Employing and modifying the model by Jones (1991), this study examines the effects of moral intensity and organizational factors on individual ethical decision making. Organizational factors, used to be ignored in previous research, are also believed to influence the ethical decision making process. A survey applying four different scenarios was conducted to master and doctoral degree students ...

Although moral dilemmas such as the trolley and footbridge dilemmas (Thomson, 1986) have been widely employed to investigate the nature of moral reasoning, but their psychometric properties remain a mystery. In this study, 219 participants completed 62 moral dilemma tasks used in Greene et al. (2001), and the correlation structure among the dilemmas was analyzed through factor analysis and stru...

When a group engages in immoral behavior, group members face the whistleblower's dilemma: the conflict between remaining loyal to the group and standing up for other moral concerns. This study examines the developmental origins of this dilemma by investigating 5-year-olds' whistleblowing on their in- vs. outgroup members' moral transgression. Children (n = 96) watched puppets representing their...

The most prominent anti-realist program in recent metaethics is the expressivist strategy of treating ethical claims as expressing not beliefs but noncognitive attitudes of some sort. Its popularity stems in part from the fact that, by construing ethical claims as expressing noncognitive attitudes rather than beliefs, one can reject a realist ontology of morality without rejecting moral discour...

Kohlberg’s theory of moral development claims that moral reasoning remains consistent across situations. Contrary to Kohlberg’s ideas, recent research has suggested that individuals’ levels of moral reasoning may vary across situations. This study explored the impact of varying a character’s sexual orientation in a scenario to assess whether or not level of moral reasoning is influenced by this...

Neuroimaging research has demonstrated the involvement of a well-defined brain network in the mediation of moral judgment in normal population, and has suggested the inappropriate network use in criminal psychopathy. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to prove that alterations in the brain network subserving moral judgment in criminal psychopaths are not limited to the inadequ...

A brain death case is presented and reinterpreted using the narrative approach. In the case, two Japanese parents face a dilemma about whether to respect their daughter's desire to donate organs even though, for them, it would mean literally killing their daughter. We argue that the ethical dilemma occurred because the parents were confronted with two conflicting narratives to which they felt a...

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...