Do we have a unified moral faculty? No.

This thesis is going to scrutinise what current cognitive science can tell us about our moral cognition, to explore what psychological mechanism(s) facilitate(s) moral cognition, and to investigate the question of whether we have an innate, unified, and domain-specific psychological mechanism for moral cognition. I will argue that current evidence suggests that our moral cognition is a result of our general complex and flexible learning processes, which also perform other psychological tasks. The thesis will be divided into three parts. The first part consists of three chapters, which will be on the role of emotions in moral cognition: chapter 1 will focus on Jesse Prinz’ constitution model account, chapter 2 will focus on Shaun Nichols’ sentimental rules’ account, chapter 3 will be a general discussion on the role of emotions in moral judgements. The second part focuses on two theories that scaffold morality on the ground of evolutionary psychology: chapter 4 is on Chomskyan moral nativism and chapter 5 will be on cooperation-based mutualistic account of moral theory. I will argue that evolutionary psychology cannot indicate that human moral cognition is domain-specific. In my last part, I will turn to discuss the relationship between general learning capacity and moral cognition. In chapter 6, I will argue that although Shaun Nichols is right that moral cognition is not innate, we are not Bayesian learners as he argues. Chapter 7 will be my last chapter, in which I will explore whether machines can engage with moral cognition. I will argue that based on current performance of large language models, machines are able to engage with moral cognition, which further refutes the domain-specificity of moral cognition. I will summarise what I have argued in my conclusion.