A moral trade-off system produces intuitive judgments that are rational and coherent and strike a balance between conflicting moral values.

ABSTRACT: How does the mind make moral judgments when the only way to satisfy one moral value is to neglect another? Moral dilemmas posed a recurrent adaptive problem for ancestral hominins, whose cooperative social life created multiple responsibilities to others. For many dilemmas, striking a balance between two conflicting values (a compromise judgment) would have promoted fitness better than neglecting one value to fully satisfy the other (an extreme judgment). We propose that natural selection favored the evolution of a cognitive system designed for making trade-offs between conflicting moral values. Its nonconscious computations respond to dilemmas by constructing "rightness functions": temporary representations specific to the situation at hand. A rightness function represents, in compact for

SUBMITTER: Guzman RA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9586309 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature