Much recent research has sought to uncover the neural basis of moral judgment. However, it has remained unclear whether "moral judgments" are sufficiently homogenous to be studied scientifically as a unified category. We tested this assumption by using fMRI to examine the neural correlates of moral judgments within three moral areas: (physical) harm, dishonesty, and (sexual) disgust. We found that the judgment of moral wrongness was subserved by distinct neural systems for each of the different moral areas and that these differences were much more robust than differences in wrongness judgments within a moral area. Dishonest, disgusting, and harmful moral transgression recruited networks of brain regions associated with mentalizing, affective processing, and action understanding, respectively. Dorsal medial pFC was the only region activated by all scenarios judged to be morally wrong in comparison with neutral scenarios. However, this region was also activated by dishonest and harmful scenarios judged not to be morally wrong, suggestive of a domain-general role that is neither peculiar to nor predictive of moral decisions. These results suggest that moral judgment is not a wholly unified faculty in the human brain, but rather, instantiated in dissociable neural systems that are engaged differentially depending on the type of transgression being judged.

Some mental states seem to be "of" or "about" things or to "say" something. For example, a thought might represent that grass is green, and a visual experience might represent a blue cup. This is intentionality. The aim of this book is to explain this phenomenon. Once we understand intentionality as a phenomenon to be explained, rather than a posit in a theory explaining something else, we can see that there are glaring empirical and in-principle difficulties with currently popular tracking and functional role theories of intentionality, which aim to account for intentionality in terms of tracking relations and functional roles. This book develops an alternative theory, the phenomenal intentionality theory (PIT), on which the source of intentionality is none other than phenomenal consciousness, the subjective, felt, or qualitative aspect of mental life. While PIT avoids the problems that plague tracking and functional role theories, it faces its own challenges in accounting for the rich and complex contents of thoughts and the contents of nonconscious states. In responding to these challenges, this book proposes a novel version of PIT, one on which all intentionality is phenomenal intentionality, though we in some sense represent many non-phenomenal contents by ascribing them to ourselves. This book further argues that phenomenal consciousness is an intrinsic feature of mental life, resulting in a view that is radically internalistic in spirit: Our phenomenally represented contents are literally in our heads, and any non-phenomenal contents we in some sense represent are expressly targeted by us.

Moods and emotions are sometimes thought to be counterexamples to intentionalism, the view that a mental state's phenomenal features are exhausted by its representational features. The problem is that moods and emotions are accompanied by phenomenal experiences that do not seem to be adequately accounted for by any of their plausibly represented contents. This paper develops and defends an intentionalist view of the phenomenal character of moods and emotions on which (1) directed moods and emotions represent intentional objects as having sui generis affective properties, which happen to be uninstantiated, and (2) at least some moods represent affective properties not bound to any objects. * This paper is forthcoming in Uriah Kriegel (ed.) Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind, Routledge. targets. This paper develops and defends an intentionalist theory of the phenomenal character of moods and emotions. On the view I will defend, (1) emotions and some moods represent intentional objects as having sui generis affective properties that happen to be uninstantiated, and (2) like concepts, but unlike most perceptual representations, affective representations can be tokened without binding to any object representations, yielding undirected moods. The paper proceeds as follows: §2 clarifies some key notions, §3 provides an intentionalist account of emotions, and §4 provides an intentionalist account of directed and undirected moods. 2 Moods, emotions, and intentionalism Emotions are affective states that seem to be directed at something. Examples include fear of a dog, joy about an upcoming event, and guilt about a wrong one has committed. Emotions tend to be fairly short-lived and are usually caused by a specific stimulus, which may or may not be what they are directed at. Moods are affective states that do not seem to be directed at anything. Exampes include happiness, sadness, and anxiety. Moods tend to be longer-lasting than emotions, and are usually not associated with a specific stimulus. 1 For most moods, there is a corresponding phenomenally similar emotion. For example, an anxious mood is phenomenally similar to anxiety about something, say an upcoming event. 2 Intentionalism is the view that a mental state's phenomenal features are reducible to, supervenient on, type or token identical to, or determined by its representational features. Loosely, the idea is that phenomenal consciousness is nothing over and above mental representation. 1 What distinguishes moods from emotions is a matter of some controversy. The various criteria proposed for distinguishing between them (their duration, whether they exhibit directedness, and whether they are connected to a specific stimulus) can come apart (see Kind, this volume). For most purposes, it might be best to assume that moods and emotions are natural kinds and to fix reference on them partly ostensively by use of examples or typical features. Since my goal is to provide an intentionalist account of all affective states, everything I say should apply equally well ...

It is a live possibility that certain of our experiences reliably misrepresent the world around us. I argue that tracking theories of mental representation (e.g. those of Dretske, Fodor, and Millikan) have difficulty allowing for this possibility, and that this is a major consideration against them.