Schools have long been seen as institutions for preparing children for life, both academically and as moral agents in society. In order to become capable, moral citizens, children need to be provided with opportunities to learn moral values. However, little is known about how teachers enact social and moral values programs in the classroom. The aim of this article is to investigate the the mora...

Moral responsibility emerges in choice situations where the choice has wideranging consequences and not only the decision maker but also other parties are affected by the outcome of the choice. In this paper I will refer to such situations as complex choice situations. The purpose of this paper is to present a normative but realistic model of responsible choice. The model is normative in the se...

Over the past 12,000 years humans have gradually developed greater understanding and control over life. Agriculture, including plant and animal husbandry, were early important developments. Medicine also contributed to the control of life by fighting disease and more recently through technologies to control and manipulate fertility. Knowledge and technologies from physics and chemistry provide ...

On the face of it, you are only morally responsible for what you cause. Ceteris paribus, if you cause a particularly bad outcome, generally you are morally responsible for it; and if you cause only part of that bad outcome, you are only responsible for the part that you cause. But consider the following pair of cases: (Victim) Two independently employed assassins, unaware of each other, are dis...

Frankfurt-type examples have proven to be quite helpful in our thinking about the relation between freedom and moral responsibility. Harry Frankfurt designed his own examples to show that an agent can be morally responsible even if that agent could not have done otherwise. Following Frankfurt’s lead, many philosophers have developed their own Frankfurt-type examples to extend our understanding ...

The threat of malpractice litigation in the United States is encouraging physicians again to assume responsibility for their patients. The fundamental ethical problem, however, is that this approach denies the patient's moral agency. In this essay, responsibility to patients, rather than for them, is discussed as an alternative to the emerging neo-paternalism. Responsibility to avoids the ethic...

Clean up your own mess: An experimental study of moral responsibility and efficiency by Michael Jakob, Dorothea Kübler, Jan Christoph Steckel and Roel van Veldhuizen* Although market-based environmental policy instruments feature prominently in economic theory and are widely employed, they often meet with public resistance. We argue that such resistance may be driven by a feeling of moral respo...

The professional and institutional responsibility for handling genetic knowledge is well discussed; less attention has been paid to how lay people and particularly people who are affected by genetic diseases perceive and frame such responsibilities. In this exploratory study we qualitatively examine the attitudes of lay people, patients and relatives of patients in Germany and Israel towards ge...