Implicit in feminist and other critiques of ideal theorizing is a particular view of what normative theory should be like. Although I agree with the rejection of ideal theorizing that oppression theorists (and other theorists of justice) have advocated, the proposed alternative of nonideal theorizing is also problematic. Nonideal theorizing permits one to address oppression by first describing ...

Deterrence studies have shown that perceived sanction risk is related to delinquent behaviour, independent of other variables, and that this relation may be conditioned by individual propensity towards crime. The principal goal of this study is to assess these findings with data from a sample of 843 Dutch adolescents. First, we analysed whether perceived sanction risk (perceived apprehension ri...

Reflecting on the significance of his early research on the neuropsychology of moral judgment, Joshua Greene raises an important and increasingly pressing kind of question: “Where does one draw the line between correcting the nearsightedness of human moral nature and obliterating it completely?” and goes on to more directly wonder “How far can the empirical debunking of human moral nature go?” ...

BACKGROUND The value of ethics education have been questioned. Therefore we did a student survey on attitudes about the teaching of ethics in Swedish medical schools. METHODS Questionnaire survey on attitudes to ethics education with 409 Swedish medical students participating. We analyzed > 8000 words of open-ended responses and multiple-choice questions using classic grounded theory procedur...

In the early parts of the 20th century, character made up a major part of psychology, specifically of personality psychology. However, an influential observational study of children’s moral behavior, conducted by Hartshorne, May, and colleagues in the 1920s, suggested that consistency in morality-related behavior was lower than many people expected. Some psychologists interpreted such results t...

This paper examines compatibility of some existing understandings of morality with the likely phenomenon of increasing human-robot interaction (HRI) in the United States. Particularly for cases involving autonomous humanoid robots, it is argued that impacts of HRI may differ dramatically as a function of the received understandings of morality encountered.

In the fall 2009 issue of Teaching Ethics C.E. Harris wrote an article with a question as the title, “Is Moral Theory Useful in Practical Ethics?” which he answered in the affirmative.1 In Harris’ article he considers two moral theories. “For utilitarianism the purpose of morality is to promote human well-being, and moral principles and judgments should be evaluated in terms of their effectiven...

We investigate the potential of logic programming (LP) to model morality aspects studied in philosophy and psychology. We do so by identifying three morality aspects that appear in our view amenable to computational modeling by appropriately exploiting LP features: dual-process model (reactive and deliberative) in moral judgments; justification of moral judgments by contractualism; and intentio...

Evolutionary theory was applied to Reeder and Brewer's schematic theory and Trafimow's affect theory to extend this area of research with five new predictions involving affect and ability attributions, comparing morality and ability attributions, gender differences, and reaction times for affect and attribution ratings. The design included a 2 (Trait Dimension Type: HR, PR) × 2 (Behavior Type: ...

When autonomous agents are deployed in some field where moral dilemmas may arise, the need for imbuing them with some capacity of moral decision making becomes indispensable. Computational morality has emerged to address this issue, bringing together perspectives from different areas, including artificial intelligence. This PhD research investigates further the appropriateness of logic programm...