This article is concerned with major current developments in moral psychology, deriving from the study of the neurobiological bases of our responses to moral dilemmas. I briefly illustrate the most important research programs and outline the burning issues in neuroethics, both empirical and conceptual. “The rules of justice may be compared to the rules of grammar; the rules of the other virtues...

Education in ethics among practising professionals should provide a systematic procedure for resolving moral problems. A method for such decision-making is outlined using the two classical orientations in moral philosophy, teleology and deontology. Teleological views such as utilitarianism resolve moral dilemmas by calculating the excess of good over harm expected to be produced by each feasibl...

Contemporary moral psychology often emphasizes the universality of moral judgments. Across age, gender, religion and ethnicity, people's judgments on classic dilemmas are sensitive to the same moral principles. In many cases, moral judgments depend not only on the outcome of the action, but on the agent's beliefs and intentions at the time of action. For example, we blame agents who attempt but...

The social intuitionist model (J. Haidt, 2001) posits that fast and automatic intuitions are the primary source of moral judgments. Conscious deliberations play little causal role; they are used mostly to construct post hoc justifications for judgments that have already occurred. In this article, the authors present evidence that fast and automatic moral intuitions are actually shaped and infor...

PURPOSE To demonstrate the effect of ethics education on a resident's ability to answer questions that relate to moral dilemmas and on the clinical evaluations of residents by faculty. METHODS The curriculum for the ethics education that was used for this study was designed by the author and consisted of 10 lectures of 1.5 hours each. Five residencies were included in the project. One residen...