How should Moral Motivation be Represented? The Motivation of Moral Action (MoMA)
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Moral psychology has mostly asked which motives drive moral action, and rarely how moral motivation should be represented once several are active at once. Most theories represent it as a single dominant motive or as one continuum from bad to good. Both discard information: a person torn between strong competing motivations and a person who feels nothing occupy the same position. We argue that representational format is a testable empirical claim, not a modeling convenience, and propose the Motivation of Moral Action (MoMA), which represents moral motivation as four independent dimensions formed by crossing motivational direction (approach, avoid) with perceived moral valence (good, bad). MoMA does not specify which motives matter; it specifies the space in which they combine. We derive requirements for an adequate architecture, show that lower-rank representations necessarily collapse psychologically distinct states, and state predictions distinguishing MoMA from simpler alternatives.
Institution: Duke University
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213543640