Adults use the terms revolting, gross, and disgusting to describe entities and actions, such as feces, rotten food, and sex with corpses, which elicit a certain visceral response. But adults also apply such expressions to certain sociomoral transgressions, such as cheating on one's spouse or stealing from the poor. Here, the authors explore whether young children associate disgust with physical...

This paper investigates the equilibrium consequences of a contractual market with moral hazard where multiple principals compete each other to offer incentive contracts to agents who choose unobservable ex post actions. We show the following limit theorems: First, when the trade–off between incentive and risk sharing causes the moral hazard problem on the side of agents, the full insurance cont...

Many important moral decisions, particularly at the policy level, require the evaluation of choices involving outcomes of variable magnitude and probability. Many economic decisions involve the same problem. It is not known whether and to what extent these structurally isomorphic decisions rely on common neural mechanisms. Subjects undergoing fMRI evaluated the moral acceptability of sacrificin...

BACKGROUND The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgment have been the focus of extensive recent research. Here we show that serotonin transporter (5-HTTLPR) genotype predicts responses to moral dilemmas featuring foreseen harm to an innocent. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Participants in this study judged the acceptability of actions that would unintentionally or...

Recent theorizations on the cognitive process of moral judgment have focused on the role of intuitions and emotions, marking a departure from previous emphasis on conscious, step-by-step reasoning. My study investigated how being in a disgusted mood state affects moral judgment. Participants were induced to enter a disgusted mood state through listening to disgusting sounds and reading disgusti...

This article defends three interconnected premises that together demand for a new way of dealing with moral responsibility in developing and using technological artifacts. The first premise is that humans increasingly make use of dissociated technological delegation. Second, because technologies do not simply fulfill our actions, but rather mediate them, the initial aims alter and outcomes are ...

The aim of this study is to develop understanding of moral issues in project-based IT companies. Three corporate moral dilemmas, the dirty hands dilemma (balancing between the corporation’s efficiency needs and stakeholder interests), the many hands dilemma (integrating individual members’ actions into a cohesive whole), and the entangled hands dilemma (individual members’ responsibility for gi...

Actions that do not have as their goal the advancement or protection of one's material interests are often seen as illegitimate. Four studies suggested that moral values can legitimate action in the absence of material interest. The more participants linked sociopolitical issues to moral values, the more comfortable they felt advocating on behalf of those issues and the less confused they were ...

Which actions does morality require of us? What does it forbid and what does it permit? In trying to fi nd some general answers to these questions, moral theorists typically start from commonsense morality, from what ordinary people think about moral issues. In deciding how to act, people often think about the consequences of their actions: they try to fi nd the action that leads to the best ov...