The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ve...

We investigated whether and why the use of a foreign language influences moral judgment. We studied the trolley and footbridge dilemmas, which propose an action that involves killing one individual to save five. In line with prior work, the use of a foreign language increased the endorsement of such consequentialist actions for the footbridge dilemma, but not for the trolley dilemma. But contra...

BACKGROUND Moral reasoning is important for developing medical professionalism but current evidence for the relationship between education and moral reasoning does not clearly apply to medical students. We used a combined study design to test the effect of clinical teaching on moral reasoning. METHODS We used the Defining Issues Test-2 as a measure of moral judgment, with 3 general moral sche...

This paper shows how moral decisions can be drawn computationally by using ACORDA, a working implementation of prospective logic programming. ACORDA is employed to model moral dilemmas, as they are able to prospectively look ahead at the consequences of hypothetical moral judgments. With this knowledge of consequences, moral rules are then used to decide the appropriate moral judgments. The who...

This article explores nurses' decision-making related to the administration of PRN anti-seizure medications to children with long-term seizure disorders in palliative care. Hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry guided by van Manen's approach was the method used. Six nurses participated in interviews. Data analysis revealed that not on my watch was the overarching theme in which nurses engaged in...

People with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have difficulties with mentalizing, empathy, and narrative comprehension. A new test of social and narrative cognition, the Moral Dilemmas Film Task, was developed to probe individuals' spontaneous understanding of naturalistic film scenes. Twenty-eight individuals with ASC and 28 neurotypical controls, matched for age, sex, and IQ, watched four shor...

Recent studies in the field of neuropsychological decision-making as well as moral psychology emphasize the role of emotions in decision-making. The current study examines whether stress affects moral decision-making. We induced stress in 20 participants with the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and also examined 20 participants in a control condition (Placebo TSST). The level of stress was asse...

The aim of this study is to develop understanding of moral issues in project-based IT companies. Three corporate moral dilemmas, the dirty hands dilemma (balancing between the corporation’s efficiency needs and stakeholder interests), the many hands dilemma (integrating individual members’ actions into a cohesive whole), and the entangled hands dilemma (individual members’ responsibility for gi...

Researchers have recently argued that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment, and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas (involving active vs. passive harm) are committing an error. We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non...