Status holders across societies often take moral initiatives to navigate group practices toward collective goods; however, little is known about how different (e.g., the United States vs. China) evaluate high- (vs. low-) status holders’ transgressions of preached morals. Two preregistered studies (total N = 1,374) examined information (occupational rank in Study 1 and social prestige 2) influen...

People's desires to see themselves as moral actors can contribute to their striving for and achievement of a sense of self-completeness. The authors use self-completion theory to predict (and show) that recalling one's own (im)moral behavior leads to compensatory rather than consistent moral action as a way of completing the moral self. In three studies, people who recalled their immoral behavi...

T AIM of this essay is to clarify the models of moral thinking and doing called teleology and deontology, to gain understanding of utilitarianism as a subcategory of the former, and to explore the relation both to utilitarianism and to teleology in general of certain Christian "consequentialist" modes of moral argument. This purpose arises out of a general and considerable unclarity in recent e...

Evolution has since the publication of The origin of species (1859) been a source of inspiration, and a bone of contention, not only for biology but also for philosophy and the sciences of man. The moral consequences of Darwinism have been a concern for ethicists since Herbert Spencer elevated the survival of the fittest to a norm underwriting cultural and societal progress—hard for the individ...

Where does morality come from? Why are moral judgments often so similar across cultures, yet sometimes so variable? Is morality one thing, or many? Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) was created to answer these questions. In this chapter we describe the origins, assumptions, and current conceptualization of the theory, and detail the empirical findings that MFT has made possible, both within social...

Gratitude is conceptualized as a moral affect that is analogous to other moral emotions such as empathy and guilt. Gratitude has 3 functions that can be conceptualized as morally relevant: (a) a moral barometer function (i.e., it is a response to the perception that one has been the beneficiary of another person's moral actions); (b) a moral motive function (i.e., it motivates the grateful pers...

There is broad consensus that features such as causality, mental states, and preventability are key inputs to moral judgments of blame. What is not clear is exactly how people process these inputs to arrive at such judgments. Three studies provide evidence that early judgments of whether or not a norm violation is intentional direct information processing along 1 of 2 tracks: if the violation i...

I believe that most philosophers agree that ethics has no absolute standard. There is no ultimate appeal or norm beside which a system or detail of ethics can be compared, and therefore we must begin the moral consideration of this subject, abortion, as of all other problems of morality, by remembering that what is rightness or wrongness is the result of the public opinion of the race, epoch, a...

This article explores the impact of the new sustainability agenda on the occupational and professional needs of those who have undergone educational and training programmes in the environmental field either at the undergraduate or the post-graduate level or through relevant professional institutions’ continuing professional development programmes. It also describes a one-day workshop for the pr...

Awareness of stakeholder interactions and sustainable development (SD) issues in the management of information and communication technologies (ICT), forces companies to adopt the concepts of Green IT and corporate social responsibility (CSR) to meet the challenges of agility and innovation, also to create differentiation in governance processes and strategic alignment of ICT. In this paper, we ...