This article discusses institutional global ethics and its applications. Different approaches to applied ethics are discussed. The discussion focuses on whether a set of plausible ethical principles can be found that have global application to institutions of various forms in contexts connected with sustainability and human well-being generally. The article is divided into four major sections. ...

Ethical theory often starts with our intuitions about particular cases and tries to uncover the principles that are implicit in them; work on the 'trolley problem' is a paradigmatic example of this approach. But ethicists are no longer the only ones chasing trolleys. In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have also turned to study our moral intuitions and what underlies them. The re...

Particularism and Generalism refer to families of attitudes towards moral principles. This paper explores the suggestion that neural network models of cognition may aid in vindicating particularist views of moral reasoning. Neural network models of moral case classification are presented, and the contrast case method for testing and revising case classifications is considered. It is concluded t...

The study of decision making has been dominated by economic perspectives, which model people as rational agents who carefully weigh costs and benefits and try to maximize the utility of every choice, without consideration of issues such as cultural norms, religious beliefs and moral rules. However, psychological findings indicate that in many situations people are not rational decision makers a...

Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affe...

Within cognitive science, mental processing is often construed as computation over mental representations—i.e., as the manipulation and transformation of mental representations in accordance with rules of the kind expressible in the form of a computer program. This foundational approach has encountered a long-standing, persistently recalcitrant, problem often called the frame problem; it is som...

The principles of equality and equity, respectively in the Bill of Rights and the white paper on health, provide the moral and legal foundations for future health care for children in South Africa. However, given extreme health care need and scarce resources, the government faces formidable obstacles if it hopes to achieve a just allocation of public health care resources, especially among chil...

This paper consists of a case study on blind woman with the possibility of genetic transmission. The paper aims to understand the motivation for procreation, existential dilemmas experienced by blind mother and moral judgments that determined her choice. The social group expressed moral judgments sustained rational beliefs and values of the collective unconscious about the disability. The healt...

1086 Moral Reasoning and Sleep-Deprivation—Olsen et al STUDIES SHOW THAT, IN GENERAL, SLEEP DEPRIVATION IMPAIRS PERFORMANCE OF A WIDE RANGE OF COGNITIVE TASKS AND SENSORY FUNCTIONS, SUCH as mental arithmetic, logical reasoning, memory, vigilance, and meta-cognition.1,2 The detrimental effects of sleep deprivation on cognition, motor performance, and mood have also been documented by meta-analys...