Cognitively Bounded Morality: How Cognitive Limits Could Impact Moral Decisions

Cognition affects our daily lives in countless ways, but there has been very little research into how it affects our ability to engage in moral reasoning. To show the necessity of this avenue of future research we examine multiple facets of cognition and morality. From cognitive load theory (de Jong, 2010) to satisficing (Simon, 1957), there are ideas from multiple schools of thought all showing the throughline that in situations outside of morality, we are imperfect and make errors due to our cognition, or more often our lack of cognitive capacity. These show that “cognitively bounded morality”, the idea that our ability to morally reason is limited, or bound, by our ability to engage in cognition, is possible due to the similarities between it and other ways of reasoning that have been shown to be affected by cognitive errors