Securing instream flows for aquatic ecosystems is critical for sustainable water management and the promotion of human and environmental health. Using a case study from the semiarid region of southern Alberta (Canada) this paper considers how the determination of instream flow standards requires judgments with respect to: (1) The relationship between instream flow indicators and assessments of ...

E thical diversity abounds in organizations. That is, there are diverse beliefs among employees, managers, and executives in organizations as to what are the most ethically appropriate or inappropriate courses of actions to take in their daily workplace situations. Consider the following five examples of ethical diversity, each of which comes from the authors’ direct work experience, consulting...

The main purpose of this article is to show how the belief-function framework can be used to model human behavior when making decisions that involve value judgments. A rule of decision making has been presented in the form of a proposition. This proposition is simple and intuitive. It predicts correctly the observed behavior, even the behavior that is considered to be irrational under the expec...

In this project, I seek to an answer to the question of whether the correct ethical framework is a deontological or consequentialist one. I begin with the assumption that morality is objective. Using that as a starting point, I discuss the two primary sources of data on moral topics: our intuitions and our judgments. I note some epistemic worries with regards to our moral intuitions, and argue ...

Our moral motivations might include a drive towards maximizing overall welfare, consistent with an ethical theory called "utilitarianism." However, people show non-utilitarian judgments in domains as diverse as healthcare decisions, income distributions, and penal laws. Rather than these being deviations from a fundamentally utilitarian psychology, we suggest that our moral judgments are genera...

The authors provide evidence that social ethics claims on food packaging (e.g., fair trade) can promote the misperception that foods are lower-calorie and therefore appropriate for greater consumption. In Study 1, participants evaluating chocolate provided lower calorie judgments when it was described as fair trade—a claim silent on calorie content but signifying that trading partners received ...

The search for the neural correlates of moral judgment has been rapidly expanding in recent years. Perhaps the best-known search technique is neuroimaging, but significant contributions have also been made by fields including neuroendocrinology, neuropharmacology, neuropathology, and neurogenetics. In addition to the value this multidisciplinary search holds for social, cognitive, and affective...