An Fmri Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgement

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The hypothesis of the research paper “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgement” propose that moral judgment involve emotional process is highly active during moral dilemmas relevantly similar to the footbridge dilemma, than those relevantly similar to the trolley dilemma and these differences in emotional engagement affect people in their judgements. Researcher assumed that the areas of the brain which are directly linked with the emotions would be more effective during the footbridge dilemma observation; such as purposely sacrificing one person life by pushing a large person off a footbridge to stop the coming trolley to save five others, as contrast to the trolley dilemma observation; such as by hitting a switch to reroute the trolley onto a opposite direction where it would run over one individual and kill that person, thus this would save other five people. Researcher also purposed that people tend to refuse to consider as an appropriate action during footbridge dilemma because it seems as harmful action and provokes a negative emotional response that persuades people to say this action as inappropriate. On the other hand, people tend to agree to consider as an appropriate action during the trolley dilemma because as the countervailing emotional response is absent during this situation, thus people tend to be in default condition to a utilitarian state of rationalizing that provokes this action as a favors approach to trade one life to save other five. Researcher suggested that the automatic emotional response provoked by the footbridge situation is related to the more likely as a moral-personal type of the harm. This means that emotional assessment helps individual to distinguish moral-personal dilemmas such as the footbridge situation from moral-impersonal dilemmas such as the trolley case. To test this hypothesis researcher
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