[3] Distinctions between theories of moral reasoning can be accounted for by evaluating inferences (which tend to be either deductive or inductive) based on a given set of premises.
[4] Jonathan Haidt agrees, arguing in his social intuitionist model that reasoning concerning a moral situation or idea follows an initial intuition.
[7] This phase, more common among children, is characterized by the idea that rules come from authority figures in one's life such as parents, teachers, and God.
"[9] In Lawrence Kohlberg's view, moral development consists of the growth of less egocentric and more impartial modes of reasoning on more complicated matters.
[10] According to his theory, people pass through three main stages of moral development as they grow from early childhood to adulthood.
In this stage people, usually young children where they age from 5 to 7 years old, avoid certain behaviors only because of the fear of punishment, not because they see them as wrong.
They usually age between 21 or older where they think what is moral are values and rights that exist prior to social attachment and contracts.
At this stage people begin to develop their ideas of universal moral principles and will consider them the right thing to do regardless of what the laws of a society are.
[12] Based on empirical results from behavioral and neuroscientific studies, social and cognitive psychologists attempted to develop a more accurate descriptive (rather than normative) theory of moral reasoning.
[13] In contrast with such view, however, Joshua Greene and colleagues argued that laypeople's moral judgments are significantly influenced, if not shaped, by intuition and emotion as opposed to rational application of rules.
They suggested that our emotional intuition and deliberate reasoning are not only qualitatively distinctive, but they also compete in making moral judgments and decisions.
[5][21] Haidt highlighted the aspect of morality not directly accessible by our conscious search in memory, weighing of evidence, or inference.
The theory explained that in many cases, people resolve inconsistency between the intuitive and rational processes by using the latter for post-hoc justification of the former.
Haidt, using the metaphor "the emotional dog and its rational tail",[5] applied such nature of our reasoning to the contexts ranging from person perception to politics.
[33] A theorization of moral reasoning similar to dual-process theory was put forward with emphasis on our motivations to arrive at certain conclusions.
Those with a hold on information may dull out certain variables that propagate their agenda and then leave out specific context to push an opinion into the form of something reasonable to control individual, groups, and entire populations.
In Alicke (1992, Study 1),[36] participants made responsibility judgments about an agent who drove over the speed limit and caused an accident.
Even though the causal attribution of the accident may technically fall under the domain of objective, factual understanding of the event, it was nevertheless significantly affected by the perceived intention of the agent (which was presumed to have determined the participants' motivation to praise or blame him).
Another paper by Simon, Stenstrom, and Read (2015, Studies 3 and 4)[37] used a more comprehensive paradigm that measures various aspects of participants' interpretation of a moral event, including factual inferences, emotional attitude toward agents, and motivations toward the outcome of decision.
Participants read about a case involving a purported academic misconduct and were asked to role-play as a judicial officer who must provide a verdict.
A student named Debbie had been accused of cheating in an exam, but the overall situation of the incident was kept ambiguous to allow participants to reason in a desired direction.
Behavioral and computer simulation results showed an overall shift in reasoning—factual inference, emotional attitude, and moral decision—depending on the manipulated motivation.
[40] Coherence-based reasoning framework draws symmetrical links between consistent (things that co-occur) and inconsistent (things that do not co-occur) psychological representations and use them as constraints, thereby providing a natural way to represent conflicts between irreconcilable motivations, observations, behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes, as well as moral obligations.
[37][39] Importantly, Thagard's framework was highly comprehensive in that it provided a computational basis for modeling reasoning processes using moral and non-moral facts and beliefs as well as variables related to both 'hot' and 'cold' cognitions.
Bertram Malle and Joshua Knobe conducted survey studies to investigate laypeople's understanding and use (the folk concept) of the word 'intentionality' and its relation to action.
Consistent with this view as well as with our moral intuitions, studies found significant effects of the agent's intention, desire, and beliefs on various types of moral judgments, Using factorial designs to manipulate the content in the scenarios, Cushman showed that the agent's belief and desire regarding a harmful action significantly influenced judgments of wrongness, permissibility, punishment, and blame.
Many studies on moral reasoning have used fictitious scenarios involving anonymous strangers (e.g., trolley problem) so that external factors irrelevant to researcher's hypothesis can be ruled out.
However, criticisms have been raised about the external validity of the experiments in which the reasoners (participants) and the agent (target of judgment) are not associated in any way.
According to their view, learning the moral character of agents around us must have been a primary concern for primates and humans beginning from their early stages of evolution, because the ability to decide whom to cooperate with in a group was crucial to survival.
[54] With these two ideas in mind, researchers decided to do their experiments based on moral dilemmas that both men and women face regularly.