Moral dumbfounding occurs when people maintain a moral judgment even though they cannot provide reasons for it. In recent years, questions have been raised about whether dumbfounding is a real or artefactual phenomenon. In one challenge to the existence of dumbfounding, participants' judgments were attributed to either harm-based reasons (believing an action may lead to harm) or to norm-based reasons (breaking a moral norm is inherently wrong). Attribution was determined by participants' endorsing of either reason. Participants who endorsed a reason were excluded from analysis, and instances of moral dumbfounding seemingly reduced to non-significance. The current research aims to test the claim that participants’ judgments in the dumbfounding paradigm can be attributed to these reasons. We argue that endorsing alone does not provide evidence that a judgment is grounded in a given reason. We present two studies that develop more robust exclusion criteria accounting for (a) pa...

Although many philosophers argue that making and revising moral decisions ought to be a matter of deliberating over reasons, the extent to which the consideration of reasons informs people's moral decisions and prompts them to change their decisions remains unclear. Here, after making an initial decision in 2-option moral dilemmas, participants examined reasons for only the option initially chosen (affirming reasons), reasons for only the option not initially chosen (opposing reasons), or reasons for both options. Although participants were more likely to change their initial decisions when presented with only opposing reasons compared with only affirming reasons, these effect sizes were consistently small. After evaluating reasons, participants were significantly more likely not to change their initial decisions than to change them, regardless of the set of reasons they considered. The initial decision accounted for most of the variance in predicting the final decision, whereas...

“The wrongness of Albert's action causally explains why Jane judged that his action was wrong”. This type of causal moral explanation has been extensively discussed in the recent metaethical literature. This paper motivates the following claims about this type of moral explanation. First, a typical defence of this type of moral explanation suggested in the literature does not work because it predicts inaccurate modal information. Second, focusing on different aspects of the ways moral judgements are generated provides better chances for the defender of this type of moral explanation. Third, the strategy mentioned in the previous point leads us to the following alternative evaluative explanation: The property of being a harmful action explains a recognisable pattern of moral judgements observed in the relevant empirical studies. One crucial implication the paper alludes to is a localist approach to the debates concerning moral realism: We should consider each moral property's ontological genuineness separately, referring to specific empirical findings that are particularly relevant to the target moral property in question. Such a localist approach can provide solid resources for realists to respond to various anti-realist challenges, such as an influential evolutionary debunking argument.