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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access published online on October 20, 2006
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi:10.1093/scan/nsl026
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© The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Received August 1, 2006
Accepted September 1, 2006

Special Issue Paper

The liver and the moral organ

Marc D. Hauser 1 *

1 Departments of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, and Human Evolutionary Biology Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Marc D. Hauser, E-mail: mdh{at}wjh.harvard.edu


  Abstract

Drawing on an analogy to language, I argue that a suite of novel questions emerge when we consider our moral faculty in a similar light. In particular, I suggest the possibility that our moral judgments are derived from unconscious, intuitive processes that operate over the causal-intentional structure of actions and their consequences. On this model, we are endowed with a moral faculty that generates judgments about permissible and forbidden actions prior to the involvement of our emotions and systems of conscious, rational deliberation. This framing of the problem sets up specific predictions about the role of particular neural structures and psychological processes in the generation of moral judgments as well as in the generation of moral behavior. I sketch the details of these predictions and point to relevant data that speak to the validity of thinking of our moral intuitions as grounded in a moral organ.

Keywords: moral oragan; linguistic analogy; moral judgments; cognitive faculties.
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