Moral Intuition: Psychological Underpinnings and Epistemological Inquiries

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26770004
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Philosophy/Ethics
• Research Institution: Niigata University (2015); The University of Tokyo (2014)
• Principal Investigator: Ota Koji 新潟大学, 人文社会・教育科学系, 准教授 (80726802)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 道徳直観 / 道徳心理学 / 道徳認識論 / 道徳的責任 / 自由意志

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In this study we investigated an epistemological suspicion that moral intuition might be unreliable since various experimental studies have shown instability of intuitive moral judgments. We explained those kinds of unreliability by appealing to the fact that our moral intuition involves complex representational processing which takes representations of actions as input. This sort of processing can be contrasted some kind of intuition assumed by contemporary moral intuitionist ethics. This consideration was extended to experimental scaling of judgments of moral responsibility and free will, which specified that the componential representations of free will as input were alternative possibility and agency.

Free Research Field

哲学・倫理学