Abstract

In the archetypical action thriller, the plot turns on a critical moment of insight. A car with out-of-state license plates, the gold tooth of the man behind the counter— something tips us off, and loose strands of evidence are woven into a meaningful pattern. Substituting a runaway trolley for suspicious vehicles and dental anomalies, we suggest that a similar denouement is at hand in the field of moral psychology. A number of theoretical proposals that were at one time regarded as unconnected at best, and contradictory at worst, now show hope of reconciliation. Unknowns abound, but there are hints of an emerging consensus. At its core is a recognition that moral judgment is the product of interaction and competition between distinct psychological systems. The goal of the present essay is to describe these systems to highlight important questions for future research. Recent research in moral psychology has focused on two challenges to the longdominant cognitive development paradigm conceived by Piaget and nurtured by Kohlberg (Kohlberg, 1969; Piaget, 1965/1932; Turiel, 1983, 2005). The first challenge claims that moral judgment is accomplished by rapid, automatic and unconscious intuitions (Damasio, 1994; Haidt, 2001; Hauser, 2006; Mikhail, 2000; Schweder & Haidt, 1993), contra the cognitive developmentalists' assumption that moral judgment is the product of conscious principled reasoning. This challenge is built in part on studies demonstrating people's inability to articulate a rational basis for strongly held moral convictions (Bjorklund, Haidt, & Murphy, 2000; Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006; Hauser, Cushman, Young, Jin, & Mikhail, 2007; Mikhail, 2000). The second and related challenge claims that moral judgment is driven primarily by affective responses (Blair, 1995; Damasio, 1994; Greene & Haidt, 2002; Schweder & Haidt, 1993), contra the cognitive developmentalists' assumption that moral judgment results from the application of general principles in a "cold" cognitive process..