An argument that moral reasoning plays a crucial role in moral judgment through episodes of rational reflection that have established patterns for automatic judgment foundation. Rationalists about the psychology of moral judgment argue that moral cognition has a rational foundation. Recent challenges to this account, based on findings in the empirical psychology of moral judgment, contend that moral thinking has no rational basis. In this book, Hanno Sauer argues that moral reasoning does play a role in moral judgment—but not, as is commonly supposed, because conscious reasoning produces moral judgments directly. Moral reasoning figures in the acquisition, formation, maintenance, and reflective correction of moral intuitions. Sauer proposes that when we make moral judgments we draw on a stable repertoire of intuitions about what is morally acceptable, which we have acquired over the course of our moral education—episodes of rational reflection that have established patterns for automatic judgment foundation. Moral judgments are educated and rationally amenable moral intuitions. Sauer engages extensively with the empirical evidence on the psychology of moral judgment and argues that it can be shown empirically that reasoning plays a crucial role in moral judgment. He offers detailed counterarguments to the anti-rationalist challenge (the claim that reason and reasoning play no significant part in morality and moral judgment) and the emotionist challenge (the argument for the emotional basis of moral judgment). Finally, he uses Joshua Greene's Dual Process model of moral cognition to test the empirical viability and normative persuasiveness of his account of educated intuitions. Sauer shows that moral judgments can be automatic, emotional, intuitive, and rational at the same time.

In recent research, dual-process theories of cognition have been the primary model for explaining moral judgment and reasoning. These theories understand moral thinking in terms of two separate domains: one deliberate and analytic, the other quick and instinctive. This book presents a new theory of the philosophy and cognitive science of moral judgment. Hanno Sauer develops and defends an account of "triple-process" moral psychology, arguing that moral thinking and reasoning are only insufficiently understood when described in terms of a quick but intuitive and a slow but rational type of cognition. This approach severely underestimates the importance and impact of dispositions to initiate and engage in critical thinking – the cognitive resource in charge of counteracting my-side bias, closed-mindedness, dogmatism, and breakdowns of self-control. Moral cognition is based, not on emotion and reason, but on an integrated network of intuitive, algorithmic and reflective thinking. Moral Thinking, Fast and Slow will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science.

An argument that moral reasoning plays a crucial role in moral judgment through episodes of rational reflection that have established patterns for automatic judgment foundation. Rationalists about the psychology of moral judgment argue that moral cognition has a rational foundation. Recent challenges to this account, based on findings in the empirical psychology of moral judgment, contend that moral thinking has no rational basis. In this book, Hanno Sauer argues that moral reasoning does play a role in moral judgment—but not, as is commonly supposed, because conscious reasoning produces moral judgments directly. Moral reasoning figures in the acquisition, formation, maintenance, and reflective correction of moral intuitions. Sauer proposes that when we make moral judgments we draw on a stable repertoire of intuitions about what is morally acceptable, which we have acquired over the course of our moral education—episodes of rational reflection that have established patterns for automatic judgment foundation. Moral judgments are educated and rationally amenable moral intuitions. Sauer engages extensively with the empirical evidence on the psychology of moral judgment and argues that it can be shown empirically that reasoning plays a crucial role in moral judgment. He offers detailed counterarguments to the anti-rationalist challenge (the claim that reason and reasoning play no significant part in morality and moral judgment) and the emotionist challenge (the argument for the emotional basis of moral judgment). Finally, he uses Joshua Greene's Dual Process model of moral cognition to test the empirical viability and normative persuasiveness of his account of educated intuitions. Sauer shows that moral judgments can be automatic, emotional, intuitive, and rational at the same time.

This book brings together three distinct research programmes in moral psychology – Moral Foundations Theory, Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange, and the Linguistic Analogy in Moral Psychology – and shows that they can be combined to create a unified cognitive science of moral intuition. The book assumes evolution has furnished the human mind with two types of judgement: intuitive and deliberative. Focusing on moral intuitions (understood as moral judgments that were not arrived at via a process of conscious deliberation), the book explores the origins of these intuitions, examines how they are produced, and explains why the moral intuitions of different humans differ. Providing a unique synthesis of three separate established fields, this book presents a new research program that will further our understanding of the various different intuitive moral judgements at the heart of some of the moral tensions within human society.

The study of morality is an empirical as well as conceptual task, one that involves data collection, statistical analysis, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. This volume is about moral judgment, especially its exercise in selected social settings. The contributors are psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers of morality, most of whom have collaborated on long-ranged research projects in Europe involving socialization. These essays make it clear that moral judgment is a complex phenomena. The book fuses developmental psychology, sociology, and social psychology. It relates this directly to the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, who wrote the introduction to the book. Whether moral reasoning has a content-specific domain, or whether its structures transcend specific issues of justice, obedience, and rights, these and similar questions suggest that moral philosophers and ethical theorists have much to say about the human condition. The contributors represent diverse disciplines; but they have as their common concern the topic of the interaction of individual or group-specific moral development and social milieu. Although deeply involved in empirical research, they maintain that research on moral development can be pursued properly only in conjunction with a well-formulated theory of the relationship between society, cognition, and behavior. Moral development is an institutional as well as individual concern for schools, universities, and the military. It is rooted in the ability to formulate genuine and coherent moral judgments that reflect social conditions at two levels: individual socialization and historical development of the social system. This classic volume, now available in paperback, not only exemplifies that framework, but also makes an important contribution to it.

Empirical research suggests that our moral behaviors, judgments, and intuitions have been evolutionarily selected for because they provide strategic solutions to the problems we face as social animals. Nonetheless, a great deal of moral philosophy relies on employing our moral judgments and intuitive moral concepts to guide our understanding of morality and justifications for moral actions. Moral argumentation is commonly guided by thought experiments, counterexamples, attractive principles, as well as concepts like justice and desert. While our moral intuitions and judgments might be helpful in pursuing moral understanding, using these judgments without also appreciating the natural facts about morality will inevitably lead to failures. In this dissertation, I focus on a subset of morality, moral responsibility, and show that certain intuitive views regarding moral responsibility are inherently problematic in light of the empirical explanation of our moral judgments and behaviors. I start by discussing punishment. Punishment has been a topic of great interest to biologists and behavioral economists because of how difficult it is to explain. If morality and moral behavior are adaptive, punishment seems to provide a counterexample; it is not obvious how punishment could straightforwardly benefit the punisher and it certainly does not seem to benefit the one who is punished. I argue that the logic of punishment constrains what sorts of punishment behavior can be adaptive and that our current punishment behaviors and judgments conform to this logic. Thus, I offer an explanation for many of our prevalent and firmly held intuitive judgments and behaviors about punishment. I argue that this explanation illuminates problematic aspects for certain philosophical views and arguments surrounding punishment, as well as moral responsibility more generally. For instance, I argue that this evolutionary explanation poses a problem for anyone who attempts to justify treating people in ways they deserve to be treated because they deserve to be treated that way. More specifically, I argue that desert-based justifications for treatment face a dilemma. Either there is some relationship between justifications for our practices of treating people in ways they deserve to be treated and the evolutionary selective forces that determine what sorts of desert judgments we make or there is no such relationship. If there is no relationship, then we cannot rely on desert judgments to inform us about justifiably deserved treatment. If there is a relationship, then desert-based justifications are at odds with the scientific understanding of our moral judgments. Desert-based justifications for treatment face this dilemma because they both appeal to intuitive judgments about deserved treatment and also require an assumption that is at odds with the evolutionary explanation of our desert intuitions. The problematic assumption stems from the backward-looking nature of desert justifications for treatment. Desert-based justifications do not take any future or forward-looking considerations to be relevant to the justification for such treatment. The concept of desert itself is also thought to be backward-looking, in that the basis of desert is independent of forward-looking considerations. That is, it is normally assumed that if we judge that a person deserves something, it is in virtue of something that person did or some character trait they have that they deserve this, and never because of some fact about the future. Given that desert is central to most understandings of moral responsibility, I investigated whether our everyday concepts of desert and moral responsibility are in fact entirely backward-looking. My results suggest that this is not the case. Therefore, if appealing to intuitions is a valid method of discovering the nature of moral responsibility and desert, it seems either desert is not entirely backward-looking or moral responsibility is not exclusively desert-based. These experimental results also suggest that consequentialist accounts of moral responsibility, which have largely been abandoned due to their counterintuitive nature, are perhaps not so counterintuitive after all. In sum, I argue that progress in understanding morality, and moral responsibility specifically, requires empirical clarity.