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Two Theories of Moral Cognition

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Does Neuroscience Have Normative Implications?

Part of the book series: The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology ((ELTE,volume 22))

Abstract

Moral cognition refers to the human capacity to experience and respond to situations of moral significance. Recently, philosophers and cognitive scientists have turned to reinforcement learning, a branch of machine learning, to develop formal, mathematical models of normative cognition. One prominent approach, proposed by Cushman (Curr Opin Behav Sci 3:58–62, 2015), suggests that moral cognition is underwritten by a habitual (‘model-free’) system, in conjunction with socially-learned moral rules. I argue that moral cognition instead depends on three or more decision-making systems, with interactions between the systems producing its characteristic sociological, psychological, and phenomenological features. Adopting such an approach allows us to not only better explain what is going on in everyday, ‘successful’ instances of moral judgment and action, but also to more reliably predict, and perhaps thereby counter, routine breakdowns in moral behavior.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Reinforcement learning is an area in machine learning that aims to understand how agents learn to maximize rewards through interactions with their environments, i.e., how they learn through reinforcement, rather than through training on supervised data sets (Sutton and Barto 2018).

  2. 2.

    This example is loosely based on controversial remarks made by Guido Barilla, of Barilla pasta, in 2013. The company has since improved its record on LGBTQ rights (Somashekhar 2014).

  3. 3.

    By cognition, I mean the general functioning of the mind, rather than the narrower mental processes associated with understanding and knowledge. Moral cognition here refers to our capacity for lay moral experience, including the experience of moral emotions such as anger or shame. In other branches of philosophy, moral cognition is sometimes referred as moral perception; however, this latter term has technical connotations that I do not want to import in the discussion here (for a review, see McGrath 2018).

  4. 4.

    This latter, deliberation-based form of moral cognition is different from a still third kind of moral capacity, namely, moral reasoning or debate – the sort of reasoning on display in the pages of philosophy journals, where we aim to develop general and intermediate moral principles, defend and apply them, and so on.

  5. 5.

    I owe this formulation to Crockett (2013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN, USA

    Julia Haas

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  1. Julia Haas
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Correspondence to Julia Haas .

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  1. New York, NY, USA

    Geoffrey S. Holtzman

  2. Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA

    Elisabeth Hildt

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Haas, J. (2020). Two Theories of Moral Cognition. In: Holtzman, G.S., Hildt, E. (eds) Does Neuroscience Have Normative Implications?. The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56134-5_4

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