In this paper, we take moral agency to be that context in which a particular agent can, appropriately, be held responsible for her actions and their consequences. In order to understand moral agency, we will discuss what it would take for an artefact to be a moral agent. For reasons that will become clear over the course of the paper, we take the artefactual question to be a useful way into dis...

This paper sheds light on the views of Mulla Sadra about virtue and action. The main question is how he explains the relationship, if any, between virtue and action. Mulla Sadra defines moral virtue as a settled inner disposition by which one acts morally, without need for any reflection or deliberation. This study seeks to explain how, according to Mulla Sadra, a virtue motivates the agent and...

Mind perception entails ascribing mental capacities to other entities, whereas moral judgment entails labeling entities as good or bad or actions as right or wrong. We suggest that mind perception is the essence of moral judgment. In particular, we suggest that moral judgment is rooted in a cognitive template of two perceived minds-a moral dyad of an intentional agent and a suffering moral pati...

Trying to understand morality has been a central human preoccupation for as far back as human history extends, and for very good reasons. The core phenomenon is readily observable: we humans judge each other’s behaviour as right or wrong, and each other’s selves as moral or immoral. If others view you as moral, you will thrive in the bosom of a human group. If, however, others view you as immor...

Extant models of moral judgment assume that an action's intentionality precedes assignments of blame. Knobe (2003b) challenged this fundamental order and proposed instead that the badness or blameworthiness of an action directs (and thus unduly biases) people's intentionality judgments. His and other researchers' studies suggested that blameworthy actions are considered intentional even when th...

In Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame, Thomas Scanlon challenges moral philosophers with a subtle analysis of how permissibility, meaning and blame are to be understood. Scanlon’s challenge is significant not only because he is a moral philosopher of considerable stature but because his analysis proceeds with an unusual degree of care. Scanlon employs a number of novel distinction...

The puzzle of resultant moral luck arises when we are disposed to think that an agent who caused a harm deserves to be blamed more than an otherwise identical agent who did not. One popular (but controversial) perspective on resultant moral luck explains our dispositions to produce different judgments with regard to the agents who feature in these cases as a product not of what they genuinely d...

The central idea of the Moral Impact Theory is that legal obligations are those genuine obligations that obtain in virtue of the actions of legal institutions. (If we formulate this idea in terms of moral obligations, the paradigm of genuine obligations, we get the view that legal obligations are those moral obligations that obtain in virtue of the actions of legal institutions.) What philosoph...

Noradrenergic pathways are involved in mediating the central and peripheral effects of physiological arousal. The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of noradrenergic transmission in moral decision-making. We studied the effects in healthy volunteers of propranolol (a noradrenergic beta-adrenoceptor antagonist) on moral judgement in a set of moral dilemmas pitting utilitarian o...

This study investigated the role of moral emotions in the development of children's sharing behavior (N = 244 4-, 8-, and 12-year-old children). Children's sympathy was measured with both self- and primary caregiver-reports, and participants anticipated their negatively and positively valenced moral emotions (i.e., feeling guilty, sad, or bad; and feeling proud, happy, or good) following action...