Let's not get ahead of ourselves: we have no idea if moral reasoning causes moral progress.

An important question about moral progress is what causes it. One of the most popular proposed mechanisms is moral reasoning: moral progress often happens because lots of people reason their way to improved moral beliefs. Authors who defend moral reasoning as a cause of moral progress have relied on two broad lines of argument: the general and the specific line.

The effect of cognitive load, ego depletion, induction and time restriction on moral judgments about sacrificial dilemmas: a meta-analysis.

Greene's influential dual-process model of moral cognition (mDPM) proposes that when people engage in Type 2 processing, they tend to make consequentialist moral judgments. One important source of empirical support for this claim comes from studies that ask participants to make moral judgments while experimentally manipulating Type 2 processing. This paper presents a meta-analysis of the published psychological literature on the effect of four standard cognitive-processing manipulations (cognitive load; ego depletion; induction; time restriction) on moral judgments about sacrificial moral dilemmas [ = 44; = 68; total = 14, 003; () = 194.

How Stable are Moral Judgments?

Psychologists and philosophers often work hand in hand to investigate many aspects of moral cognition. In this paper, we want to highlight one aspect that to date has been relatively neglected: the stability of moral judgment over time. After explaining why philosophers and psychologists should consider stability and then surveying previous research, we will present the results of an original three-wave longitudinal study.

Moral progress: Recent developments.

Societies change over time. Chattel slavery and foot-binding have been abolished, democracy has become increasingly widespread, gay rights have become established in some countries, and the animal rights movement continues to gain momentum. Do these changes count as moral progress? Is there such a thing? If so, how should we understand it? These questions have been receiving increasing attention from philosophers, psychologists, biologists, and sociologists in recent decades.

Freedom from what? Separating lay concepts of freedom.

Debates about freedom of will and action and their connections with moral responsibility have raged for centuries, but the opposing sides might disagree because they use different concepts of freedom. Based on previous work, we hypothesized that people who assert freedom in a determined (D) or counterfactual-intervener (CI) scenario assert this because they are thinking about freedom from constraint and not about freedom from determination (in D) or from inevitability (in CI). We also hypothesized that people who deny that freedom in D or in CI deny this because they are thinking about freedom from determination or from inevitability, respectively, and not about freedom from constraint.