Although reasoning has been characterized as the essence of our being, it is often prone to cognitive biases. Decades of research in the reasoning and decision making fields have shown that when fa...

On the mainstream view, consciences are valuable because they promote moral unity. However, conscience, so defined, will systematically prevent moral growth that threatens unity, even when unity has formed around oppressive moral values. This motivates Carolyn McLeod's alternative ‘Dynamic View’ whereby consciences are valuable to the extent that they are dynamic. Consciences are dynamic when they interact with our best moral judgements to shape or ‘retool’ the moral values underpinning conscience, sometimes at an initial cost to unity. We modify and (...) extend McLeod's account in two ways: (1) We object to her claim that conscience encourages its own retooling. We argue that the opposite is true – conscience creates a motivational barrier to change that moral judgement must overcome to successfully retool conscience. The task of ensuring dynamism, therefore, falls to moral judgement. (2) However, this motivational barrier enables conscience to play a valuable role that McLeod overlooks – compensating for the limitations of moral judgement. On our Balanced View, the value of conscience depends on it being sufficiently open to being shaped by our best moral judgements but inert enough to compensate for distorted moral judgements and to guide action when under cognitive load. (shrink)

Human reasoning is often conceived as an interplay between a more intuitive and deliberate thought process. In the last 50 years, influential fast-and-slow dual-process models that capitalize on this distinction have been used to account for numerous phenomena – from logical reasoning biases, over prosocial behavior, to moral decision making. The present paper clarifies that despite the popularity, critical assumptions are poorly conceived. My critique focuses on two interconnected foundational issues: the exclusivity and switch feature. The exclusivity feature refers to (...) the tendency to conceive intuition and deliberation as generating unique responses such that one type of response is assumed to be beyond the capability of the fast-intuitive processing mode. I review the empirical evidence in key fields and show that there is no solid ground for such exclusivity. The switch feature concerns the mechanism by which a reasoner can decide to shift between more intuitive and deliberate processing. I present an overview of leading switch accounts and show that they are conceptually problematic – precisely because they presuppose exclusivity. I build on these insights to sketch the groundwork for a more viable dual-process architecture and illustrate how it can set a new research agenda to advance the field in the coming years. (shrink)