The study of decision making has been dominated by economic perspectives, which model people as rational agents who carefully weigh costs and benefits and try to maximize the utility of every choice, without consideration of issues such as cultural norms, religious beliefs and moral rules. However, psychological findings indicate that in many situations people are not rational decision makers a...

In this essay, we oppose current conceptualizations of anger as, at least, a temporary individual psychological disorder and as the cause of a social disorder. We develop the view that anger can be a profoundly moral emotion aimed at maintaining moral order and restoring social order when this has been ruptured. Moral anger is distinguished from other types of anger, like the ones arising from ...

As argued by [9], moral decision making entails considering alternatives and assessing the pros and cons of their possible consequences for self and others. From the area of affective neuroscience the concept of moral emotions has been introduced [9] and neurobiological findings [7] show that moral emotions are used to judge the adequacy of actions and are central to moral behavior, decision ma...

BACKGROUND End-of-life decision making constitutes a major challenge for bioethical deliberation and political governance in modern democracies: On the one hand, it touches upon fundamental convictions about life, death, and the human condition. On the other, it is deeply rooted in religious traditions and historical experiences and thus shows great socio-cultural diversity. The bioethical disc...

Commentators have noted that the issue stands taken by each side of the American ‘‘culture war’’ lack conceptual consistency and can even seem contradictory. We sought to understand the psychological underpinnings of culture war attitudes using Moral Foundations Theory. In two studies involving 24,739 participants and 20 such issues (e.g. abortion, immigration, same-sex marriage), we found that...

The possibility of constructing a personal AI raises many ethical and religious questions that have been dealt with seriously only by imaginative works of fiction; they have largely been ignored by technical experts and by philosophical and theological ethicists Arguing that a personal AI is possible in principle, and that its accomplishment could be adjudicated by the Turing Test, the article ...