Up until now I’ve been making a case for the distinct causal roles our emotional and more rational brain systems play in moral judgments. This is a false distinction. The fact remains that the individual making a moral judgment is an organism susceptible to emotions, and whether those emotions can be fully divorced from rational thought is an area worth exploring.

Anyone who has even a basic familiarity with philosophy, or has stayed up late arguing with friends after a few drinks, has probably at one time or another been posed with some sort of hypothetical situation. Hypotheticals are both difficult to answer and interesting to contemplate precisely because we are posed with a situation we have never been in, and might never be in.

When we talk about morality we too often neglect to consider the relationship our moral decisions have with innate moral intuitions. While moral standards could be described as prescriptive statements regarding human behavior (how should I act?), moral intuitions could be better described as descriptive statements regarding the cause of that behavior (why did I act this way?).

There is a famous philosophical thought experiment created by Peter Singer that goes something like this; you are walking down the street and you see a small child drowning in a shallow pond. You can jump in and save the child easily, but in the process you will ruin your $500 suit. Any sane person would say it is your moral obligation to save this child…D8XDSZ2RPQNZ

One of the most amazing things about human consciousness is that we experience it as a holistic unified experience. As we interact with the world we see, hear, and smell. We remember. We feel. We think. It’s this seamless unification that makes us forget sometimes that all these processes that contribute to our conscious experience…

Over at brainblogger there was a post recently (Free Will is NOT An Illusion) which argued against the idea that free will is an illusion. The author argues against the idea that all choices and decisions are made by the subconscious mind, that “the brain makes a subconscious decision before it is realized consciously”. He…