La cronobiología de la moral: ¿cómo y cuándo somos morales?

Aníbal Monasterio Astobiza

doi:10.5281/zenodo.2550937

Aníbal Monasterio Astobiza Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Spain

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2550937

Keywords: Chronotype, Morality, Time of Day, Experimental Ethics

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.

Author Biography

Aníbal Monasterio Astobiza, Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Spain

Aníbal Monasterio Astobiza is a Basque Government Posdoctoral Researcher, Spain. PhD in Cognitive Science
and Humanities at the Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Spain. During his stay at
Oxford–Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics he will conduct research on social cognition and on the ethics of
moral bioenhancement technologies. His research lies at the intersection of the cognitive, biological and social
sciences exploring their philosophical underpinnings.

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The Chronobiology of Morality: How and When are we Moral People?

Abstract

Author Biography

References

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