Final answer:
Transfer effects in moral judgments are influenced by emotional and cognitive factors that can skew one's ethical decision-making. Cognitive biases and emotional responses play into how one evaluates moral situations, which are deeply interwoven with evolved psychological faculties.
Step-by-step explanation:
Transfer effects in moral judgments refer to the influence that one's previous experiences, decisions, or knowledge have on subsequent moral evaluations.
Emotional and cognitive factors both play a significant role in how these transfer effects are manifested. Emotional factors can cause moral judgments based on the way we feel towards an associated subject or individual. For example, negative feelings towards someone can cloud our judgment of their arguments, perturbing our moral reasoning. Cognitive factors involve our decision-making processes and biases, such as sunk cost fallacies or associative reasoning, which might also impact our moral assessments.
Certain cognitive biases may encourage us to value prior investments of time, effort, or resources, which can alter our moral judgments. Meanwhile, emotional factors like empathy or anger can engender a sympathetic or adversarial stance, respectively, which influences our moral decisions. Both of these aspects interact with our ingrained ethical intuitions, possibly rooted in evolved brain mechanisms such as the operation of mirror neurons and the function of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Understanding these elements is key to analyzing the underpinnings of our ethical systems and recognizing the complexity involved in moral decision-making. In educational contexts, especially within the realms of philosophy and psychology, dissecting these effects can offer insights into ethical theory and practice.