Learning to make moral judgements based on considerations beyond self-interest is a fundamental aspect of moral development. A deficit in such learning is associated with poor socialization and criminal behaviour. The neural systems required for the acquisition and maturation of moral competency are not well understood. Here we show in a unique sample of neurological patients that focal lesions...

Theories of moral judgment have long emphasized reasoning and conscious thought while downplaying the role of intuitive and contextual influences. However, recent research has demonstrated that incidental feelings of disgust can influence moral judgments and make themmore severe. This study involved two experiments demonstrating that the reverse effect can occur when the notion of physical puri...

Moral disengagement processes are cognitive self-justification processes of transgressive actions that have been hypothesized to be learned and socialized within social contexts. The current study aimed at investigating socialization of moral disengagement by friends in two developmentally different age groups, namely late childhood (age: 9-10 years; n = 133, 42.9% girls) and early adolescence ...

What implications does a dirty-handed politician‟s assertion that dirty hands are necessary for certain political achievements have on our understanding of the relationship between political actors and the political community? The problem of dirty hands, as described in Michael Walzer‟s “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” occurs when a political actor finds that he must transgress o...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Conscientious refusal among physicians to provide medical care is known to exist. The prevalence of conscientious refusal in residents and behaviors surrounding moral objections is largely unknown. The purpose of this study was to identify the prevalence of moral objections among family medicine residents and faculty members and to identify beliefs and actions surround...

There is a large tradition of work in moral psychology that explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g. hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g. playing with your food). However, only recently have there been attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgment (e.g. Cognition 57 (1995)...

The resurgence of interest in virtue ethics can be traced to the late 1950s and to the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. On Anscombe's view, both deontologism and consequentialism are guilty of judging the " rightness " or " wrongness " of actions on the model of rendering a verdict based on one's understanding of the law and of an agent's obligations under the law. The fundamental ...

Inspired by the success of generative linguistics and transformational grammar, proponents of the linguistic analogy (LA) in moral psychology hypothesize that careful attention to folk-moral judgments is likely to reveal a small set of implicit rules and structures responsible for the ubiquitous and apparently unbounded capacity for making moral judgments. As a theoretical hypothesis, LA thus r...