| The current focus of moral psychology treats affect and emotions as the driving force behind our judgments about right and wrong. Without a strong cognitive component, however, such perspective can have only limited explanatory power and can only make a very few, ad hoc predictions about the properties of the events influencing moral judgments. From this point of view, studying the cognitive processes relevant to moral psychology is of highest priority for the progress of the field. Among these different processes, our ability to perceive meaningful connections between events, to make causal inferences and to assign causal roles seems particularly relevant to moral judgments.;The important role of causal reasoning on moral judgments has been recognized for long time (Heider, 1958; Shaver, 1985) but both the theoretical and empirical research on this link is rather limited. Some theories, for example, simply state that causality plays a role but they do not go into much detail about which aspects of it we take into account when making moral judgments (Cushman, 2008; Lagnado & Channon, 2009). Other theories are more specified, defining particular mechanisms which we use to distinguish morally appropriate from morally inappropriate interventions (Mikhail, 2007; Waldmann & Dieterich, 2007).;In the current research I take a different perspective, emphasizing the role of domain general cognitive processes on moral judgment. I use one particular domain general framework, namely, physicalist causality, to investigate the degree to which moral judgments are influenced by manipulation of simple physical factors, such as motion, distance and physical contact. In six studies I apply a variety of methodologies and experimental designs, repeatedly finding that physical factors can change the perception of wrongfulness. I interpret these results as a support for the value of domain general causal approaches to moral reasoning, claiming that a physicalist framework not only can explain results generated from other theories, but it can also predict results which other theories are either silent about or make wrong predictions. In the discussion, however, I also address important limitations and propose an alternative domain general framework which can be applied in a similar fashion. |
