Process and content in moral psychology

Guy Kahane
University of Oxford

Recent scientific research in moral psychology has highlighted the pervasive role of automaticity, 
intuition and emotion in moral judgment, leaving little space for genuine reasoning and deliberation. A 
provocative exception has been Joshua Greene’s influential research on utilitarian solutions to moral 
dilemmas. According to Greene’s dual process model of moral judgment, controlled cognitive processing 
not only plays a significant role in moral judgment, but also favours a distinctive type of content—a 
broadly utilitarian approach to ethics. In this talk, I will argue that this proposed tie between process and 
content is based on a misinterpretation of the evidence. Drawing on some of our own empirical 
research, I will show that the supposed evidence for controlled processing in utilitarian judgment is 
actually likely to reflect, not ‘utilitarian reasoning’, but a form of moral deliberation which, ironically, is 
actually in serious tension with a utilitarian outlook. The more general lesson of all this is that much of 
current empirical research in moral psychology is based on a far too narrow understanding of intuition 
and deliberation.