Autonomous systems must consider the moral ramifications of their actions. Moral norms vary among people, posing a challenge for encoding them explicitly in a system. This paper proposes to enable autonomous agents to use analogical reasoning techniques to interactively learn an individual’s morals.

Conservatives and liberals disagree sharply on matters of morality and public policy. We propose a novel account of the psychological basis of these differences. Specifically, we find that conservatives tend to emphasize the intrinsic value of actions during moral judgment, in part by mentally simulating themselves performing those actions, while liberals instead emphasize the value of the expe...

Repeat offenders are commonly given more severe sentences than first-time offenders for the same violations. Though this practice makes intuitive sense, the theory behind escalating penalties is disputed in both legal and economic theories. Here we investigate folk intuitions concerning the moral and intentional status of actions performed by people with positive versus negative prior records. ...

In this essay, we shall make an attempt to account for the frequently observed phenomenon of insurance companies offering discounts to clients who possess a favorable record of past claims. We shall argue that such discounts provide a mechanism which enables both insurer and insured to counteract the inefficiency which arises from moral hazard. Moral hazard is an example of economic interaction...

This paper considers job separations in a search model with labour market matching and moral hazard. Both workers and firms value productive matches and take actions to increase match stability: firms offer a share of match surplus to provide workers with correct incentives and workers take hidden actions (effort) negatively affecting the match separation rate. Heterogeneous productivity draws ...

Recent studies indicate that emotional processes, mediated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), are of great importance for moral judgment. Neurological patients with VMPC dysfunction have been shown to generate increased utilitarian moral judgments, i.e. are more likely to endorse emotionally aversive actions in order to maximize aggregate welfare, when faced with emotionally salient ...

Moral emotions have been badly neglected by philosophical ethics. In my view to the detriment of this discipline because they are not only important for the moral evaluation of persons but also for value theory and thus also for a theory of morally right actions. This paper outlines my account of moral emotions. Emotions such as regret or shame are sometimes but not always moral emotions. I wil...

Psychopaths are notorious for their antisocial and immoral behavior, yet experimental studies have typically failed to identify deficits in their capacities for explicit moral judgment. We tested 20 criminal psychopaths and 25 criminal nonpsychopaths on a moral judgment task featuring hypothetical scenarios that systematically varied an actor's intention and the action's outcome. Participants w...

Compatibilism is the view that determinism is compatible with acting freely and being morally responsible. Incompatibilism is the opposite view. It is often claimed that compatibilism or incompatibilism is a natural part of ordinary social cognition. That is, it is often claimed that patterns in our everyday social judgments reveal an implicit commitment to either compatibilism or incompatibili...

Moral judgment often requires making difficult tradeoffs (e.g., is it appropriate to torture to save the lives of innocents at risk?). Previous research suggests that both emotional appraisals and more deliberative utilitarian appraisals influence such judgments and that these appraisals often conflict. However, it is unclear how these different types of appraisals are represented in the brain,...