when people are making these decisions, both the emotional reaction and the moral principle are available at the same time, and one will win out over the other, depending largely on the strength of the emotional response (which is strong in the personal scenarios, and weak in the impersonal ones, at least when they're just being read on paper). This would be inconsistent with strong intuitionist theories of moral judgment.Mixing Memory : Emotion, Reason, and Moral Judgment
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Mixing Memory presents a nice summary of the recent Koenigs, et al. study ("Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements" in Nature) in which subjects with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex were more likely than control groups to favor a utilitarian judgment over a normally potent emotion-driven judgment in high-conflict personal moral dilemmas. MM suggests that
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