Bridging the New Moral Psychology to Traditional Ethics

Fellow Project Academic Year
2010

One of the most remarkable and distinctive human attributes concerns our ability to make moral judgments. These judgments play a crucial role not only in guiding our everyday lives but also in shaping policy decisions. Although for thousands of years philosophers have been studying morality, very little is known about what actually goes on in our minds when we make moral judgments. Recently, however, there has been a surge of scientific work aiming to address this question. The goal of this project is to investigate how this empirical work informs human and philosophical understanding of morality. Some aspects of the project are purely conceptual while others involve carrying out empirical investigations of the sort that is characteristic of the growing area of study known as “experimental philosophy”.

Fellow Project Principal Investigator
Angel Pinillos, Assistant Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies