Ali Yousefi

I examine the epistemic reliability of moral intuitions and show how certain cognitive biases—such as confirmation bias, framing effects, and the availability heuristic—distort moral judgment. Intuitions are widely treated as the primary input in ethical theory; however, their vulnerability to bias significantly undermines their normative authority. Philosophical approaches like Reflective Equilibrium and Coherentism possess formal structure but prove insufficient for detecting or correcting these distortions. These approaches depend on intuitions that may already be compromised by bias while lacking empirical tools to validate their outcomes. In response to these limitations, this article proposes a naturalistic framework that integrates philosophical reflection with empirical methods—including neuroimaging, implicit association tests, and cross-cultural research—to examine the evolutionary, psychological, and social origins of moral intuitions. By empirically auditing the causal pathways from emotion to moral judgment, this approach allows us to identify and reduce bias, thereby improving the reliability of moral reasoning.

This paper argues that the key distinguishing feature between simulation and mere resemblance lies in its representational function. Defining this function requires addressing two critical conditions: how neural resemblance denotes its object and how specific content is grounded in such resemblance when it functions as representation. To begin with, the paper posits that the object of simulation is determined by its cognitive role within a broader cognitive system. Second, it examines three potential frameworks for grounding the content of simulation: the Neural Correspondence Thesis (NCT), the Functional Correspondence Thesis (FCT), and the Context-Dependent Correspondence Thesis (CDCT). Both NCT and FCT, the paper shows, encounter problems of content indeterminacy because of their oversimplified assumptions about the relationship between neural activations and mental states. FCT, in particular, faces the issue of over-permissiveness, wherein multiple neural activation patterns correspond to the same mental state, undermining the connection between functional roles and specific content. In response, the paper introduces CDCT as a more robust replacement, addressing both content indeterminacy and over-permissiveness by incorporating context-sensitive mappings between neural states and mental content. Drawing an analogy from the idea of cognitive maps in rats, the paper demonstrates how CDCT clarifies the role of context in shaping the mapping between neural activations and mental content, thereby offering a more precise framework for tackling the complexities of content determination in mental simulations.