Recent research in social psychology suggests that people harbor ‘‘implicit race biases,’’ biases which can be unconscious or uncontrollable. Because awareness and control have traditionally been deemed necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility, implicit biases present a unique challenge: do we pardon discrimination based on implicit biases because of its unintentional nature, or do ...

In this Commentary article we critically assess the claims made by Schurz, Kronbichler, Weissengrubler, Surtees, Samson and Perner (2015) relating to the neural processes underlying theory of mind and visual perspective taking. They attempt to integrate research findings in these two areas of social neuroscience using a perspective taking task contrasting mentalistic agents ('avatars'), with no...

It is often argued that a robot cannot be held morally responsible for its actions. The author suggests that one should use the same criteria for robots as for humans, regarding the ascription of moral responsibility. When deciding whether humans are moral agents one should look at their behaviour and listen to the reasons they give for their judgments in order to determine that they understood...

Some researchers have argued that mass perception, causal ascriptions, and predictions in simple billiard ball interactions can be modeled as inductive Bayesian inference over a (noisy) Newtonian representation of the world. However, there are phenomena, such as the asymmetrical ascription of forces to colliding objects, that are conceptually incompatible with the symmetry of Newtonian physics....

Six different talking heads have been evaluated in two consecutive experiments. Two text-to-speech components and three head components have been used. Results from semantic differentials show a clear preference for the most human-like and expressive head. The analysis of the semantic differentials reveals three factors each. These factors show different patterns for the head components. Overal...

The debate between Simulation-Theory (ST) and Theory-Theory (TT) provides the dominant theoretical framework for research on "theory of mind" (ToM). Behavioural research has failed to provide clear methods for discriminating between these theories, but a number of recent studies have claimed that neuroimaging methods do allow key predictions of ST and TT to be tested. In the current paper it is...

The cognitive appraisal of an event is crucial for the elicitation and differentiation of emotions. Similar appraisals will result in similar emotions, but the appraisal of one and the same event may depend on culturally defined concepts. Appraising an event as unjust, for instance, and its agent as responsible are cognitive determinants for anger. Justice, however, is defined through cultural ...

This paper examines factors influencing prosocial intentions. On the basis of the norm activation model (NAM), we propose that four variables influence prosocial intentions or behaviours: (1) personal norms (PN), reflecting feelings of moral obligation to engage in prosocial behaviour, (2) awareness of adverse consequences of not acting prosocially, (3) ascription of responsibility for the nega...

I argue that Schopenhauer’s ascription of (moral) rights to animals flows naturally from his distinctive analysis of the concept of a right. In contrast to those who regard rights as fundamental and then cast wrongdoing as a matter of violating rights, he takes wrong (Unrecht) to be the more fundamental notion and defines the concept of a right (Recht) in its terms. He then offers an account of...

ion of their entangled correlations with the chosen context of investigation. Thus, the resulting contextual object is the quantum object exhibiting a particular property with respect to a certain experimental situation. The contextual character of property-ascription implies, however, that a state-dependent property of a quantum object is not a welldefined property that has been possessed prio...