Toronto Workshop on Moral Psychology and Moral Theory Asks What Experiments Can Prove About Right and Wrong

The Toronto workshop on moral psychology and moral theory spent the weekend of 7–8 November 2026 on a question that sounds technical and isn’t: if a laboratory can show how people actually make moral judgments, what follows for what they ought to do? Philosophers, psychologists and legal scholars met at the University of Toronto to work through the relationship between empirical research on moral cognition and the foundations of moral theory (PhilEvents). Information verified through 9 November 2026.

Put bluntly: does knowing why you flinch settle whether you should?

A Toronto workshop on moral psychology and moral theory, by design

The format gave the question room. Five contributed papers were selected, each taking a 45-minute presentation followed by 45 minutes of discussion — as much time arguing as presenting, in a workshop the organisers describe as discussion-focused (PhilEvents). The invited speakers mapped the fault line the event was built on: psychologist Paul Bloom of Toronto and Yale, experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe of Yale, psychologist Liane Young of Boston College, legal scholar Roseanna Sommers of the University of Michigan, and philosopher Brendan de Kenessey of Toronto (PhilEvents). The workshop was organised by Toronto philosopher Andrew Sepielli, with abstracts of 750 to 1,000 words due on 1 July and decisions on 1 August, and early-career scholars explicitly encouraged to submit (Experimental Philosophy Blog).

The university listed the meeting for 7–8 November in Jackman Humanities Building 100, in a November programme that also includes a Toronto–London perception workshop and the department’s UNESCO World Philosophy Day lecture (University of Toronto Philosophy). Moral psychology is not a fringe booking there this month. It’s the schedule.

Empirical research on moral cognition meets an old argument

The call for papers named the contested ground precisely: experimental philosophy, the psychology of moral cognition, causal cognition and moral judgment, the neuroscience of moral judgment, evolutionary approaches to morality, and — the sharp end — debunking arguments and related challenges to moral belief (PhilEvents).

Debunking is where the weekend’s question bites. If a moral intuition can be explained by evolution, upbringing or a quirk of cognition, does that explanation weaken the intuition? One side says a belief with a disreputable family tree should be trusted less. The other replies that every belief has a causal history, including the belief that causal histories discredit things. The workshop’s stated aim was to foster interdisciplinary discussion about how work in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary theory bears on moral judgment and on the evaluation of moral beliefs themselves (PhilEvents) — which is a careful way of saying the two camps were put in one room, with equal time to answer back.

Experimental philosophy and moral judgment beyond one campus

Toronto was not an isolated gathering. At Penn State, the Expanding Empathy series opened its eighth year on 4 November, hosted by the Consortium on Moral Decision-Making, with a lecture by Mohammad Atari of the University of Massachusetts Amherst titled “Morality Across Time and Space” — the series’ first traditional in-person lecture since 2020 (Penn State).

Atari’s warning travels well across both programmes: “Studying those differences keeps us from mistaking our own moral backyard for human moral universals” (Penn State). His colleague Paige Amormino put the sampling problem in one line — “Most of what we know about moral psychology comes from a fairly narrow slice of humanity” (Penn State). Penn State’s series continues on 10 November with a panel trying to build a shared vocabulary for empathy itself, drawn from a 15-author paper published in September, and closes on 7 December with early-career researchers setting out where the field should go (Penn State).

How morality varies across cultures is now a method, not a footnote

Notice what’s changed. A generation ago, cross-cultural variation was the objection you raised at the end of a talk. In Toronto’s topic list it is built into the method — causal cognition, evolutionary approaches and empirical work bearing on normative ethics are the programme, not the rebuttal (PhilEvents). Penn State built its opening session the same way, pairing Atari with an anthropologist and a psychologist for a public dialogue on how moral beliefs are shaped by culture, history and institutions (Penn State).

Analysis: neither event will settle whether experiments can prove a moral claim, and that was never the realistic prize. The realistic shift is jurisdictional. Moral theory used to be able to treat laboratory findings as interesting but external. A workshop that gives psychologists and legal scholars half the podium — and half the clock — is a discipline renegotiating who gets a vote. The facts about how we judge won’t dictate what is right. They are increasingly deciding which arguments about right and wrong are still allowed to sound plausible.

Photo: Cmglee, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources

1. https://philevents.org/event/show/147097
2. https://xphi.net/tag/moral-psychology/
3. https://philosophy.utoronto.ca/events/list/?posts_per_page=20
4. https://www.psu.edu/news/rock-ethics-institute/story/expanding-empathy-series-explore-morality-empathy-and-future-research