One of the many possibilities of understanding culture is proposed by Clifford Geertz who understood culture as “a system of control mechanisms— plans, recipes, rules, instructions ... that guide behavior”(Geertz, 1973). This opinion is based on the assumption that “man is exactly the animal that is the most dependent upon such control mechanisms that exist outside the skin” (p. 44). But these ...

Objective. Scholars continue to debate whether morally charged political issues constitute a distinct type of policy question or produce essentially the same political dynamic as public controversies lacking an overt moral dimension. The debate will not be resolved until scholars test the determinants of putative morality policies with predictors drawn both from morality politics theory and fro...

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...

Previous research has linked disgust sensitivity to negative attitudes toward gays and lesbians. We extend this existing research by examining the extent to which disgust sensitivity predicts attitudes more generally toward groups that threaten or uphold traditional sexual morality. In a sample of American adults (N = 236), disgust sensitivity (and particularly contamination disgust) predicted ...

The morality of human beings, defined here as our ability to determine whether our actions are right or wrong, depends not just on following rules but also on understanding the impact of our actions on another person. How we understand the impact of our actions on another person depends on our state of consciousness, which is mediated by our brain and nervous system. We describe how we understa...

This paper investigates the appropriateness of LP-based reasoning to machine ethics, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that emerges from the need of imbuing autonomous agents with the capacity for moral decision making. The first contribution of the paper is that of identifying morality viewpoints, as studied in moral philosophy and psychology, which are amenable to computational modeling, ...

1871 saw the publication of two major treatises in economics, with self-seeking economic man at their center. In the same year Darwin published The Descent of Man, which emphasized sympathy and cooperation as well as self-interest, and contained a powerful argument that morality has evolved in humans by natural selection. Essentially this stance is supported by modern research. This paper consi...

Abstract: This research project has two parts. First, I argue that empathy is not necessary and not sufficient for morality. I use autistic individuals and individuals who suffer from psychopathy as my primary examples to show that empathy is not a significant source of morality. I review the literature in moral psychology and emotion research to show that emotions other than empathy, primarily...