Jon Haidt (2001) has done a great service to the field of moral psychology by drawing our attention to the importance of intuition in moral evaluation. He has proposed provocative new models and hypotheses that can be tested in experimental situations and has inspired additional models and theories about intuition. But there is much more work to be done. Here are four things that need deep stud...

Moral theories typically rest upon the assumption that conscious deliberation plays a causal role in action; however, a growing body of scientific evidence supports a physicalist account of causation that leaves no causal role for mental activity. In response, I develop a moral theory (including moral truth, motivation, and meaning) that excludes considerations of conscious free will. I then co...

In contrast to other articles in this series on the history of moral philosophy the present essay is not devoted to expounding the views of a single author, or to examining a particular moral theory. Instead it discusses an important dispute between two medieval accounts of the relation between theological and moral propositions. In addition to its historical interest this debate is important b...

A prominent theme in twentieth and early twenty-first century moral philosophy is that a full and accurate picture of the ethical life must include an important role for the emotions. The neglect of the emotions has been a major point of criticism raised against the dominant consequentialist, Kantian, and contractualist theories by virtue ethicists such as G.E.M. Anscombe, Alisdair MacIntyre, M...

The determination of individual moral status is a central factor in the ethical evaluation of controversial practices such as elective abortion, human embryo-destructive research, and the care of severely disabled and those in persistent vegetative states. A comprehensive review of recent work on Kant’s conception of moral status reveals the need for a careful examination of the content of Kant...

Is Moral Theory Perplexed by New Genetic Technology? Richard J. Arneson From Choice to Chance: Genes and the Just Society intelligently addresses difficult issues at the intersection of medical ethics and the theory of justice. The authors, Dan Brock, Allen Buchanan, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wikler, repeatedly emphasize their opinion that advances in genetic technology force upon us entirely ...

BACKGROUND Providing health services is described as an important moral measure, since its major aim is to ensure the welfare of the people who need treatment and care. Moral sensitivity is the ability to identify the existing moral problem and understand the moral consequences of the decisions made on the patient's part. Physicians are always exposed to moral distress due to various circumstan...

This paper examines the moral education of the child with a critical attention paid to the allocation of responsibility. The paper tried to answer the question: ‘Who gives the child his moral education, is it a collective responsibility or the sole responsibility of an institution’? After the examination of some theories of moral development, attempt was made to examine the various institutions...

In this paper, I argue for the permissibility of torture in idealized cases by application of separation of cases: if torture is permissible given any of the dominant moral theories (and if one of those is correct), then torture is permissible simpliciter and I can discharge the tricky business of trying to adjudicate among conflicting moral views. To be sure, torture is not permissible on all ...