Moral Faculty Research Articles

From Consciousness to Conscience: Cognitive Aspects in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Conscience

Abstract This article examines a subject that has received relatively little attention in the literature on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: the pivotal role played by the emergence of consciousness (Bewusstsein) as an epistemic faculty in the development of conscience (Gewissen) as a moral faculty. To achieve this objective, I will (1) introduce the inquiry, (2) elucidate Nietzsche’s hypothesis regarding the emergence of consciousness, (3) establish a connection between consciousness and the genesis of conscience, and (4) expound upon the cognitive capacities involved in the formation of conscience as a moral faculty.

Bishop Butler’s Hybrid Moral Faculty and the Wisdom of Solomon

Bishop Butler’s Hybrid Moral Faculty and the Wisdom of Solomon

The disunity of moral judgment: Implications for the study of psychopathy

ABSTRACT Since the 18th century, one of the key features of diagnosed psychopaths has been “moral colorblindness” or an inability to form moral judgments. However, attempts at experimentally verifying this moral incapacity have been largely unsuccessful. After reviewing the centrality of “moral colorblindness” to the study and diagnosis of psychopathy, I argue that the reason that researchers have been unable to verify that diagnosed psychopaths have an inability to make moral judgments is because their research is premised on the assumption that there is a specific moral faculty of the brain, or specific “moral” emotions, and that this faculty or set of emotions can become “impaired”. I review recent research and argue that we have good reason to think that there is no such distinct capacity for moral judgment, and that, as a result, it is impossible for someone’s “moral judgment faculty” to become selectively disabled. I then discuss the implications of such a position on psychopathy research, the coherence of the disorder, and the moral responsibility of psychopaths.

Conspiracy and Punishment in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Abstract: This study is devoted to discussing the phenomenon of “Conspiracy” and “Punishment” in Julius Caesar (1599) according to Shakespeare’s canon. William Shakespeare has attributed to dealing with some of the concepts that confirm his piercing insight into human nature. He considers the man to be instinctive with exaggerated passion, if not guided by reason, leading to unexpected consequences affecting both the individual and the community. This study also is an attempt to deal with how the individual and society are affected by the inability of the man to deal rationally with his divided nature. It shows how men cannot mitigate the consequences of their anti-social actions because justice must be on the path. The study helps to discover the political conflicts in our present-day through reconsidering Shakespeare's political texts and referring to a “Conspiracy Theory” which leads to political and moral troubles at all times and everywhere. Thus, it is axiomatic that the law needs the support of the human moral faculty as called by psychologists a “Superego” specifically when the law fails to obtain maximum assistance, crime increases, unrest spreads, the law and order prove difficult if not impossible

The Nature of Morals: How Universal Moral Grammar Provides the Conceptual Basis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

I argue that theoretical developments in the study of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) should occur alongside progress in moral psychology, particularly moral cognition. More specifically, I argue that Universal Moral Grammar (UMG), a model positing an innate, regulative, and universal moral faculty characterizable in terms of rules and principles, fulfills the role of the foundational model needed to usefully conceptualize the UDHR. As such, I provide a detailed account of UMG against competing models in moral psychology. Furthermore, I combine UMG with Talbott’s Historical-Social Process of Moral Discovery and Rawls’s reflective equilibrium to show how the UDHR represents a major development in moral exploration, one indicating a more penetrative look into the inner moral nature of humans that attempts to reach, but does not attain, one interpretation of reflective equilibrium tied to cognitive moral psychology.

DrugsandHugs: Stimulating Moral Dispositions as a Method of Moral Enhancement

AbstractAdvocates of moral enhancement through pharmacological, genetic, or other direct interventions sometimes explicitly argue, or assume without argument, that traditional moral education and development is insufficient to bring about moral enhancement. Traditional moral education grounded in a Kohlbergian theory of moral development is indeed unsuitable for that task; however, the psychology of moral development and education has come a long way since then. Recent studies support the view that moral cognition is a higher-order process, unified at a functional level, and that a specific moral faculty does not exist. It is more likely that moral cognition involves a number of different mechanisms, each connected to other cognitive and affective processes. Taking this evidence into account, we propose a novel, empirically informed approach to moral development and education, in children and adults, which is based on a cognitive-affective approach to moral dispositions. This is an interpretative approach that derives from the cognitive-affective personality system (Mischel and Shoda, 1995). This conception individuates moral dispositions by reference to the cognitive and affective processes that realise them. Conceived of in this way, moral dispositions influence an agent's behaviour when they interact with situational factors, such as mood or social context. Understanding moral dispositions in this way lays the groundwork for proposing a range of indirect methods of moral enhancement, techniques that promise similar results as direct interventions whilst posing fewer risks.

Naturaleza humana, ley y obligación en Francisco Suárez

De acuerdo con Francisco Suárez, la naturaleza humana es el fundamento último del dominio político y de la obediencia civil. En virtud de su semejanza con Dios, el legislador humano participa del dominio de aquel. Dicho dominio constituye una facultad moral del legislador humano para mandar e imponer leyes a sus congéneres, pues su voluntad es una condición necesaria para que los ciudadanos, unidos en un cuerpo místico, alcancen su fin natural. De esta manera, el legislador recibe el señorío de parte de la comunidad perfecta de hombres para obligarlos a través de leyes. Las cuales, no solo han de versar sobre el bien común, sino que además han de ser dadas de manera proporcional al conocimiento humano. Para lo cual, hace falta que sean suficientemente promulgadas a través de un acto de habla que produzca la obligación y transmita la voluntad del legislador a la comunidad bajo una forma sensible. Luego la acción legislativa es la elaboración sensible de la fórmula legal que vehiculiza la intención del legislador penetra en la mente de los súbditos para engendrar el deber moral.

Moral Readings of the Court: Discrimination Cases in the U.S. Supreme Court

What moral readings characterize contemporary U.S. Supreme Court opinions on discrimination by race; ethnicity; religion; gender; sexuality; and disabilities? John Rohr and the Constitutional School of Public Administration scholars have analyzed the Supreme Court’s decisions for moral insights in public affairs. The authors sought to take a modest step with analysis based on a more nuanced, empirical moral reading of the Court’s cases. First, the authors critiqued the case-study method of the Constitutional School, comparing these with moral readings of the Court’s opinion, including moral justifications that are teleological and nonteleological. Second, the authors analyzed selected opinions by the contemporary Supreme Court on discrimination by race; ethnicity; religion; gender; sexuality; and disabilities. Third, the authors analyzed patterns of teleological (utilitarian or virtue) and nonteleological (deontological) moral justifications and concluded the Supreme Court ordinarily uses ethical arguments, often teleological (utilitarian), with nonteleological (deontological) justifications in cases of perceived injustice. Virtue moral justifications are rare: only with a nonvirtuous litigant. Thus, the authors meld a more nuanced, empirical moral reading with the traditional case-study method of the Constitutional School of Public Administration, without assuming appeal to some universal moral faculty—instead deferring to each person in accepting or rejecting these moral justifications.

A Universal Moral Grammar (UMG) Ontology

This paper describes an OWL ontology that is a Universal Moral Grammar (UMG). UMG has been hypothesized by students of Chomsky to play the same role in human ethics as Universal Grammar (UG) does in Linguistics. I.e., the UMG describes a moral faculty hypothesized to have a genetic basis. This approach utilizes the modular view of the mind developed by Chomsky and currently utilized by many evolutionary psychology researchers. In this paper I describe the ontology and how it represents ethical choices, rules, scenarios, and systems. This includes representation of choices governed by the golden rule, utilitarianism, and Moral Foundations Theory. The foundation for the model is an Artificial Intelligence model of events, plans, and decisions. This plan model represents what is known as Theory of Mind (TOM). The TOM model is extended to the ethical domain by an analysis of recent research in evolutionary psychology and the representation of 40 different scenarios such as the trolley problem from the philosophical, psychological, and biological literature. The ontology is an example of how semantic technology can be used to provide mathematical rigor to the study of human ethics. This version demonstrates the breadth of the UMG, that it is capable of representing many diverse examples from the literature. However, there are already meaningful results from this version such as a resolution to Hume’s Is-Ought problem.

El concepto de derecho subjetivo y el derecho a la propiedad privada en Suárez y Locke

En Suárez no se encuentra un tratamiento sistemático del derecho en sentido subjetivo, pero el Dr. Eximio dispuso de una elaborada doctrina sobre esta cuestión. Suárez entiende el derecho en sentido subjetivo como una potestad o facultad moral del sujeto que se funda en su naturaleza racional. Su pensamiento sobre el particular, especialmente su doctrina sobre el derecho a la propiedad privada, parece haber ejercido una amplia influencia en la Inglaterra del siglo XVII.

Moral Learning: Conceptual foundations and normative relevance

What is distinctive about a bringing a learning perspective to moral psychology? Part of the answer lies in the remarkable transformations that have taken place in learning theory over the past two decades, which have revealed how powerful experience-based learning can be in the acquisition of abstract causal and evaluative representations, including generative models capable of attuning perception, cognition, affect, and action to the physical and social environment. When conjoined with developments in neuroscience, these advances in learning theory permit a rethinking of fundamental questions about the acquisition of moral understanding and its role in the guidance of behavior. For example, recent research indicates that spatial learning and navigation involve the formation of non-perspectival as well as ego-centric models of the physical environment, and that spatial representations are combined with learned information about risk and reward to guide choice and potentiate further learning. Research on infants provides evidence that they form non-perspectival expected-value representations of agents and actions as well, which help them to navigate the human environment. Such representations can be formed by highly-general mental processes such as causal and empathic simulation, and thus afford a foundation for spontaneous moral learning and action that requires no innate moral faculty and can exhibit substantial autonomy with respect to community norms. If moral learning is indeed integral with the acquisition and updating of casual and evaluative models, this affords a new way of understanding well-known but seemingly puzzling patterns in intuitive moral judgment—including the notorious “trolley problems.”

Reid's Response to Hume's Moral Critique of Religion

My aim in this paper is to present Reid's answer to Hume's claim that religion is contrary to natural human moral passions. Religion, according to Hume, weakens natural human inclinations toward virtue and invents new species of merit. Reid would respond, first, that morality is indeed tied to human nature, and that Hume fails to recognize that a sense of justice is natural as well. Since justice does not arise within human social conventions, Reid would conclude that justice is not a virtue that is limited to the human domain. Second, Reid would argue that the concordance between natural moral human motives and natural non-moral motives is a sign of design. And third, Reid would argue that uncorrupted religion is one that is faithful to morality and human nature, and that does not distort natural motives. Overall, Reid holds that the moral faculty is a natural human faculty that gives rise to natural inclinations and beliefs, but that these are concordant with religious beliefs and practices prescribed by Scripture.

Emotional Appraisal of Moral Dilemmas: What Neuroimaging Can Tell about the Disgust-Morality Link.

The debate about the origin of moral faculty—the psychological systems that make judgments about right and wrong, what's permissible and what is not ([Jones, 2007][1])—has long been central among philosophers and scientists. In the contest of this debate, some experimental work (e.g., [Eskine et

ИССЛЕДОВАНИЕ КОГНИТИВНОГО КОМПОНЕНТА ЭМОЦИОНАЛЬНОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ МЛАДШИХ ШКОЛЬНИКОВ

In connection with global changes in the education system and introduction of Federal state educational standard for primary education (FSES PE), the issue of emotional development of primary school children acquires new emphasis. The central task of educational activity and the main system formation of primary-school age is now considered the child’s achievement of the level of formed emotional culture in the complex of its components by the end of the primary-school age period. Integrity of emotional development of primary school children is also one of the essential conditions for the effectiveness of the training and education of children in the following age periods. The aim of the research is to diagnose the cognitive component of emotional culture. The results of the study revealed the signs of insufficient development of the cognitive component of emotional culture. The children demonstrated inadequate response to the proposed emotional situations, immaturity of moral faculty, and had difficulty in distinguishing between different emotions (fear, anger and sadness). A distorted understanding of emotions of other people can become the reason for inadequate behavior of children and unfavourable emotional state. More precise differentiation of emotional states was observed when children were performing a task with a picture containing a plot. The plot and activity context facilitated children’s adequate perception and understanding of emotional states of other people – they identified easier the emotions of the characters depicted. The results of the study indicate the necessity of the development and testing of the programme aimed at formation and development of the cognitive component of emotional culture.

Plato on the Philosophical Benefits of Musical Education

I argue that musical education in Plato’sRepublicis not aimed at developing a moral discriminatory faculty in the spirited part, but rather that its benefits are predominantly intellectual, and become fully apparent only at the philosophical stage of the guardians’ education. In order to prove this point, I discuss the intellectual state which the guardians’ philosophical education is meant to bring about, and then show why it is dependent on the earlier cognitive effects of musical education. Ultimately, I show that musical education allows guardians to provide a unified analysis of both culture and nature.

Neurodegeneration and Identity

There is a widespread notion, both within the sciences and among the general public, that mental deterioration can rob individuals of their identity. Yet there have been no systematic investigations of what types of cognitive damage lead people to appear to no longer be themselves. We measured perceived identity change in patients with three kinds of neurodegenerative disease: frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Structural equation models revealed that injury to the moral faculty plays the primary role in identity discontinuity. Other cognitive deficits, including amnesia, have no measurable impact on identity persistence. Accordingly, frontotemporal dementia has the greatest effect on perceived identity, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has the least. We further demonstrated that perceived identity change fully mediates the impact of neurodegenerative disease on relationship deterioration between patient and caregiver. Our results mark a departure from theories that ground personal identity in memory, distinctiveness, dispositional emotion, or global mental function.

A Good Dissenter Speaking Well: William Enfield’s Educational and Elocutionary Philosophies in Religious Context

ABSTRACTEighteenth-century British dissenting minister and rector of Warrington Academy William Enfield, author of the enormously successful elocutionary manual, The Speaker, although often ignored entirely or dismissed as trite and uninteresting in many histories of rhetoric, in fact wrote his elocutionary manual as part of a comprehensive educational system grounded in moral theology and faculty psychology. This article places Enfield’s elocutionary work within religious and pedagogical context through analysis of his writings on religion and education and his pamphlets debating Joseph Priestley over the nature of dissent.

A Good Dissenter Speaking Well: William Enfield’s Educational and Elocutionary Philosophies in Religious Context

Eighteenth-century British dissenting minister and rector of Warrington Academy William Enfield, author of the enormously successful elocutionary manual, The Speaker, although often ignored entirely or dismissed as trite and uninteresting in many histories of rhetoric, in fact wrote his elocutionary manual as part of a comprehensive educational system grounded in moral theology and faculty psychology. This article places Enfield’s elocutionary work within religious and pedagogical context through analysis of his writings on religion and education and his pamphlets debating Joseph Priestley over the nature of dissent.

Morality for skeptics? Morality for Humans Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science Mark Johnson University of Chicago Press, 2014. 273 pp.

Morality for skeptics? <b>Morality for Humans</b> Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science <i>Mark Johnson</i> University of Chicago Press, 2014. 273 pp.

Reid on the moral sense

Some interpret Reid's notion of a moral sense as merely analogical. Others understand it as a species of acquired perception. To understand Reid's account of the moral sense, we must draw from his theory of perception and his theory of aesthetic experience, each of which illuminate the nature and operation of the moral faculty. I argue that, on Reid's view, the moral faculty is neither affective nor rational, but representational. It is a discrete, basic, capacity for representing the real moral properties of humans and human conduct.