We review several instances where cognitive research has identified distinct psychological mechanisms for moral judgment that yield conflicting answers to moral dilemmas. In each of these cases, the conflict between psychological mechanisms is paralleled by prominent philosophical debates between different moral theories. A parsimonious account of this data is that key claims supporting differe...

The moral arguments and the decision-making processes arising from them in the context of the dilemmas that arise in considering the appropriateness and implementation of withholding or withdrawing treatment in certain neonates form the basis of this commentary. It is concluded that the differing opinions on management of these babies by individual paediatricians results from their differing mo...

In the current study, strictly controlled moral dilemmas are used to study intuitions in moral judgments concerning situations in which one human life has to be sacrificed in order to save more human lives. The influence of two factors (inevitability of death and instrumentality of harm) is explored. Both of them are found to influence moral judgments. To study the emotional processing in judgm...

BACKGROUND Recent work on cognitive-behavioural models of obsessive-compulsive disorder has focused on the roles played by various aspects of self-perception. In particular, moral self-ambivalence has been found to be associated with obsessive-compulsive phenomena. AIMS In this study we used an experimental task to investigate whether artificially priming moral self-ambivalence would increase...

Although most people acknowledge the moral virtue in sacrificing oneself to save others, few actually endorse self-sacrifice. Seven experiments explored the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that underlie such endorsements. Participants responded to 1 of 2 moral dilemmas in which they could save 5 members of their country only by sacrificing themselves. Over 90% of participants acknowledged th...

A substantial body of evidence indicates that utilitarian judgments (favoring the greater good) made in response to difficult moral dilemmas are preferentially supported by controlled, reflective processes, whereas deontological judgments (favoring rights/duties) in such cases are preferentially supported by automatic, intuitive processes. A recent neuroimaging study by Kahane et al. challenges...

This study examines the moral and ethical aspects of creating savior siblings using Kant’s moral-philosophical theory and Beauchamp and Childress’s (B&C) principles of medical ethics. In this study, the researchers argue that three of the four clusters of the principles of B&C framework are derived from common morality and Kant’s ethics. Besides, the second part of this article is designed as a...

Moral attentiveness is a useful concept to investigate ethical decision-making and explain individual differences in the amount of attention paid to moral aspects of life. Although cultural influences on ethics have been documented, little is known about the affect of culture on moral attentiveness. Using a theoretical framework based on Hofstede’s typology and social cognition theory and a res...

A substantial body of evidence indicates that utilitarian judgments (favoring the greater good) made in response to difficult moral dilemmas are preferentially supported by controlled, reflective processes, whereas deontological judgments (favoring rights/duties) in such cases are preferentially supported by automatic, intuitive processes. A recent neuroimaging study by Kahane et al. challenges...