The relation of self-understanding and moral judgment to dedicated prosocial behavior is investigated. Participants were African-American and Latin-American adolescents who had been nominated by community leaders for having demonstrated unusual commitments to care for others or the community (care exemplars). The care exemplars, and matched comparison adolescents, were extensively interviewed o...

Teachers are expected to act ethically and provide moral role models in performing their duties, even though teacher education has often relegated the cultivation of teachers’ ethical awareness and moral development to the margins. When it is addressed, the main theoretical assumptions have relied heavily on the cognitivist developmental theories of Piaget and Kohlberg. A major pedagogical prob...

This paper argues for the moral significance of the notion of an evil person or character. First, I argue that accounts of evil character ought to support a robust bad/evil distinction; yet existing theories cannot plausibly do so. Consequentialist and related theories also fail to account for some crucial properties of evil persons. Second, I sketch an intuitively plausible “affective-motivati...

The importance of including cultural perspectives in the study of human cognition has become apparent in recent decades, and the domain of moral reasoning is no exception. The present review focuses on moral cognition, beginning with Kohlberg's model of moral development which relies heavily on people's justifications for their judgments and then shifting to more recent theories that rely on ra...

Experiencing ubiquitous contention, the correlation between execution as a form of legal punishment and morality pervades in the modern era to form a central concern for examination. Competing accounts of moral theories have provided dichotomous vindications for capital punishment, indicating a substantial strife in criminal justice morality. This thesis will examine these rival philosophies in...

Yudkowsky’s “coherent extrapolated volition” (CEV) concept shares much in common with ideal advisor theories in moral philosophy. Does CEV fall prey to the same objections which are raised against ideal advisor theories? Because CEV is an epistemic rather than a metaphysical proposal, it seems that at least one family of CEV approaches (inspired by Bostrom’s parliamentary model) may escape the ...

According to experts, the inefficient agricultural sector has a dominant role in degrading water resources all over the world. Farmers’ conservational behavior is an important aspect of new integrated water management studies. Relevantly, various behavioral theories have been proposed in the field of environmental psychology. The main objective of the present comparative analysis and review stu...

Computer ethics is recognized as an essential component of information systems curricula. However, little is known about how students perceive the usefulness and usability of ethics theories in solving computerrelated moral conflicts, and what kinds of mistakes they make in solving moral problems by applying those theories. To fill this gap, an interpretive qualitative and quantitative study (n...

In teaching ethics, I have found it important to correctly describe a moral problem as it most naturally presents itself to a person in a situation of moral choice. We can call this attempt to correctly describe the structure of a moral problem an attempt to achieve phenomenological accuracy. Enumerating some of the ways in which moral problems can present themselves will provide the context fo...

Moral status ascribes equal obligations and rights to individuals on the basis of membership in a protected group. Substance change is an event that results in the origin or cessation of individuals who may be members of groups with equal moral status. In this paper, two substance changes that affect the moral status of human embryos are identified. The first substance change begins with fertil...