The patentability of inventions related to Human Embryonic Stem Cells (HESC) is challenged by the morality provision of various nations’ regulations. 1 This Article discusses whether it is a matter of expediency to prohibit granting patents to HESC-related inventions based on moralitybased provisions, and it concludes that this is not appropriate. To claim this, the Article explores typical cas...

The claim that the psychological study of morality underwent a revolution at the beginning of the twenty-first century and that this revolution was an affective one is now commonplace: emotions, rather than reflection and reasoning from explicit moral principles, were suddenly supposed to play the prominent role in moral thought and behaviour (Haidt 2001, 2007). Though supporters of this revolu...

The implications of sleep for morality are only starting to be explored. Extending the ethics literature, we contend that because bringing morality to conscious attention requires effort, a lack of sleep leads to low moral awareness. We test this prediction with three studies. A laboratory study with a manipulation of sleep across 90 participants judging a scenario for moral content indicates t...

Safety critical systems can cause injury or death to people if they malfunction, and thus it is of vital importance for employees to report bugs in such systems. Based on the notions of moral intensity and morality judgment, we propose a model that explains employees’ intentions to report bugs in safety critical systems. We conducted a conjoint experiment to test the model. Based on data from 1...

Three studies examined automatic associations between words with moral and immoral meanings and the colors black and white. The speed of color naming in a Stroop task was faster when words in black concerned immorality (e.g., greed), rather than morality, and when words in white concerned morality (e.g., honesty), rather than immorality. In addition, priming immorality by having participants ha...

Refinements in Darwin's theory of the origin of a moral sense create a framework equipped to organize and integrate contemporary theory and research on morality. Morality originated in deferential, cooperative, and altruistic "social instincts," or decision-making strategies, that enabled early humans to maximize their gains from social living and resolve their conflicts of interest in adaptive...

Moral dilemmas engender conflicts between two traditions: consequentialism, which evaluates actions based on their outcomes, and deontology, which evaluates actions themselves. These strikingly resemble two distinct decision-making architectures: a model-based system that selects actions based on inferences about their consequences; and a model-free system that selects actions based on their re...

Morality is what makes us human. One meaning of this common saying is plain enough. Refraining from injury to others, keeping our word, and helping those in need constitute the elementary decencies of society. If most of us did not observe these practices most of the time, or at least give one another the impression of doing so, no one would have the security to pursue a flourishing life. Even ...

Claims that some sorts of genuine moral behavior exist in nonhuman beings are increasingly common. Many people, however, remain unconvinced, despite growing acceptance of the remarkable behavioral complexity of animals and despite the admission that there may be significant differences between human and nonhuman moral behavior. This paper argues that the rejection of “moral animals” is misplace...