This paper challenges the accepted interpretation of Oedipus Rex, which takes Oedipus’ ignorance of the relevant facts to be an established matter. I argue that Oedipus’ epistemic state is ambiguous, and that this in turn generates a moral ambiguity with respect to his actions. Because ignorance serves as a moral excuse, my demonstration that Oedipus was not ignorant bears significantly on the ...

Our contribution discusses the possibilities and limits of using video games for apprehending and reflecting on the moral actions of their players. We briefly present the results of an extended study that introduces the conceptual idea of a Serious Moral Game (SMG). Then, we outline its possible application in the domain of bioethics for training medical professionals such that they can deal be...

OBJECTIVE To identify the frequency and intensity of moral distress experienced by nurses, technicians and nursing assistants who worked in hospitals in the South of Rio Grande do Sul State. METHOD A survey research was conducted with 334 nursing workers from three institutions, through a questionnaire of moral distress. Constructs were validated through factorial analysis and Cronbach's alph...

The thesis we develop in this essay is that all humans are endowed with a moral faculty. The moral faculty enables us to produce moral judgments on the basis of the causes and consequences of actions. As an empirical research program, we follow the framework of modern linguistics. 1 The spirit of the argument dates back at least to the economist Adam Smith (1759/1976) who argued for something a...

A central question in the development and design of artificial moral agents is whether the absence of emotions, and the capacity of computer systems to manage large quantities of information and analyze many courses of actions, will make them equal or superior to humans in making moral judgments. The contrasting contention that emotions, a sense of self, embodiment, consciousness, and the abili...

Human moral judgment depends critically on "theory of mind," the capacity to represent the mental states of agents. Recent studies suggest that the right TPJ (RTPJ) and, to lesser extent, the left TPJ (LTPJ), the precuneus (PC), and the medial pFC (MPFC) are robustly recruited when participants read explicit statements of an agent's beliefs and then judge the moral status of the agent's action....

BACKGROUND Preliminary evidence suggests that relative to healthy controls, patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) show deficits on several inter-related social cognitive tasks, including theory of mind, and emotion comprehension. Systematic investigations examining other aspects of social cognition, including moral reasoning, have not been conducted in PTSD stemming from childhood ...

There is a large tradition of work in moral psychology that explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g., hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g., playing with your food). However, only recently have there been attempts to characterize the cognitive mechanisms underlying moral judgment (e.g., Blair 1995, Gold...

INTRODUCTION The possibility that deep brain stimulation (DBS) in Parkinson's disease (PD) alters patients' decisions and actions, even temporarily, raises important clinical, ethical and legal questions. Abnormal moral decision-making can lead to ethical rules violations. Previous experiments demonstrated the subthalamic (STN) activation during moral decision-making. Here we aim to study wheth...