Spring 2024 | Yale University
The past few years have witnessed an explosion of new work in the cognitive science of morality, yielding surprising new findings that have revolutionized our understanding of human moral psychology and led to the creation of a new interdisciplinary field of research. The aim of this seminar is to acquaint students with cutting-edge work in the contemporary study of moral cognition and give them the tools they need to make important contributions of their own.
Existing work in the field has a surprising interdisciplinary character, with psychologists and philosophers working together on a common set of problems. Accordingly, the present seminar is cross-listed, and my hope is that a discussion involving both psychology students and philosophy students will enable us to make more progress than would have been possible within either of these two disciplines alone.
General
Readings
Sep 9: Reason and Intuition in Moral Cognition
[\o] Jonathan Haidt, The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment
Sep 16: Dual Process Theory
[\o] Joshua Greene, The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul
[\a] Guy Kahane et al., “‘Utilitarian’ judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern for the greater good”
Sep 23: Moral Grammar
[\a] John Mikhail, Universal Moral Grammar: Theory, Evidence and the Future
[\a] Susan Dwyer, Bryce Huebner and Marc D. Hauser, The Linguistic Analogy: Motivations, Results, and Speculations
[\a] Fiery Cushman and Liane Young, Patterns of Moral Judgment Derive From Nonmoral Psychological Representations
Sep 30: Reinforcement Learning
[\a] Fiery Cushman, Action, Outcome, and Value: A Dual System Framework for Morality
[\o] Molly Crockett, Models of Morality
Oct 7: Impact of Morality on ‘Non-Moral’ Intuitions
[\o] Joshua Knobe, Person as Scientist, Person as Moralist
Please read one of the following responses (whichever one you prefer):
[\a] Edouard Machery, The Folk Concept of Intentional Action: Philosophical and Experimental Issues
[\a] Shaun Nichols and Joseph Ulatowski (2007), Intuitions and Individual Differences: The Knobe Effect Revisited
[\a] Sydney Levine et al., The Mental Representation of Human Action
[\o] Lawrence Ngo et al., Two Distinct Moral Mechanisms for Ascribing and Denying Intentionality
[\o] Steven Sloman et al., A Causal Model of Intentionality Judgment
[\a] Chandra Sripada and Sara Konrath, Telling More Than We Can Know About Intentional Action
[\a] Kevin Uttich and Tania Lombrozo, Norms Inform Mental State Ascriptions: A Rational Explanation for the Side-Effect Effect
[\o] Mark Alicke et al. (2011), Causation, Norm Violation and Culpable Control
[\o] David Danks et al., Demoralizing Causation
[\a] Michael Strevens et al., Causality Reunified
Oct 14: Moral Foundations and the Liberal/Conservative Divide
[\o] Jesse Graham et al., Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism
Moral Cognition and Mind Perception
[\o] Kurt Gray, Liane Young & Adam Waytz, Mind Perception is the Essence of Morality
[\o] Kurt Gray et al., The Myth of Harmless Wrongs in Moral Cognition: Automatic Dyadic Completion From Sin to Suffering
Oct 28: Two Philosophical Issues: Moral Luck and Moral Responsibility
[\o] Mario Attie-Picker, Is the Folk Concept of Luck Normative?
[\o] Kathryn Tabb et al., Behavioral Genetics and Attributions of Moral Responsibility
Nov 4: Moral Development
[\o] Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn & Paul Bloom, Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants
[\a] Marjorie Rhodes and Lisa Chalik, Social Categories as Markers of Intrinsic Interpersonal Obligations
Nov 11: Evolution and Moral Judgment
[\a] Chandra Sripada, Punishment and the Strategic Structure of Moral Systems
[\o] Jillian Jordan et al., Third-Party Punishment as a Costly Signal of Trustworthiness
Nov 18: Morality and Religion
[\o] Ara Norenzayan et al., The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions