Ecological rationality of moral intuitions: Exploring its description with GARP and its functionality with a jealousy evoking economic game

Abstract

This introductory theoretical framework describes the existing literature on the approaches that moral psychology has followed in recent years. Specifically, the advantages and disadvantages of constructing this discipline will be exposed using theories and methodologies from other areas such as: neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and microeconomics, which have visions that allow us to understand how individuals respond to their environment and allow us to build models around how and why moral intuitions arise. We will focus on the evolutionary vision that allows us to understand morality as rules that solve certain ancestral problems that are believed to be relevant to our ancestors. In this context, intuitions have an important role in cooperation and consequently in the reproductive success of humans, for this reason we will change the paradigm that exists in the literature on reason vs. intuition. In which intuitions are thought of irrational behavior due to their close link to emotions. We demonstrate that intuitions are rational and explore their functionality from an evolutionary perspective evoking the moral emotion of jealousy