Faced with moral choice, people either judge according to pre-existing obligations (deontological judgment), or by taking into account the consequences of their actions (utilitarian judgment). We propose that the latter coheres with a more general cognitive mechanism - deontic introduction, the tendency to infer normative ('deontic') conclusions from descriptive premises (is-ought inference). P...

At first one is inclined is to conceive of the problem of mass morality as one of a generally valid norm. ‘The construction of norms for the regulation of social life and individual behaviour is a compelling need of capitalism, so long as it wishes to proclaim itself as a universal form of social life,’ says B. (Borkenau, 1971: 96). Consequently, the new morality had to be a mass morality, base...

OBJECTIVES To explore whether people's organ donation consent decisions occur via a reasoned and/or social reaction pathway. DESIGN We examined prospectively students' and community members' decisions to register consent on a donor register and discuss organ donation wishes with family. METHOD Participants completed items assessing theory of planned behaviour (TPB; attitude, subjective norm...

When Pat Suppes asked if I would be willing to take part in a panel on norms and their conflicts last year, I asked him what he had in mind—what did he mean by a norm, and what kinds of conflicts among norms did he hope the panelists would discuss? Pat said that he preferred to let the panelists interpret the topic as they saw fit. So let me begin by offering an interpretation of the topic—of t...

There are two competing approaches sustainability in agriculture. One stresses a strict economic approach in which market forces should be allowed to guide the activities of agricultural producers. The other advocates the need to balance economic with environmental and social objectives, even to the point of reducing profitability. This paper shows how the writings of the 18 century moral philo...

We analyze how insurance arrangements, labor supply, moral hazard and outright cheating are affected by social norms. One question is under what conditions norms may improve social welfare. Another is under what conditions people should be allowed to opt out of social insurance. We introduce an informal production sector to analyze the consequences of alternative assumptions about the informati...

In one of a series of articles on philosophical medical ethics, Gillon rebuts the argument that moral claims are essentially different from scientific claims because scientific claims are objective and confirmable or refutable, while moral claims are subjective, unconfirmable, irrefutable, and their differences incapable of resolution. He contends that there is widespread agreement about many ...

Collective action and protest have become a normalized political behavior that in many cases defines the political agenda. The reasons why people take to the streets constitute a central subject within the study of social psychology. In the literature, three precedents of protest that have been established as central to the study of this phenomenon are: injustice, efficacy, and identity. But po...

Abstract—Sustaining cooperation among self-interested agents is critical for the proliferation of emerging online social communities, such as online communities formed through social networking services. Providing incentives for cooperation in social communities is particularly challenging because of their unique features: a large population of anonymous agents interacting infrequently, having ...