Scientists from various disciplines have begun to focus attention on the psychology and biology of human morality. One research program that has recently gained attention is universal moral grammar (UMG). UMG seeks to describe the nature and origin of moral knowledge by using concepts and models...

Could a computer be programmed to make moral judgments about cases of intentional harm and unreasonable risk that match those judgments people already make intuitively? If the human moral sense is an unconscious computational mechanism of some sort, as many cognitive scientists have suggested,...

In his path-breaking work on the foundations of visual perception, the MIT neuroscientist David Marr distinguished three levels at which any information-processing task can be understood and emphasized the first of these: Although algorithms and mechanisms are empirically more accessible, it is...

Shaun Nichols’ "Rational Rules" is the most creative and interesting response to moral nativism to appear since the naturalistic turn in moral psychology that began several decades ago. Nichols accepts the basic nativist observation that the moral rules children acquire are surprisingly rich...

"The Second Creation" by Jonathan Gienapp is a marvelous study of the earliest debates over constitutional language, meaning, and interpretation. In virtually every aspect, the book is brilliantly conceived, meticulously researched, and masterfully executed. This essay agrees with Gienapp’s...

The presumption of innocence is not only a bedrock principle of American law, but also a fundamental human right. The psychological underpinnings of this presumption, however, are not well understood. To make progress, one important task is to explain how adults and children infer the goals and...

Where do our moral intuitions come from? Are they innate? Does the brain contain a module specialized for moral judgment? Does the human genetic program contain instructions for the acquisition of a sense of justice or moral sense? Questions like these have been asked in one form or another for...

In their stimulating book, "'A Great Power of Attorney': Understanding the Fiduciary Constitution," Professors Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman argue that: (1) the Constitution of the United States is a power of attorney, or at least usefully analogized to a power of attorney; (2) although the United...

Various theories of moral cognition posit that moral intuitions can be understood as the output of a computational process performed over structured mental representations of human action. We propose that action plan diagrams — “act trees” — can be a useful tool for theorists to...