RESEARCH ARTICLE
Moral educational implications of neuroscientific research on moral decisionmaking
Sungshin Women's University
Correspondence to Kyung-ho Moon, mkh064@sungshin.ac.kr
Brain, Digital, & Learning. Volume 13, Number 4, 537–551, December 2023. https://doi.org/10.31216/BDL.20230031
Received on November 6, 2023, Revised on December 18, 2023, Accepted on December 19, 2023, Published on December 31, 2023.
Copyright © 2023. Institute of Brain based Education, Korea National University of Education This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
In this study, the two types of moral judgment, rational reasoning and emotional intuition, were analyzed with a focus on neuroscientific interpretation of human responses in the trolley dilemma and footbridge dilemma. Based on such analysis, the cognitive approach required to make correct moral judgments was sought with a focus on establishing the relationship between reason and emotion. And the implications of this neuroscientific approach for moral education were derived. According to the results of neuroscientific research on people’s moral judgments in the trolley dilemma and footbridge dilemma, there are many neuroscientific research results supporting that emotional intuition leads to deontological judgments and rational reasoning leads to consequential judgments. In this way, emotional intuition and rational reasoning appear widely in human moral judgment. There is a need to find a method of moral education that can harmoniously utilize emotional intuition, which is fast and efficient but has the potential for bias, and rational reasoning, which is slow but accurate and fair.
Keywords
Moral judgment, rational reasoning, emotional intuition, moral education