ABSTRACT
Jonathan Haidt has argued that moral judgments might sometimes be caused by feelings generated by morally irrelevant aspects of the cases presented to subjects or of the context in which they are presented. We hypothesized that opposition to cognitive enhancements—pharmaceutical or neurological means of raising the cognitive capacities of normal individuals—might be due in part to a mechanism of this kind. Specifically, we hypothesized that the fact that cognitive enhancement violates dualistic intuitions, which appear to be nearly universal, might cause a feeling of unease that would then cause or constitute a negative moral appraisal of these enhancements. We used a cognitive load manipulation to test the hypothesis. Unfortunately, our data did not support our hypothesis. Nevertheless, we suggest that the methodology employed opens up further avenues for research on the relationship between emotions and moral judgments.
