Imperfect Cognitions

Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic is a research associate at the Moral Injury Lab, University of Virginia and a Teaching Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen. In this post, she tells us about her new book, Perpetrator Disgust (OUP 2023). What is the significance of our gut feelings? Can they disclose our deep selves or point to a shared human nature? My book identifies and analyzes the phenomenon of “perpetrator disgust”. Across time and cultures, soldiers who participate in war crimes sometimes feel ill. They start to shake, feel nausea and sometimes even retch and vomit. As a philosopher, I’ve been interested in the many moralized interpretations that scholars and journalists have applied to the phenomenon. In a nutshell, many have thought that such reactions demonstrate a sort of bodily morality, a physical revolt against the act being committed. But such interpretations are often wrong, especially when grounded in nativist ideas about morality and human emotions. As an alte...

Janet Geipel (pictured above) is currently a Postdoc at the VU University Medical Center Amsterdam. In this post, she summarises a paper she recently published in the journal Cognition, which is based on her doctoral studies at the University of Trento. Imagine yourself in the following situation. You are standing on a footbridge next to a large man. Underneath the footbridge, a runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks and will soon kill 5 unsuspected workmen. But there is a way out. You could push the large man off the footbridge and onto the path of the runaway trolley. The person would die but the five workmen would be saved. Is it morally permissible to do so? Now consider what seems to be an insignificant variation. Instead of reading the story in your native language you read it in a non-native language that you understand well. Would this affect your moral evaluation? Studies conducted by our research group and others suggest that it might. Overall, foreign language ...