Contribution of perceptual and emotional skills to moral decision-making

Moral decision-making is the ability to choose an optimal course of action based on a system of norms and values that guides our behaviour in a community. Even though the models of moral decision-making have mainly focused on cognitive reasoning and emotions, moral decisions - like all kind of decisions - are taken within a context and in interaction with environmental factors. Therefore, the role played by such factors is critical in order to explain how a decision is reached. In Chapter 1, after a systematic overview of the different theoretical models proposed to explain morality, I discuss the evidence in favour of the role played by sensory stimuli in moral choices, focusing on a recent meta-analysis (Landy & Goodwin, 2015a) that showed that besides vision, chemosensory stimuli play a central role in the moral decision process. Then, I explore the link between odours and morality, starting from the disgust emotion, arguing that olfactory stimuli could extend their effects to morality via mechanisms unrelated to disgust, as suggested by the shared neural underpinnings underlying olfaction and moral choices..