CFP: Moral Emotions, Reasoning and Behavior: Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience in Dialogue

Rivista internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia

Rivista internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia is a peer reviewed, no-fees full open access journal that aims to promote and to develop critical discussions and thorough reflections on the links connecting philosophical and psychological research.

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Call for Papers: Moral Emotions, Reasoning and Behavior: Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience in Dialogue

Recent empirical research on the processes that guide our moral choices and psychological models of moral reasoning have both had a strong influence on the contemporary debate on metaethics and normative ethics. In the field of metaethics, a number of interpretations of moral phenomena and value choices have been put forward based on the considerable psychological and neuroscientific data available. Moreover, both evolutionary and neurochemical perspectives have led to hypotheses that aim to explain various allegedly innate moral propensities.

The classical Kantian bifurcation between utilitarian and deontological ethics based on the opposition of reason and emotion has now become a domain of formalizations and research based on the actual responses of moral decision makers in experimental settings. Just one example is the large body of literature available on the so-called “trolley problem”. Other fields of study have also contributed to redefining the specific roles of emotion and cognition with respect to moral choices and outlining new normative perspectives which assign different weights to the processes based on intuition and reasoning.

Topics like morality and moral sense can hardly be considered a task for philosophy to tackle alone. And yet, even though these topics are ever more frequently the subject of empirical – psychological and neuroscientific – research, close cooperation with philosophers remains indispensable.

The most recent frontier of this new debate is possibly the challenge from genetic research, which examines how an individual’s biological predispositions due to her genetic profile may influence her moral decisions.

In the complex perspective sketched above, some of the most influential and debated models are those recently proposed by Joshua Greene, Patricia S. Churchland, Jonathan Haidt and Albert Bandura as well as those based on the research of Antonio Damasio, Daniel Kahneman and Philip Johnson-Laird.

Rivista internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia e SINe - Società italiana di Neuroetica e Filosofia delle Neuroscienze aims to promote a discussion on these topics in a themed issue in 2019 (n. 1 Vol. 9, N° 1, 2019) and encourages all interested scholars to submit original papers that address these matters relying either on an experimental approach or on a conceptual analysis which aims at developing a model to explain moral phenomena.

Manuscript preparation and submission

Manuscripts should not exceed 9,000 words (including footnotes) and must be submitted through the online submission procedure available on the journal internet site by October 30th, 2018.

Manuscripts written in Italian or English will be considered for publication. An English abstract of max. 150 words and 5 English key-words must be provided. Please, insert the code “Moral2018” in the box “Communications to the Editor” in the online submission form (step 1). Two separate documents should be submitted. The first document must be anonymous and contain only the manuscript and abstract without any identifying information about the author(s). A second document (called the “supplementary file”) must be submitted separately (step 3) and include pictures, tabs, title, abstract, the whole manuscript as well as the author(s)’ name, affiliation, e-mail, and postal address.

After a preliminary assessment by the Editorial Board, submissions undergo a double-blind peer review process. For instructions on how to prepare the manuscript, click on the link “How to ensure a blind review” available on the internet site. The decision will be communicated to the authors within 6 weeks after submission. After manuscript acceptance, an authors’ guideline will be provided for copyediting the final version of the manuscript.

For further information, please email Sandro Nannini ([email protected]) or Andrea Lavazza ([email protected])