Abstract

Practical ethics can greatly benefit from the work in cognitive science. Cognitive science boasts substantial research and data on how people think, reason, and process information, as well as on the nature of the mind. I argue that cognitive science research and data are invaluable to investigating how people conduct themselves as they plod through practical moral problems. I discuss three reasons why practical ethics should be interested in cognitive science: cognitive science : helps us to better understand how people reason and offers theories about underlying mental processes; offers substantive discussion on normative accounts of reason and rationality; and provides insight into the nature of the human mind which may ground morality qua a human enterprise.