (2015) A single counterexample leads to moral belief revision. Cognitive Science 39:1950–64.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Kant, I. (1785/2002) Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals. Yale University Press. (Original work published in 1785.)Google Scholar
Knowlton, B. J., Morrison, R. G., Hummel, J. E. & Holyoak, K. J. (2012) A neurocomputational system for relational reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16:373–81.Google Scholar
Kounios, J. & Beeman, M. (2015) The eureka factor: Aha moments, creative insight, and the brain. Random House.Google Scholar
Kubricht, J. R., Lu, H. & Holyoak, K. J. (2017) Intuitive physics: Current research and controversies. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21:749–59.Google Scholar
Lagnado, D. A. & Gerstenberg, T. (2017) Causation in legal and moral reasoning. In: Oxford handbook of causal reasoning, ed. Waldmann, M. R., pp. 562–602. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
May, J. (2018) Regard for reason in the moral mind. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Moors, A., Ellsworth, P. C., Scherer, K. R. & Frijda, N. H. (2013) Appraisal theories of emotion: State of the art and future development. Emotion Review 5:119–24.Google Scholar
Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (2013) Dynamic inference and everyday conditional reasoning in the new paradigm. Thinking and Reasoning 19:346–79.Google Scholar
Penn, D. C., Holyoak, K. J. & Povinelli, D. J. (2008) Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31:109–30.Google Scholar
Pessoa, L. & Pereira, M. G. (2013) Cognition–emotion interactions: A review of the functional magnetic resonance imaging literature. In: Handbook of cognition and emotion, ed. Robinson, M. D., Watkins, E. & Harmon-Jones, E., pp. 55–68. Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Rai, T. S. & Holyoak, K. J. (2010) Moral principles or consumer preferences? Alternative framings of the trolley problem. Cognitive Science 34:311–21.Google Scholar
Rawls, J. (1971) A theory of justice. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Simon, D. (2012) In doubt: The psychology of the criminal justice process. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Simon, D. & Holyoak, K. J. (2002) Structural dynamics of cognition: From consistency theories to constraint satisfaction. Personality and Social Psychology Review 6:283–94.Google Scholar
Simon, D., Stenstrom, D. M. & Read, S. J. (2015) The coherence effect: Blending hot and cold cognitions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 109:369–94.Google Scholar
Spellman, B. A., Ullman, J. B. & Holyoak, K. J. (1993) A coherence model of cognitive consistency. Journal of Social Issues 4:147–65.Google Scholar
Waldmann, M. R. & Dieterich, J. H. (2007) Throwing a bomb on a person versus throwing a person on a bomb: Intervention myopia in moral intuitions. Psychological Science 18:247–53.Google Scholar
Wynne, C. D. I. & Bolhuis, J. J. (2008) Minding the gap: Why there is still no theory in comparative psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31:152–53.Google Scholar
Zamir, E. & Medina, B. (2010) Law, economics, and morality. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar