How Neuroscience Can Vindicate Moral Intuition Christopher Freiman Accepted: 13 February 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Keywords Utilitarianism . Moral psychology . Moral intuitions Imagine that an anthropologist returns from her study of a group of people and reports the following: & They refuse to kill one person even to avert the death of all involved—including that one person; & They won’t directly push someone to his death to save the lives of five others, but they will push a lever to kill him to save five others; & They punish transgressors because it feels right, even when they expect the punishment to cause far more harm than good—and even when the harm done by the punishment exceeds the harm done by the transgression being punished. The anthropologist’ s report might lead us to conclude that these people are at least confused, and perhaps even dangerous. Here’ s some bad news. Those people are us. Or so suggests recent research in experimental psychology and the neurosciences. This research indicates that our moral intuitions have a vaguely deontological character and they prompt us to make any number of judgments that appear arbitrary or otherwise unjustified, such as those recommending the behaviors above. Our intuitions are allegedly the product of morally-insensitive evolutionary processes—they are emotionally-driven heuristics adapted to help our ancestors procreate, not to help us grasp the nuances of moral decision making. Our moral reasoning, in contrast, is characteristically utilitarian and appears sensitive to a rich complex of moral considerations. When our moral judgment is cognitive rather than affective, we gather information, balance competing con- cerns, weigh costs and benefits, and so on. These findings have led moral theorists such as Peter Singer (2005) and Joshua Greene (2008) to doubt the credentials of our so-called Bdeontological^ intuitions. 1 (I’ll simply follow precedent by labeling the relevant intuitions Bdeontological^ while acknowledging that they’re unlikely to closely track the contours of a deontological moral theory.) If one accepts the preceding Ethic Theory Moral Prac DOI 10.1007/s10677-015-9571-y 1 See also Sinnott-Armstrong (2006). C. Freiman (*) Department of Philosophy, College of William and Mary, P.O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795, USA e-mail: cafreiman@wm.edu