In Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame, Thomas Scanlon challenges moral philosophers with a subtle analysis of how permissibility, meaning and blame are to be understood. Scanlon’s challenge is significant not only because he is a moral philosopher of considerable stature but because his analysis proceeds with an unusual degree of care. Scanlon employs a number of novel distinction...

The moral permissibility of harm is strikingly varied among individuals. In light of the connection between testosterone levels and utilitarian moral judgment, this study examined to what extent a CAG polymorphism in the androgen receptor gene, a genetic polymorphism with the ability to regulate testosterone function, contributes to individual differences in moral judgment. Four hundred and thi...

People often use indirect speech, for example, when trying to bribe a police officer by asking whether there might be "a way to take care of things without all the paperwork." Recent game theoretic accounts suggest that a speaker uses indirect speech to reduce public accountability for socially risky behaviors. The present studies examine a secondary function of indirect speech use: increasing ...

The actions of a rational agent reveal information about its mental states. These inferred mental states, particularly the agent’s intentions, play an important role in the evaluation of moral permissibility. While previous computational models have shown that beliefs and desires can be inferred from behavior under the assumption of rational action they have critically lacked a third mental sta...

The paper explores the idea that when a proposition p is borderline, p is permissible: we can assert p, deny p or suspend judgement about p for all we know, nothing mandates one of these attitudes. The vagueness of p leaves open what we have to think of p. Recognition that p is borderline amounts to be tolerant toward any of three following attitudes on p: 1) hesitant acceptance of p (positive ...