Intuition and analysis of moral intuition

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2014, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (6) : 1473-1477.

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PDF(5302 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2014, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (6) : 1473-1477.

Intuition and analysis of moral intuition

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Abstract

Moral intuition is an important concept in recent moral judgment researches. This paper makes a comment on theoretical and empirical researches over the following three topics in recent ten years or so--What is moral intuition? What is the underlying mechanism of moral intuition? Is moral intuition motivated by emotions or rules? Based on extant literature, the authors suggest that there are several conceptual and theoretical problems with above questions. For the first question, some researchers argue that moral intuition is a special social intuition which emphasizes on the key function of emotions. Neural cognitive researches have found that moral intuitions is related to the function of certain brain areas such as cingulate cortex, basal ganglia, lateral prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the orbito-frontal cortex, temporo-parietal junction. These brain areas are also associated with processing of re-evaluation of emotional stimuli, motives and intentions. In addition, the authors also analyzed the essential difference between moral intuition and moral heuristic, and argues that they are two different concepts, for that the former emphasizes the rapidity and integrity of processing, while the latter emphasizes the utilization of simple rules that based on small samples in the short-term memory. Therefore, the essential differences between them were ignored when researchers used the two terms equally. For the question 2 above, both of the universal moral grammar framework (UMG)and the moral foundation theory (MFT) take moral intuition as innate and modularized. However, the greatest challenge that the two theories face is that the modularized mechanism and its classification are inconsistent with the findings in contemporary neuroscience. Accordingly, the authors argue that the embody-metaphor framework of morality with emphasis on the evolution, culture and individual experience may be a promising direction of the origin and formation of moral intuition. Finally, for the question 3, this article shows that it is difficult to adjudicate whether moral intuition mainly motives by emotions or by rules. However, the following points are worthy of noting. First, Studies of the classification of intuitions imply that moral intuition may have different subtypes which could be formed by different mechanisms; Second, recent researches suggest that moral intuition is closely associated with the emotional cognition, including emotional recognition and classification, conferring value (not emotion itself) and moral rules(or beliefs).

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moral intuition / moral heuristics / UMG / moral foundation theory

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Intuition and analysis of moral intuition[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2014, 37(6): 1473-1477
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