jessica m gonzalez


image credit: Michael Gonzalez (IG @iopticsphotography)

research

What role should science play in our moral deliberations? My dissertation project addresses this question, first by looking at naturalistic accounts of morality that claim scientific knowledge can tell us what moral theory we should adopt. In other words, these accounts try to squeeze normativity out of descriptive theories. For that reason, I argue, they violate the is/ought boundary.

Instead of telling us how we ought to live, I argue that science should be used to help us better understand our moral processes. Scientific work in moral cognition reveals surprising aspects of our moral processes. The more we understand the cognitive underpinnings of our moral intuitions and judgments, the better we can understand our own moral behavior. Importantly, we can use this knowledge to make concrete changes in our moral deliberations -- changes that will help us better live up to the values we hold. Using science in this way will help us become better moral agents and will allow us to make decisions that we are more satisfied with upon moral reflection.

My dissertation integrates empirical work from fields like neuroscience and cognitive development with the work of philosophers like Dewey, Korsgaard and Rawls.

Moral Cognition:
An Introduction to the Field

Accepted by DeGruyter for publication in an edited volume by Kristen Monroe.
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Abstract

Moral cognition is an interdisciplinary field aimed at understanding the cognitive processes underlying how we talk, think and feel about morality. I begin this chapter by introducing moral cognition as an interdisciplinary field without crisp boundaries between disciplines like philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. That is, various disciplines and subdisciplines come together to answer particular questions about our moral thinking. Next, I explore two particular questions in moral cognition by highlighting studies and scientifically-based theories that have proposed respective answers. These questions are: “How do people think about morality?” and “How do people make moral judgments?” Although the field of moral cognition is vast, multifaceted, and continuously expanding, I intend here to introduce the field in a way that highlights both the sorts of questions moral cognition aims at answering as well as the ways in which it investigates these questions.

Forming our Moral Selves:
How science can help us live up to the morals we value

Presented at the joint conference for the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP) and the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP), 2022.
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SPP_J. Gonzalez_Poster.pdf

Turning the Is-Ought Problem into a How-To Solution

In Progress
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Abstract

I examine and criticize two attempts to squeeze normative moral authority directly out of scientific knowledge itself: Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project and Joshua Greene’s dual-process theory of moral judgment. In both cases, I argue that the authors claim to avoid committing the naturalistic fallacy, and that they are each unsuccessful. That is, both Kitcher and Greene claim to avoid the is-ought problem, but in doing so they each conflate what is natural with what is good. The moral we learn here is that we should not waste our efforts on trying to infer normative conclusions from descriptive ethical theories. Instead, we should consider the practical value that science brings to ethics: we can use it as a tool to better uphold the moral principles we value.

An Informed Introspection

In Progress

Abstract

Scientific findings about our moral cognition can illuminate our understanding of our own moral processes. However, scientific research also indicates that people have bias blind spots: even when we can point out the cognitive biases of others, we have difficulty recognizing them in ourselves. Furthermore, when we seek to understand ourselves, we tend to overvalue how much introspective access we have to our conscious processes. In this paper, I build an argument for an informed introspection, where we can use science to make concrete changes to our moral deliberations. I present three cases to demonstrate the feasibility of my view, using research from cognitive neuroscience, cognitive development and social psychology.