Various theories of moral cognition posit that moral intuitions can be understood as the output of a computational process performed over structured mental representations of human action. We propose that action plan diagrams — “act trees” — can be a useful tool for theorists to...

The topic of my 2018 Seegers Lecture at Valparaiso University Law School was the original meaning of “emolument” and its implications for President Trump. In this expanded version of my remarks, I begin by discussing the Constitution's Emoluments Clauses and describing the three emoluments...

The presumption of innocence is not only a bedrock principle of American law, but also a fundamental human right. The psychological underpinnings of this presumption, however, are not well understood. To make progress, one important task is to explain how adults and children infer the goals and...

Could a computer be programmed to make moral judgments about cases of intentional harm and unreasonable risk that match those judgments people already make intuitively? If the human moral sense is an unconscious computational mechanism of some sort, as many cognitive scientists have suggested,...

In his path-breaking work on the foundations of visual perception, the MIT neuroscientist David Marr distinguished three levels at which any information-processing task can be understood and emphasized the first of these: Although algorithms and mechanisms are empirically more accessible, it is...

Darwin’s (1871) observation that evolution has produced in us certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct that lack any obvious basis in individual utility is a useful springboard from which to clarify the role of emotion in moral judgment. The problem is whether a certain class of...

Scientists from various disciplines have begun to focus attention on the psychology and biology of human morality. One research program that has recently gained attention is universal moral grammar (UMG). UMG seeks to describe the nature and origin of moral knowledge by using concepts and models...

In "Moral Heuristics," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(4), 531-573 (2005), Professor Cass Sunstein draws on recent scientific literature on heuristics in judgment and decision-making to argue that heuristics play a pervasive role in moral cognition and often lead to mistaken and even absurd...