Moralistics and Psychomoralistics: A Unified Cognitive Science of Moral Intuition

This book brings together three distinct research programmes in moral psychology - Moral Foundations Theory, Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange, and the Linguistic Analogy in Moral Psychology - and shows that they can be combined to create a unified cognitive science of moral intuition.

The book assumes evolution has furnished the human mind with two types of judgement: intuitive and deliberative. Focusing on moral intuitions (understood as moral judgments that were not arrived at via a process of conscious deliberation), the book explores the origins of these intuitions, examines how they are produced, and explains why the moral intuitions of different humans differ.

Providing a unique synthesis of three separate established fields, this book presents a new research program that will further our understanding of the various different intuitive moral judgements at the heart of some of the moral tensions within human society.

Graham Wood is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Tasmania, Australia. His research examines the relationship between human values and a scientific understanding of the human condition and draws on insights from moral philosophy, moral psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science.