Is moral judgment accomplished by intuition or conscious reasoning? An answer demands a detailed account of the moral principles in question. We investigated three principles that guide moral judgments: (a) Harm caused by action is worse than harm caused by omission, (b) harm intended as the means to a goal is worse than harm foreseen as the side effect of a goal, and (c) harm involving physica...

In some cases in which rational and moral agents experience moral uncertainty, they are unable to assign exact degrees of moral value—in a non-arbitrary way—to some of the different acts available to them, and so are unable to choose with certainty the best act. This article presents a new justification for the use of lotteries in this kind of situation. It is argued that sometimes the only rat...

As part of the Dutch post-license young driver coaching program, Drive Xperience (DX), the level of moral reasoning was explored in relation to self-reported violating driving behaviors. Drawing from literature in the field of juvenile crime, three online assessments were developed to measure: a) social driving behavior; b) moral justification for rule compliance, and: c) cognitive distortions ...

Human beings with diminished decision-making capacities are usually thought to require greater protections from the potential harms of research than fully autonomous persons. Animal subjects of research receive lesser protections than any human beings regardless of decision-making capacity. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely animals' lack of some characteristic human capacities that is com...

One popular justification for punishment is the just deserts rationale: A person deserves punishment proportionate to the moral wrong committed. A competing justification is the deterrence rationale: Punishing an offender reduces the frequency and likelihood of future offenses. The authors examined the motivation underlying laypeople's use of punishment for prototypical wrongs. Study 1 (N = 336...

It is now common to hear calls for increased attention to character in work organizations as well as other social institutions, from government to education to sport. Character refers to those qualities within individuals that lead them to desire and to pursue the good (Baumrind, 1998). Moral goodness can be regarded as an ungrounded grounder, a value that needs no further justification, but ou...

OBJECTIVE To show how systematic ethical evaluation of public health policy may reveal issues of moral significance for critical examination. METHOD Using Australia's human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination program as an exemplar and adopting an approach outlined elsewhere, we determine whether conditions of effectiveness, proportionality, necessity and least infringement, and public justifica...

Political philosophy seeks to justify principles of social justice. How should it go about that task? One answer, what may be called the practice-based method of justification, is that we are to justify principles, by moral reasoning, both for and from a social practice, which we identify by way of social interpretation. The approach contrasts, on the one hand, with what might be called pure so...