According to Knobe's central thesis, we are “moralizing creatures,” with moral judgments lying at the core of the competencies we use to make sense of our actions and ourselves. By “ordinary understanding,” Knobe means the way people make sense of the world without having any scientific education. He argues that human cognition, in general, is intrinsically and inescapably moral, in the sense that people just do not make sense of certain situations without performing proto-moral judgments at the very time they perceive them. However, the target article's argument is not as generally applicable as Knobe claims: the article does not address people's cognition in general, but only how we, as human beings, perceive and interpret human interactions, as is made clear in the reported experiments. While this topic in fact belongs to the study of causal cognition, it is far from exhausting it.

Also, the way Knobe contrasts his main thesis with other claims that have been made before seems to be misleading, promoting an erroneous interpretation of his own thesis. He opposes his view about cognition to the idea that the functioning of the human mind mirrors the functioning of scientists (Gopnik Reference Gopnik1996; Gopnik & Schulz Reference Gopnik and Schulz2004; Gopnik & Tenenbaum Reference Gopnik and Tenenbaum2007). Despite Knobe's insistence on criticizing this view, it is the wrong opponent to his own thesis. What he is actually attacking is a view according to which humans' perception of humans' interactions is objective, in the sense of being devoid of any moral commitment. Gopnik's view, for instance, is about the development of cognition as much as about cognition in adults, independently of their being impregnated or not with moral considerations.

Actually, if we adopt the thesis according to which scientific inquiry is only a very refined manifestation of our effort to make sense of the world, sharing with people's ordinary understanding the same evolutionary roots, then Knobe's claim that ordinary understanding does not build itself in the same manner as scientific understanding does, loses much of its strength. The justification of this thesis will follow in two steps.

An increasing body of evidence, from fields such as psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience, lends support to the idea that quick and automatic affect-laden intuitions indeed shape higher levels of human reasoning, which belong to a slower and phylogenetically newer set of cognitive resources (Eslinger & Damasio Reference Eslinger and Damasio1985; Fiske Reference Fiske1992; Greene & Haidt Reference Greene and Haidt2002; Haidt Reference Haidt2001; Reference Haidt2007; Moll et al. Reference Moll, Zahn, Oliveira-Souza, Krueger and Grafman2005; Prinz Reference Prinz2006). Thus, the first step is to consider emotional and affective factors as the driving forces behind moral judgments. This view is by no means new; it goes back at least to David Hume's proposal that moral reasoning is driven by moral emotions and intuitions: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions” (Hume Reference Hume1739/2000).

The second step is to dissolve the concept of “moral judgment” by no longer envisaging it as a single entity, but rather as a compound cognitive act. Based on neuroscientific evidence, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are no specific regions of the brain responsible for moral judgments, which would be the combined result of basic processes involving abstract reasoning, its emotional content, and possibly other cognitive factors (Greene & Haidt Reference Greene and Haidt2002). Lending support to this view, the “affect as information” hypothesis, from social psychology, emphasizes the importance of people's mood and feelings when making decisions and judgments (Haidt Reference Haidt2001). In the same vein, Damasio's “somatic marker” hypothesis points to the role of emotional experiences in guiding decision-making by ascribing affective valence to behavioral options, and this has been substantiated by empirical data originating from several clinical and neuroimaging studies (Eslinger & Damasio Reference Eslinger and Damasio1985; Bechara et al. Reference Bechara, Tranel and Damasio2000).

In conclusion, Knobe's article has the merit of reinforcing, with both experimental facts and theoretical considerations, the not often recognized importance of moral values in assembling apparently neutral and objective evaluations. However, we believe that such an idea must be brought to a wider scenario, in which we could integrate basic neurophysiological mechanisms underlying emotional states and decisional processes into a framework able to account for more elaborate cognitive tasks, such as planning, moral judgments, and scientific reasoning. Finally, granting to Knobe that we inescapably moralize our perception of human interactions, it would be interesting to say a word about the relationships between this intuitive grasping and the scientific grasping that psychologists and sociologists try to achieve. What does happen in a psychologist's mind when she studies someone looking at two people interacting? Such a question is likely to allow one to go deeper into the implications of Knobe's proposition.