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...

The conservation of biodiversity poses an exceptionally difficult problem in that it needs to be effective in a context of double uncertainty: scientific (i.e., how to conserve biodiversity) and normative (i.e., which biodiversity to conserve and why). Although adaptive management offers a promising approach to overcome scientific uncertainty, normative uncertainty is seldom tackled by conserva...

Recently, there is increased attention to the integration of moral values into the conception, design, and development of emerging IT. The most reviewed approach for this purpose in ethics and technology so far is Value-Sensitive Design (VSD). This article considers VSD as the prime candidate for implementing normative considerations into design. Its methodology is considered from a conceptual,...

While individual differences in the willingness and ability to engage analytic processing have long informed research in reasoning and decision making, the implications of such differences have not yet had a strong influence in other domains of psychological research. We claim that analytic thinking is not limited to problems that have a normative basis and, as an extension of this, predict tha...

This paper examines the culture, the dynamics and the financial underpinnings that determine how medical research is being conducted on children in the United States. Children have increasingly become the subject of experiments that offer them no potential direct benefit but expose them to risks of harm and pain. A wide range of such experiments will be examined, including a lethal heartburn dr...

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In this article we analyze the influence of a concrete moral emotion (i.e. moral guilt) on strategic decision making. We present a normal form Prisoner’s Dilemma with a moral component. We assume that agents evaluate the game’s outcomes with respect to their ideality degree (i.e. how much a given outcome conforms to the player’s moral values), based on two proposed notions on ethical preference...

This essay examines how biocentric positions assess the aims and planned products of synthetic biology. In this emerging field, scientists and engineers aim at designing and producing new life forms by various procedures. In this paper I explore whether, for biocentrists, 1) synthetic organisms have moral standing and, 2) the process of synthesising living organisms has moral implications. Beca...

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