Johns Hopkins University – Homewood Campus – (410-516-5250/office phone)
Thursday, October 26, 2006
3:45 p.m.
***************** Note room change ***************
***************** Note room change ***************
Room #110 Maryland Hall
Psychology,
Organismic & Evolution and Biological Anthropology
Harvard University
“The Moral Organ”
How do you decide what is morally right and wrong? Historically, there have been two answers to this question. On the one hand, we deliver moral judgments on the basis of a rational, conscious, and deliberate process of accessing principles to justify our actions. On the other hand, our judgments are the result of intuitions mediated by emotions. Though these two processes certainly play some role in our moral deliberations, each suffers from a set of critical problems. I offer a solution: by appealing to an analogy to language, I argue that humans are endowed with a universal moral grammar that generates intuitive judgments of right and wrong based on inaccessible principles that operate over the causes and consequences of action. I present evidence from a large scale study of the internet with over 200,000 subjects to justify a dissociation between judgments and justifications, and to reveal a set of core principles that appear immune to cultural influences, including religious background. I also present data from studies of brain damaged patients to reveal the architecture of our moral organ.
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