Moral Judgment As Adaptive Explanations For Different Aspects Of Morality

Moral Judgement

From the journal, the author stated that there are three distinct adaptions which is moral judgment, moral influence and moral conscience, each designed to solve broad classes of adaptive problems. Moral judgments are adaptations has been advocated in various specificities and scopes, and on different levels. Adaptive explanations have been proposed for different aspects of morality, for example, have focused on moral behavior, moral norms or sentiments or emotions. Moral judgments are also a kind of practically normative judgment. They are a kind of normative judgment in that they concern how things ought to be as opposed to how things are. They are a kind of practically normative judgment in that they concern how subjects ought to act as opposed to what subjects ought to believe.

The adaptedness of moral judgments has been claimed to support views such as that humans ought to act from altruistic motives or that consequentialist ethical theories are superior to deontological ones. The content of moral beliefs various across time and place, the belief that there is such a thing as right and wrong seems to present across widely different cultures. The particular norms by which moral actions are judged vary to some extent from individual to individual and from culture to culture but value judgments concerning human behavior are passed in all cultures.

Behavior that benefits others may sometimes also benefit the individual. Such interactions between species illustrate how each other may adapt through mutually beneficial behavior, even where the exchange is not conscious. The same principle applies for interactions within species. Even if everyone competes for the same resources, they may also establish mutually beneficial relationships. Helping that seems to involve cost, therefore, may justify further analysis. Some cases of costly helping are indeed apparent only. Costs that are observed in the short term may be balanced by benefits in the long term. For long-term evolution, a proper measure is thus not individual fitness, but inclusive fitness, the total representation of one’s traits in future generations

Emotionally arousing actions are often considered permissible, and those lacking emotional salience are often judged immoral. Moreover, even when considering highly emotional stimuli, greater deliberation or weaker sensitivity to one’s bodily states considerably dulls the effects of emotion on moral judgments. any effect of emotion on moral judgment can arise only after causal-mental analysis. If there are negative feelings about the actions or character of others on moral emotion, they are predicted upon preceding causa-mental analysis. Negative affect may arise prior to such analysis, setting the process of moral judgment in motion. Negative events elicit rapid affective or evaluative responses and trigger processes of explanation and sense-making. In the context of moral judgment, the causal-mental analysis provides the conceptual framework, appraising negative affect and thus giving rise to emotional experience and moral judgment.