Modeling Morality

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of models and simulations in understanding human morality, highlighting their underappreciated contributions across diverse disciplines.

Contribution

It advocates for recognizing the significant role of modeling in advancing scientific understanding of morality, countering previous dismissals.

Findings

Models have played crucial roles in interdisciplinary morality research.

The use of simulations has contributed to answering complex moral questions.

Models have been undervalued in the scientific study of morality.

Abstract

Unlike any other field, the science of morality has drawn attention from an extraordinarily diverse set of disciplines. An interdisciplinary research program has formed in which economists, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and even philosophers have been eager to provide answers to puzzling questions raised by the existence of human morality. Models and simulations, for a variety of reasons, have played various important roles in this endeavor. Their use, however, has sometimes been deemed as useless, trivial and inadequate. The role of models in the science of morality has been vastly underappreciated. This omission shall be remedied here, offering a much more positive picture on the contributions modelers made to our understanding of morality.