Psychopaths are the bugbears of moral philosophy. They are often used as examples of perfectly rational people who are nonetheless willing to do great moral wrong without regret; hence the disorder has received the epithet “moral insanity” (Pritchard 1835). But whereas philosophers have had a great deal to say about psychopaths’ glaring and often horrifying lack of moral conscience, their aesth...

The cognitive science of moral action seeks accounts of moral cognition – and their conceptual and valuational structures – that explain stable or unstable, reasoned or unreasoned, moral commitments in the real world. To be successful, cognitive science requires experimental approaches that are relevant to the lives and choices of people who demonstrate stable moral commitment in real life. Fur...

This paper argues that the four prima facie principles-beneficence, non-maleficence, respect for autonomy and justice-afford a good and widely acceptable basis for 'doing good medical ethics'. It confronts objections that the approach is simplistic, incompatible with a virtue-based approach to medicine, that it requires respect for autonomy always to have priority when the principles clash at t...

The most powerful version of the classic epistemic argument against consequentialism is stated in an article by James Lenman. Lenman’s “argument from cluelessness” claims that a significant percentage of the consequences of our actions are wholly unknowable and hence, when it comes to assessing the moral quality of our actions, we are literally without a clue. In this paper, I distinguish the a...

In this article, I will try, first, to critically assess the approaches to liberatory ethics particularly those developed in early modernity, which aimed at deriving an “objectively” grounded liberatory ethics, second, to explore the reasons why today’s liberatory ethics should avoid both the Scylla of “objective” ethics as well as the Charybdis of irrationalist ethics or unbounded moral relati...

Watson (2003: 168) claims that ‘although increasing academic attention is being paid to business ethics, the ways in which ethical consideration come into activities and decisions of organizational managers have been examined in a very limited way’. This article contributes by suggesting an interesting way to study moral managerial decisions is studying these decisions in their discursive conte...

This report documents the programme of, and outcomes from, the Dagstuhl Seminar 16222 on “Engineering Moral Agents – from Human Morality to Artificial Morality”. Artificial morality is an emerging area of research within artificial intelligence (AI), concerned with the problem of designing artificial agents that behave as moral agents, i.e., adhere to moral, legal, and social norms. Context-awa...

Medicine is a moral enterprise, and medical educators have a primary moral and professional obligation to students to teach, evaluate and nurture this aspect of the curriculum. We assume our students enter medical school as persons of conscience, and that our job as teachers, in addition to helping them master facts, critical and clinical thinking and skills, is to promote their development int...

Among the various contemporary schools of moral thinking, consequence-based ethics, as opposed to rule-based, seems to have a good acceptance among professionals such as software engineers. But naïve consequentialism is intellectually too weak to serve as a practical guide in the profession. Besides, the complexity of software systems makes it very hard to know in advance the consequences that ...

T article uses an examination of the most troubling strand of the eugenics movements—coercive negative eugenics—to challenge the way many philosophers conceive of ethics. It is commonly assumed that to prepare ourselves for the difficult choices thrust upon us by advances in genomic science we must understand what went wrong in eugenics. The term “eugenics” encompasses a diversity of different ...