Thrust Group: 8-Emerging Technologies and Moral Boundaries: Psychological, Philosophical and Neuroscientific Perspectives
Thrust Group Leader: Tony Jack
Thrust Group Participant: Jason Gatliff, Stuart Youngner, Sara Waller
The Emerging Technologies and Moral Boundaries Thrust Group is researching and theorizing about the ways in which human beings react to the crossing of social mores.
Crossing moral boundaries is always exciting, but sometimes that excitement becomes a negative moral judgment. When actions, machines, and events go beyond our familiar categories of what is normal, acceptable, or alive, humans react with moral condemnation. Recent experimental research suggests that moral judgments are profoundly influenced by background conditions such as odors or relative cleanliness.
This group is exploring which moral transgressions lead to positive and negative moral judgments and why. We are exploring sociological, psychological and neurological elements of human categories and human judgment in order to determine where, and when, we will be most disturbed or most charmed by new technologies and in what ways we are most likely to react to them. Stay tuned for new research, projects and scholarship leading to an overarching philosophical theory of human judgment, boundary transgression, and the brain.