According to a common view among Muslim philosophers, a moral agent has free will if and only if she is able to do an action when she wants to and is able to avoid it when she wants otherwise. Implicit in this view is the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). On the other hand, according to this view, free will is dependent on requirements such as conception, judgement, tendency, decisi...

Neuroengineers such as Hugo de Garis propose to build artificial brains called “artilects” that go beyond the cybernetic model seeking to build “cyborgs.” Empirical research in this field raises moral questions to which both moral psychology and moral philosophy can contribute, especially to analysis of the motivations of a neuroengineering project such as that of de Garis. The problem is that ...

Decades of psychological research have demonstrated that intuitive judgments are often unreliable, thanks to their inflexible reliance on limited information (Kahneman, 2003, 2011). Research on the computational underpinnings of learning, however, indicates that intuitions may be acquired by sophisticated learning mechanisms that are highly sensitive and integrative. With this in mind, Railton ...

Recently, economists have re-discovered the fact of the cultural embeddedness of institutions. This raises the question whether there are transcultural universals of institutions and institutional design. The paper proposes that such universals cannot possibly be empirical givens, but have to be continuously created through transcultural discourse. I take a first step by putting family resembla...

Innate emotional bases of ethics have been proposed by authors in evolutionary psychology, following Darwin and his sources in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Philosophers often tend to view such theories as irrelevant to, or even as tending to undermine, the project of moral philosophy. But the importance of emotions to early moral learning gives them a role to play in determining the con...

jonathan dancy advocates a radical particularist theory of ethics. arguing against a variety of generalist doctrines, he maintains that there are no moral principles and that our ethical decisions are highly context-dependent: they are made case by case, without the support of such principles. in this paper, drawing on a number of theoretical concepts used in science as well as the philosophy o...

Prominent theories of morality have integrated philosophy with psychology and biology. Although this approach has been highly generative, we argue that it does not fully capture the rich and dynamic nature of moral cognition. We review research from the dual-process tradition, in which moral intuitions are automatically elicited and reasoning is subsequently deployed to correct these initial in...

I submit that epistemic progress in key areas of contemporary academic philosophy has been compromised by politically correct (“PC”) ideology. First, guided by an evolutionary account of ideology, results from social and cognitive psychology and formal philosophical methods, I expose evidence for political bias in contemporary Western academia and sketch a formalization for the contents of beli...

Traditional theories of moral psychology emphasize reasoning and "higher cognition," while more recent work emphasizes the role of emotion. The present fMRI data support a theory of moral judgment according to which both "cognitive" and emotional processes play crucial and sometimes mutually competitive roles. The present results indicate that brain regions associated with abstract reasoning an...

An authentic Christian bioethical account of abortion must take into consideration the conflicting epistemologies that separate Christian moral theology from secular moral philosophy. Moral epistemologies directed to the issue of abortion that fail to appreciate the orientation of morality to God will also fail adequately to appreciate the moral issues at stake. Christian accounts of the bioeth...