Why do moral people so often fail to act morally? Standard scientific answers point to poor moral judgment (based on deficient character development, reason, or intuition) or to situational pressure. I consider a third possibility: a relative lack of truly moral motivation and emotion. What has been taken for moral motivation is often instead a subtle form of egoism. Recent research provides co...

Background: Considering the religious and legal structures in Iran, the occurrence of euthanasia seems to be impossible; however, the attitude of nurses towards euthanasia and its related factors may also affect creating moral distress conditions for nurses. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate of the moral distress and attitude of Adult and Neonatal Intensive Care Units (AICU/ NICU) nurs...

Moral rationalization is an individual’s ability to reinterpret his or her immoral actions as, in fact, moral. It arises out of a conflict of motivations and a need to see the self as moral. This article presents a model of evil behavior demonstrating how situational factors that obscure moral relevance can interact with moral rationalization and lead to a violation of moral principles. Concept...

I start with the premise that any social robot must have moral competence. I offer a framework for what moral competence is and sketch the prospects for it to be developed in artificial agents. After considering three proposals for requirements of “moral agency” I propose instead to examine moral competence as a broader set of capacities. I posit that human moral competence consists of five com...

People perceive religious and moral iconography in ambiguous objects, ranging from grilled cheese to bird feces. In the current research, we examined whether moral concerns can shape awareness of perceptually ambiguous stimuli. In three experiments, we presented masked moral and non-moral words around the threshold for conscious awareness as part of a lexical decision task. Participants correct...

The assumption of traditional character educators that children build moral literacy from reading or hearing moral stories is challenged based on research findings. First, research in text comprehension indicates that readers do not understand texts the same way due to differences in reading skill and background knowledge. Second, moral comprehension research indicates that moral arguments are ...

BACKGROUND Moral distress is caused by situations in which the ethically appropriate course of action is known but cannot be taken. Moral distress is thought to be a serious problem among nurses, particularly those who practice in critical care. It has been associated with job dissatisfaction and loss of nurses from the workplace and the profession. OBJECTIVES To assess the level of moral dis...

The aims of this systematic review were to determine: (a) which brain areas are consistently more active when making (i) moral response decisions, defined as choosing a response to a moral dilemma, or deciding whether to accept a proposed solution, or (ii) moral evaluations, defined as judging the appropriateness of another's actions in a moral dilemma, rating moral statements as right or wrong...

We propose that social psychological findings on the intuitive bases of moral judgment have broad implications for moral education. The “five foundations theory of intuitive ethics” is applied to explain a longstanding rift in moral education as an ideological disagreement about which moral intuitions should be endorsed and cultivated. The Kohlbergian moral reasoning side has sought to limit th...

This paper analyzes price competition between a spatially differentiated product patentee and an imitator anticipating the possibility of future patent damages. We compare the performance of three damage regimes. The “reasonable royalty” regime, the only one that yields symmetric equilibrium pricing, maximizes static welfare and yields the highest incentives to innovate when patent enforcement ...