Early research and teaching on ethics focused on either a moral development perspective or philosophical approaches, and used a normative approach by focusing on the question of how people should act when resolving ethical dilemmas. In this paper, we briefly describe the traditional approach to ethics and then present a (biased) review on the behavioral approach to ethics. We define behavioral ...

awrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development has been enormously influential in psychology. As Dr. Julie Dunlap states, his work has been concerned exclusively with the development of our moral attitudes toward other humans. Her research is a welcome attempt to use Kohlberg's theory to probe for the development of moral concern about nonhuman animals and nature in general. We should be aware,...

C.W. Churchman (19132004) is probably the most influential philosopher of systems thinking thus far. A founding father of operations research and management science and NASA research philosopher, he never allowed himself to become absorbed by the mainstream of the fields he pioneered. Two outstanding qualities distinguish his academic life: intellectual honesty, and moral outrage.

Ninety-six Colombian children (mean age = 7.7 years) and adolescents (mean age = 14.6 years) made judgments about stealing and physical harm in the abstract and in the context of survival and revenge. All participants judged it wrong to steal or hurt others because of considerations with justice and welfare, and most also judged it wrong to engage in such actions even when they can aid in survi...

This article identifies similarities among three approaches to dealing with rule breaking: the procedural justice model, the restorative justice model, and the study of moral development. Each argues that the long-term goal when dealing with rule breaking is to motivate rule breakers to become more self-regulating in their future conduct. This goal is undermined by punishment-focused models of ...

Considerations from biology suggest (1) that human interests can be generalized as reproductive, involving activities by individuals that tend to promote the survival of their individualized sets of genes; (2) that ethical, moral and legal questions arise out of conflicts of interest that exist because of our history of genetic differences; (3) that human behavior probably always involves egois...

In the current investigation, we test for relationships between three domains of disgust sensitivity (pathogen, sexual, and moral disgust) and the six dimensions of the HEXACO personality model in a large, demographically diverse Dutch sample. Our results extend upon previous investigations into the relationship between disgust sensitivity and personality in two important ways. First, in contra...

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...

This study investigates the relationship between intelligence and individual differences in children's moral development across a range of different moral transgressions. Taking up prior research that showed morality and intelligence to be related in adolescents and adults, the current study wants to test if these findings can be extended to younger children. The study was designed to address s...