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...

This paper argues that one can advocate a moral imperative to pursue enhancement technologies while at the same time rejecting the historical reality of progress and holding a pessimistic view of the future. The first half of the paper puts forth several arguments for why progress is illusory and why one has good reason to be pessimistic about the future of humanity (and posthumanity). The seco...

Over the years, competitions have been important catalysts for progress in Artificial Intelligence. We describe one such competition, the Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management (TAC SCM). We discuss its significance in the context of today’s global market economy as well as AI research, the ways in which it breaks away from limiting assumptions made in prior work, and some of the...

A near ubiquitous feature of user interfaces is feedback on task completion or progress indicators such as the graphical bar that grows as more of the task is completed. The presumed benefit is that users will be more likely to complete the task if they see they are making progress but it is also possible that feedback indicating slow progress may sometimes discourage users from completing the ...

Users of information technology (IT) often encounter “progress indicators” during their interactions. These graphics (e.g., progress bars) appear on computing screens as users wait for a task to complete. The purpose of progress indicators is to inform users of the progress being made to complete a task. This study employs two theoretical models from psychological research on human waiting to d...

This paper is a contribution to the continuing development of the methods and results for the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, also known as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). It attempts a more systematic approach to some of the components of the GPI. It includes a more careful specification of types of capital and more plausible methods of estimating the costs of depletion of non-ren...