According to a long-standing tradition in philosophy, moral judgments are based on emotions; we decide whether something is wrong by seeing how it makes us feel. Recent research in psychology offers a wide range of evidence supporting this view, and extending our understanding of which emotions contribute. Neuroimaging studies add further support by confirming that moral judgments recruit brain structures associated with emotion. But some findings from neuroscience have been interpreted as providing evidence for a mixed view, which states that some moral judgments are emotionally based while others principally involve reason. An alternative interpretation of these findings in offered, according to which all moral judgments are rooted in emotions, but the emotions involved vary from case to case, and reason can play an important, though subsidiary, role.

Jesse Prinz studies the cognitive and neurological foundations of the mind, focusing particularly on emotional, experiential, and cultural contributions to thought and morality.