The Role of Emotions in Moral Judgment in Green’s View

Moral psychology for decades focused on reasoning, but recent evidence finds that emotions play a fundamental role in moral judgment. One of the models for explaining moral judgment is Greene’s Dual-process model of moral judgment. He believes that we can arrive at moral judgments either through reasoning or through emotions, according to which both automatic emotional responses and more controlled cognitive responses are involved in moral judgment. More specifically, utilitarian moral judgments are driven by cognitive processes while non-utilitarian judgments are driven by automatic emotional responses. Green tries to prove his point through experimental experiments and cognitive neuroscience. But according to the sample of violations and recent research, his view does not seem to provide a comprehensive and adequate explanation.