Gawronski, Armstrong, Conway, Friesdorf & Hütter (2017, GACFH) presented a model of choices in utilitarian moral dilemmas, those in which following a moral principle (the deontological response) leads to worse consequences than violating the principle (the utilitarian response). In standard utilitarian dilemmas, the utilitarian option usually involves action, and the deontological response, omi...

The priority that Tessman’s argument gives to phenomenological and neuropsychological explanations of moral requirements entails a fundamental shift in our understanding of these. Two central problems of normative theory come together in Tessman’s account. The first arises when an agent’s sense of requirement clashes with what a systematic theory prescribes. The second arises when neuropsycholo...

Socialization and individual differences were examined as antecedents of moral motivation in representative samples of 15-year-old adolescents (N = 1,258; 54% female) and 21-year-old young adults (N = 584; 53% female). The adolescents' primary caregivers (N = 1,056) also participated. The strength of moral motivation was rated by participants' responses to two hypothetical moral dilemmas in ter...

Can adults make fair moral judgments when individuals with whom they have different relationships are involved? The present study explored the fairness of adults' relationship-based moral judgments in two respects by performing three experiments involving 999 participants. In Experiment 1, 65 adults were asked to decide whether to harm a specific person to save five strangers in the footbridge ...

Philosophy is rife with intractable moral dilemmas. We propose that these debates often exist because competing psychological systems yield different answers to the same problem. Consequently, philosophical debate points to the natural fault lines between dissociable psychological mechanisms, and as such provides a useful guide for cognitive neuroscience. We present two case studies from recent...

While a considerable amount of research is done in the field of moral psychology, to our best knowledge, no systematic study of moral judgments made by professional groups who make moral decisions as part of their occupational duties exists (e.g. firefighters, medical doctors, midwives, police officers). By their training and practice, such professionals are expected to exhibit differences in m...

In some cases people judge it morally acceptable to sacrifice one person's life in order to save several other lives, while in other similar cases they make the opposite judgment. Researchers have identified two general factors that may explain this phenomenon at the stimulus level: (1) the agent's intention (i.e. whether the harmful event is intended as a means or merely foreseen as a side-eff...

In what ways can we use games to make moral demands of players and encouraging them to reflect on ethical issues? In this article we propose an ethically notable game as one that provides opportunities for encouraging ethical reasoning and reflection. Our analysis of the videogames Ultima IV, Manhunt, and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn highlights the central role that moral dilemmas can play towards...

The emergence of moral dilemmas in health care practices, in view of the rapid demographic transition in developing countries, and skyrocketing public health care costs, is discussed. The focus is on two aspects of health care that have occupied an important place in the generation of these dilemmas. On the one hand, the tension between commercial strategies involving the health products market...