An article in the Boston Globe (with the Dylanesque title "Blood on the Tracks") briefly surveys some of the recent work exploring the relationship between reason and the emotions in moral judgment.

David Hume wrote that reason is a "slave to the emotions." But new research suggests that in our moral decision-making, reason and emotion duke it out within the mind.

The survey refers to the work of Joshua Greene (diverting killer trains by pulling switches or pushing fat men), Valdesolo and DeSteno (moral decisions primed with comedy skits), and Marc Hauser (whose forthcoming book explores the evolution of a moral faculty much like a language faculty). I'm very sympathetic with this literature, though I think we need to be careful to state what it is that is being claimed. Uncovering how we do make moral judgments doesn't automatically reveal what decisions we ought to make--though I think the work does contribute to a theory of the nature of morality generally.

Blood on the tracks - The Boston Globe

UPDATE: An interview with Marc Hauser can be found on American Scientist. Hauser describes what he call a "moral grammar," which is intended to be similar to Chomsky's universal grammar. A moral grammar is "a set of principles or computations for generating judgments of right and wrong."

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