The Chronobiology of Morality: How and When are we Moral People?
Abstract
Moral pyschology studies people functioning in moral contexts and experimental ethics uses diverse methods and techniques borrowed from the social sciences to study ethical questions. Chronobiology studies the biology of time and internal biological clocks. These biological clocks are dynamic and oscillatory found in nerve cells with a range of miliseconds, minutes, hours, days and even years. One class of these processes are circadian rythms that recur with a period of approximately one day which have medical, metabolic, physiological but also ethical implications. Moral chronobiology could be seen as a subfield within the intersection of moral psychology and experimental ethics that aspire to study how and when morality happens. The temporal factor (e.g. time of the day) affects moral behaviour leaving in doubt the stable and absolutist vision of moral agents. Our biological clocks influence our moral decision-making. Several studies has proven how the time of the day and the chronotype we have affects moral behaviour (Kouchaki and Smith 2014; Gunia, Barnes and Sah 2014). In this article is briefly introduced the chronobiology of morality and an experimental test to assess the temporal factor in morality.
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