Models of moral decision-making: Recent advances and normative relevance

Abstract

In the last decades, research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience fueled a rich debate about i) the main mechanisms underlying human (moral) decision-making and ii) their reliability. In this paper, I first make clear that the emotion/reason distinction should be set aside, although this does not imply casting doubt on dual-process models in general. To support this idea, I discuss a dual-process framework for moral decision-making informed by computational models of reinforcement learning. I finally consider some normative implications of this research, stressing their procedural, rather than substantive, nature.