Moral psychologists have shown that people’s past moral experiences can affect their subsequent moral decisions. One prominent finding in this line of research is that when people make a judgment about the Trolley dilemma after considering the Footbridge dilemma, they are significantly less likely to decide it is acceptable to redirect a train to save five people. Additionally, this ordering ef...

Moral judgments are elicited using dilemmas presenting hypothetical situations in which an agent must choose between letting several people die or sacrificing one person in order to save them. The evaluation of the action or inaction of a human agent is compared to those of two artificial agents – a humanoid robot and an automated system. Ratings of rightness, blamefulness and moral permissibil...

Inspired by Pen&Paper Role Playing principles, I intend to design and formalize a Conflict Manager for generating moral dilemmas in digital games, with the aim of intensifying the emotional-involvement of players. Based on previous work, where I formalized a character model endowed with moral values and driven by moral emotions, in this paper I sketch my proposal for a Conflict Manager.

Decision often implies a utilitarian choice based on personal gain, even at the expense of damaging others. Despite the social implications of utilitarian behavior, its neurophysiological bases remain largely unknown. To assess how the human brain controls utilitarian behavior, we delivered transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the ventral prefrontal cortex (VPC) and over the occi...

PURPOSE The aim of the current study was to investigate morality while also investigating frontal lobe function with the goal of studying the relationship between frontal lobe and morality in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy. METHOD A total of 23 right-handed patients with IGE and 25 right-handed healthy participants agreed to participate. Participants made judgments on a series ...

We introduce a new computational model of moral decision making, drawing on a recent theory of commonsense moral learning via social dynamics. Our model describes moral dilemmas as utility function that computes trade-offs in values over abstract moral dimensions, which provide interpretable parameter values when implemented in machineled ethical decision-making. Moreover, characterizing the so...

We created paired moral dilemmas with minimal contrasts in wording, a research strategy that has been advocated as a way to empirically establish principles operative in a domain-specific moral psychology. However, the candidate "principles" we tested were not derived from work in moral philosophy, but rather from work in the areas of consumer choice and risk perception. Participants were parad...

■ The recent resurgence of vigilantism in India connects both to the neo-liberal project of outsourcing security, as well as to a longer history of porous boundaries between states and powerful elements in society. When practiced by subaltern groups, it also reflects the failure of the judicial system. This article explores the moral plurality evoked by different forms of vigilantism and their ...