An important aspect of understanding morality is accurate description of what happens when people make moral judgments. Nigel Warburton talks to psychologist and philosopher Liane Young about her experiments designed to shed light on moral intentions.
Listen to Liane Young on Mind and Morality
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Very interesting, the differences between harm and purity norms shown by your research, e.g. greater emphasis on "intent" in judging harm than in purity, and the probable differences in evolutionary origins.
I very much like Jonathan Haidt's 5 moral dimensions, of which harm and purity/sacredness are two, and I found myself wondering about the other three - fairness, group-cohesion and authority. I would be interested to know how much involvement of the temporal parietal area there is when we judge someone as unjust, or unpatriotic, or subversive. Dissenters have traditionally been seen as deserving the worst punishments, yet may then become heros e.g. Gallileo, or Bruno, or the pacifists of WW1.
What on earth is going on for us there in our brains in terms of e.g. judging intent?
Posted by: Jim Vaughan | November 04, 2012 at 10:48 AM