March, 2000 AFRICA N John Cohen was a product of the democratic frontier ethos of the American West. A rigorous stickler for accuracy of detail and fidelity to the facts, he was at the same time an unwavering optimist. His writing and teaching was infused with a moral vision––that ordinary men and women are endowed with the innate capacity to solve their common problems, to learn from mistakes ...

Why does past moral behavior sometimes lead people to do more of the same (consistency), whereas sometimes it liberates them to do the opposite (licensing)? We organize the literature on moderators of moral consistency versus licensing effects using five conceptual themes: construal level, progress versus commitment, identification, value reflection, and ambiguity. Our review reveals that indiv...

The majority of Acholi recognize that most combatants in the Lord ' s Resistance Army (LRA) were fo rcibly abducted and have themselves been victims. This creates a moral empathy with the perpetrators and an acknowledgement that the formal justice system is not sufficiently nuanced to make the necessary distinctions between legal and moral gu ilt . This has generated a remarkable commitment to ...

My aim is to vindicate two distinct and important moral categories – ideals and aspirations – which have received modest, and sometimes negative, attention in recent normative debates. An ideal is a conception of perfection or model of excellence around which we can shape our thoughts and actions. An aspiration, by contrast, is an attitudinal position of steadfast commitment to, striving for, o...

Pregnant women who abuse drugs, such as alcohol, cocaine, and marihuana may face a variety of legal and social responses, including involuntary commitment, forced treatment, and criminal sanctions. These programs are intended to remedy apparent maternal-fetal conflicts but paradoxically may encourage some women to avoid beneficial medical and social services or to seek abortion. Although pregna...

In the paper the authors present a model of trust where they integrate cultural specifics along with the manifestation and dynamic of trust. The model consists of trust, relationship commitment and values affected by the current market situation and cultural specifics. Application of the model is given by the comparison of business relationships on two former Yugoslav markets, Serbia and Croati...

In a money-search model where deposits are used as means-of-payments, banks have expertise to obtain higher returns from assets with a cost and an economy of scale but are subject to limited commitment and moral hazard. They can pledge a proportion of asset holdings to issue deposits. Optimal regulation trades off efficiency in assetmanagement and liquidity service banks provide. An optimal cha...

We investigate the potential of logic programming (LP) to model morality aspects studied in philosophy and psychology. We do so by identifying three morality aspects that appear in our view amenable to computational modeling by appropriately exploiting LP features: dual-process model (reactive and deliberative) in moral judgments; justification of moral judgments by contractualism; and intentio...

Our goal in this paper is to raise a general question about the relationship between theories of responsibility, on the one hand, and a commitment to conscious attitudes, on the other. The evidence from cognitive science suggests that there are no conscious mental states playing the right causal roles to count as decisions, judgments, or evaluations. We propose that all theorists should determi...

This paper studies the implications of unobservable consumer naivete on selection and welfare in a competitive insurance market with moral hazard. We identify two distinct forces of sophistication driving the formation of market equilibriums. One is that sophistication helps individuals internalize the incentive to take high effort by adopting some commitment devices, and hence sophisticates ar...