The Theory Of The And Social Theory - 1468 Words

The footbridge scenario can be explained as follows: The ‘Personal Hypothesis’ which can be summarised as: â€Å"If an act is manifestly personal, then it is judged impermissible†. It is a potential explanation for a permissible or impermissible action, such as pushing s stranger off the bridge, which is clearly personal. Greene et al.. (2001) strongly support this hypothesis as it suggests that emotional engagement in peoples’ ideas of what they consider to be an impermissible or acceptable judgement (Nichols Mallon, 2006). Researchers have found evidence that supports the Personal Hypothesis. Despite the growing support; there are a number of criticisms that question this hypthesis. For instance, some acts that are clearly personal and†¦show more content†¦For a long time, psychologists debated the issue of whether moral judgments could be considered emotional and non-rational processes, such as Freudian internalisation and behaviourist reinforcement, or reasoning and â€Å"higher† cognition, such as Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s post-conventional reasoning. Recent studies showed the importance of both emotions and reasoning, particularly the process of automatic emotions, which was shown to be influential. Lawrence Kohlberg (1969) was responsible for one of the revolutions in this area. He carried on Jean Piaget’s earlier work by developing a six-stage model of the development of moral reasoning. Kohlberg believes that morals develop through a role- taking experience which improves moral reasoning that creates moral judgments or by evaluating a problem from several perspectives. Kohlberg focuses on moral reasoning and ignores the role of moral emotions. Recent research has begun to point out the importance of the origins of human morality in reference to a set of emotions. By distinguishing the effects of moral versus non-moral phenomena, Moll, Oliveira-Souza, Bramai and Grafman, (2002) examined moral cognition. In contrast, Greene et al. (2001), drew a difference within the moral area between â€Å"personal† and â€Å"impersonal†