The possibility that market interaction may erode moral values is a long-standing, but controversial, hypothesis in the social sciences, ethics, and philosophy. To date, empirical evidence on decay of moral values through market interaction has been scarce. We present controlled experimental evidence on how market interaction changes how human subjects value harm and damage done to third partie...

By Leo P. Kadanoff1 February 2002, page 10 Games of chance are often used as conceptual models of random processes in nature. For example, an exhibit on the heart in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry includes a kind of pinball machine. After the balls bounce somewhat randomly through this machine, they fall into bins symbolizing the different states of health of one’s heart. One can bias...

The enforcement of morals through legal sanctions is not a new topic to legal philosophers. It has, in the past decade, been the object of a new and thorough examination, though it is still open to further discussion. The "new morality" of the second half of the twentieth century will also contribute to keep the fire alive as a result of the widening gap between the traditional Christian morali...

Within cognitive science, mental processing is often construed as computation over mental representations—i.e., as the manipulation and transformation of mental representations in accordance with rules of the kind expressible in the form of a computer program. This foundational approach has encountered a long-standing, persistently recalcitrant, problem often called the frame problem; it is som...