Can Moral Principles Change?

Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws

Moral Emotions, Principles, and the Locus of Moral Perception

I vindicate the thrust of the particularist position in moral deliberation. to this purpose, I focus on some elements that seem to play a crucial role in first-person moral deliberation and argue that they cannot be incorporated into a more sophisticated system of moral principles. More specifically, I emphasize some peculiarities of moral perception in the light of which I defend the irreducib...

Moral dilemmas and moral principles: when emotion and cognition unite.

Traditional studies on moral judgement used resolutions of moral dilemmas that were framed in terms of acceptability of the consequentialist action promoting a greater good, thus overlooking the deontological implications (choices cannot be justified by their consequences). Recently, some authors have suggested a parallelism between automatic, unreflective emotional responses and deontological ...

Can Animals Be Moral?

1. Grace of the Virtues Eleanor, the matriarch of her family, is dying and unable to stand. Grace manages to lift her to her feet. She tries to get Eleanor to walk, pushing her gently along. But Eleanor falls again. Grace appears very distressed, and shrieks loudly. She persists in trying to get Eleanor to stand, unsuccessfully. Grace stays by the fallen figure of Eleanor for another hour, whil...

Moral mid-level principles in modeling

Modeling plays a substantial role in decision-making and therefore many models raise moral issues. Modelers, especially in operations research, become increasingly aware that this poses new problems to modeling. This paper addresses two questions: (1) How do moral issues in modeling arise? (2) How can these moral issues be resolved? In this article I trace the origins of moral issues in modelin...