Hugh Lafollette’s theoretical justification of parental licensing hinges upon consideration of the harms associated with raising children. If we understand Lafollette’s stance as one in which the moral status of children is equal to that of other human beings, we must consider what such a commitment might require of social institutions such as the family. Unlike other licensing programs, I argu...

Most discussions in ethics argue that a certain practice or act is morally justified, with any underlying theory taken as supporting a guide to general action by aiding discovery of the objectively and singularly right thing to do. I suggest that this oversimplifies the agent's own experience of the moral dilemma, and I take the recent English case of Diane Pretty's request for assisted suicide...

Prior research has identified team size and dispersion as important antecedents of social loafing in technology-enabled teams. However, the underlying mechanisms through which team size and team dispersion cause individuals to engage in social loafing is significantly understudied and needs to be researched. To address this exigency, we use Bandura’s Theory of Moral Disengagement to explain why...

Forty undergraduate students (20 males, 20 females) made judgments about the relationship between an individual's gender and the method of suicide most likely to be chosen by that individual. The perceived relationship between different precipitating events for suicide and the method of suicide were also examined, as were the participants' judgments about the moral justification of suicide in r...

Unlike human soldiers, autonomous weapon systems (AWS) are unaffected by psychological factors that would cause them to act outside the chain of command. This is a compelling moral justification for their development and eventual deployment in war. To achieve this level of sophistication, the software that runs AWS will have to first solve two problems: the frame problem and the representation ...

We address problems in machine ethics dealt with using computational techniques. Our research has focused on Computational Logic, particularly Logic Programming, and its appropriateness to model morality, namely moral permissibility, its justification, and the dual-process of moral judgments regarding the realm of the individual. In the collective realm, we, using Evolutionary Game Theory in po...

A central tenet of medical ethics holds that it is permissible to perform a medical intervention on a competent individual only if that individual has given informed consent to the intervention. Yet it occasionally seems morally permissible to carry out non-consensual medical interventions on competent individuals for the purpose of infectious disease control (IDC). We describe two different mo...

Qualitative interviews are widely and often uncritically adopted for health care research, with little justification of therapeutic value. Although they might provide valuable insights into the perspectives of participants, they represent only a version of reality, rather than "truth" per se. Qualitative research is vulnerable to bias through the attitudes and qualities of the researcher, socia...

Although the abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome has become commonplace, infanticide is still widely rejected. Generally, there are three ways of justifying the differentiation between abortion and infanticide: by referring to the differences between the moral status of the fetus versus the infant, by referring to the differences of the moral status of the act of abortion versus the act of i...

although america claims to be the savior of the world and itsinvasions of other nations have been justified as attempts to maintain peaceand security, america’s international interventions have not always beenwithout expansionist aims. america considers itself a messianic force on theearth. this moral aloofness has served as a justification for imperialistprojects. in the light of post-colonial...