BACKGROUND Palliative care clinicians confront suffering as they care for people living with life-limiting conditions. When the degree of suffering becomes unjustified, moral distress can ensue. Promising work from neuroscience and social psychology has yet to be applied to clinical practice. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to expand a social psychology model focusing on empathy and compassion 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...

Whilst there has been considerable debate about the fit between moral theory and moral reasoning in everyday life, the way in which moral problems are defined has rarely been questioned. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with 15 general practitioners (GPs) in South Australia to argue that the way in which the bioethics literature defines an ethical dilemma captu...

Cooperation in the face of moral hazard is a critical factor in economic development. Existing research on institutional support for cooperation has primarily focused on the role of contract enforcement in limiting the incentives for cheating. In contrast, we focus on the need for a social safety net to permit extensive cooperation. Starting from a basic prisoner’s dilemma model, we introduce u...

Persons have different value preferences. Neuroimaging studies where value-based decisions in actual conflict situations were investigated suggest an important role of prefrontal and cingulate brain regions. General preferences, however, reflect a superordinate moral concept independent of actual situations as proposed in psychological and socioeconomic research. Here, the specific brain respon...

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...

The notion of a "default mode of brain function" has taken on certain relevance in human neuroimaging studies and in relation to a network of lateral parietal and midline cortical regions that show prominent activity fluctuations during passive imaging states, such as rest. In this study, we perform three fMRI experiments that demonstrate consistency and specialization in the default mode netwo...

stated that he brought the test case on behalf of general practitioners who were caught between the uncertainty of the law and pressure from patients. This suggests that public pressure had a role to play in medico-legal developments which cannot be viewed entirely in a vacuum. While Keown is concerned to trace the legal interpretation of biological facts, Norman Ford, a Catholic philosopher, s...

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...

In his paper A (Moral) Prisoner’s Dilemma: Character Ethics and Plea Bargaining, 1 Andrew Ingram presents us with an interesting variation on the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma. Ingram’s puzzle offers a change in perspective—a Prosecutor’s Dilemma. Two coconspirators scheme to jointly participate in a spree of petty thefts. During one of the petty thefts, they run into misfortune—they are caught. Th...