Refl ecting on the signifi cance of his early research on the neuropsychology of moral judgment, Joshua Greene (2007) raises an important and increasingly pressing kind of question: “ Where does one draw the line between correcting the nearsightedness of human moral nature and obliterating it completely? ” and goes on to more directly wonder “ How far can the empirical debunking of human moral ...

The ability to reason well is central to the concept of intelligence, but intelligence alone will not guarantee morality. To recognise the ‘right’ choice and to judge our own and others’ actions, is to make an act of reason. To choose to value morality and to make the ‘right’ choice is an act of character. The link between intelligence and choice “makes the whole idea of morality possible in th...

This article investigates whether there is an underlying morality in the ways that human beings seek to obtain economic security within our imperfect economy, which can be illuminated through evolutionary biology research. Two research questions are the focus of the analysis: (1) What is the transaction cognitive machinery that is specialized for the entrepreneurial task of exchange-based secur...

Research has shown that warmth and competence are core dimensions on which perceivers judge others and that warmth has a primary role at various phases of impression formation. Three studies explored whether the two components of warmth (i.e., sociability and morality) have distinct roles in predicting the global impression of social groups. In Study 1 (N= 105) and Study 2 (N= 112), participant...

Moral dilemmas—like the ‘‘trolley problem’’ or real-world examples like capital punishment—result from a conflict between consequentialist and deontological intuitions (i.e., whether ends justify means). The authors contend that people often resolve such moral conflict by aligning factual beliefs about consequences of acts with evaluations of the act’s inherent morality (i.e., morality independ...

This study investigated moral judgment in children with high-functioning autism and their cooperation in prisoner's dilemma game with partners of different moralities. Thirty-eight 6- to 12-year-old high-functioning autistic (HFA) children and 31 typically developing (TD) children were recruited. Children were asked to judge story protagonists' morality. After making this moral judgment correct...

This paper presents a computational model, via Logic Programming (LP), of counterfactual reasoning with applications to agent morality. Counterfactuals are conjectures about what would have happened, had an alternative event occurred. In the first part, we show how counterfactual reasoning, inspired by Pearl’s structural causal model of counterfactuals, is modeled using LP, by benefiting from L...

Tom Beauchamp and James Childress have always maintained that their four principles approach (otherwise known as principlism) is a globally applicable framework for biomedical ethics. This claim is grounded in their belief that the principles of respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence and justice form part of a 'common morality', or collection of very general norms to which everyone ...

Sixty-nine Midwestern middle-class children and adolescents were tested on justice and care orientations when reasoning abstract and interpersonal moral dilemmas. Nona Lyons" ("Two Perspectives on Self, Relationships and Morality," Harvard Educational Review, 1983, 53,125-145) scoring method was used to score subjects" responses. A 2(sex) × 2(age) analysis of variance run on the total justice a...

I am a psychologist and not a theologian, so I do not know what the word "soul" means. What matters to me is a creature's capacity to feel, to suffer and to be conscious; its sentiency, not its soul, is the bedrock of my concern. Let us proclaim this creed of sentientism: that anything, human or nonhuman, terrestrial or extraterrestrial, natural or man-made, that can suffer should be included w...