The idea that empathy provides an important developmental precursor to moral decision making possesses significant conceptual appeal. However, the idea of a necessary, diachronic relation between empathy and morality has been rejected recently (by Prinz 2011, amongst others). This paper reassesses the strength of the claim that empathy is developmentally necessary for (at least some forms of) m...

The theme of this special issue is “Is Morality Universal, and Should the Law Care?” For me, this question provokes the further question of what morality and the law are. That is what most of this essay is about. The last two sections address the initial question, primarily dealing with laying out its multiple ambiguity. Few of its readings have easy answers; the best I can do in the present di...

This paper uses (tele)presence concepts to explore the practical and philosophical implications of the simulation argument: the notion that individuals may be trapped within manufactured realities. After describing a series of hypothetical simulation scenarios, key distinguishing dimensions of the scenarios are considered and implications for epistemology, religion and morality, mortality, and ...

Many believe that objective morality requires a theistic foundation. I maintain that there are sui generis objective ethical facts that do not reduce to natural or supernatural facts. On my view, objective morality does not require an external foundation of any kind. After explaining my view, I defend it against a variety of objections posed by William Wainwright, William Lane Craig, and J. P. ...

The patentability of inventions related to Human Embryonic Stem Cells (HESC) is challenged by the morality provision of various nations’ regulations. 1 This Article discusses whether it is a matter of expediency to prohibit granting patents to HESC-related inventions based on moralitybased provisions, and it concludes that this is not appropriate. To claim this, the Article explores typical cas...

The claim that the psychological study of morality underwent a revolution at the beginning of the twenty-first century and that this revolution was an affective one is now commonplace: emotions, rather than reflection and reasoning from explicit moral principles, were suddenly supposed to play the prominent role in moral thought and behaviour (Haidt 2001, 2007). Though supporters of this revolu...

The implications of sleep for morality are only starting to be explored. Extending the ethics literature, we contend that because bringing morality to conscious attention requires effort, a lack of sleep leads to low moral awareness. We test this prediction with three studies. A laboratory study with a manipulation of sleep across 90 participants judging a scenario for moral content indicates t...