This chapter discusses the intertwining of morality, values, and prosociality from childhood to adolescence. We define prosocial behaviors as acts that, if completed as intended, would directly promote the goals or welfare of others. We begin with three theoretical points: (1) People do not view all prosocial actions as inherently good or morally right. (2) Judgments about prosocial behaviors derive from reasoning about both moral and nonmoral values. (3) Judgments of right and wrong guide decisions about prosocial behaviors. From these propositions, we discuss research on three developmental periods: infancy and toddlerhood, when prosocial behaviors emerge; preschool age, when children make judgments of right and wrong; and school age to adolescence, when developments in social understanding and the coordination of competing considerations enable changes in prosocial judgments and decisions. Greater attention to how evaluative judgments shape prosocial decisions can strengthen efforts to explain and intervene on the development of prosociality.

The chapter outlines a mentalist theory of ethics and law. It clarifies its background in the cognitive revolution of the twentieth century. It discusses mayor conceptual elements like the distinction of competence/performance, performance errors and experimental design and the poverty of stimulus argument. It outlines a detailed descriptive account of principles of moral cognition generating richly structured moral judgments. The content of justice, duties to care for others and respect for human beings are specified. New findings from child psychology indicate that children in early, preverbal states of development operate with normative principles. Approaches like the social intuitionist model and recent theories of moral ontogeny are considered, including models of statistical learning. The epistemology of ethics is a central concern of this chapter, particularly the epistemological merits of universalist accounts of human rights. The argument shows that epistemological universalism does not exclude the possibility of a legitimate pluralism of concrete attempts to bring to life the imperfectly understood (at least by this author) meaning of justice, solidarity and dignity.

The Introduction highlights the main research topic, the research questions, the research methodology and the course of the argument. It argues that human rights form a central normative achievement of human moral and legal history. It highlights the egalitarian epistemic foundations of the human rights project. The assumption that all human beings have equal access to normative insights empowers human beings. The research in human rights as part of an inquiry into human moral and legal understanding is one of the most interesting projects of current science. Only an approach including perspectives from history, philosophy, legal theory, law and psychology and cognitive science can hope to provide sufficiently rich insights. The inquiry is also important because of different current attacks against human rights – for instance, from human rights history and cognitive science. The epistemology of human rights needs to address in particular the rich research in moral psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science on moral and legal phenomena. Human rights considered are not only found in international law, but also in constitutional and supranational law, in ethics and politics.

One bad act can permanently stain perceptions of someone’s character. Being labeled a criminal potentially has such an enduring stigma because of people’s willingness to believe that people have an internal, unchanging essence leading them to transgress. In Study 1, we developed a novel scale to assess individual differences in essentialist beliefs about criminality and found that these beliefs predicted punitiveness. Study 2 replicated these findings and also revealed that participants’ attitudes toward people who had committed crimes mediated this link. Study 3 found that participants who held essential beliefs about criminality were more likely to choose retributive punishments over those that prevented future harm. These results illustrate the importance of essentialist beliefs in the context of the legal system.

We spend large portions of our inner lives imagining social events and situations that fall under the umbrella of moral cognition. For example, we may simulate in our mind a future scenario in which we have to decide whether to withhold the truth to protect a colleague or a friend and wonder if it is the right thing to do or not. Or we may do the same for a past event or situation. This chapter briefly introduces the field of moral cognition with a focus on dual processing approaches, and then provides a critical review of recent empirical studies about the effect of various forms of mental simulations on a subset of moral cognitive processes. A number of behavioral studies show that imagination can affect moral cognitive processes in multiple ways, from enhancing our emotional responses to personal moral dilemmas and guiding our moral judgments, to facilitating theory of mind simulations and perspective-taking in prosocial scenarios. Ideas for future directions in the field are discussed in the final section.