In recent years it has become more and more difficult to distinguish between metaethical cognitivism and non-cognitivism. (Dreier 2004; van Roojen 2004) The distinction most often used to separate the two camps, until recently at least, was their position on the meaningfulness of moral statements and the applicability of truth-predicates to those statements. Cognitivists are said to hold that m...

In a passage in A Theory of Justice, which has become increasingly influential in recent years, John Rawls (1971) noted an analogy between moral philosophy and grammar. Moral philosophy, or at least the first stage of moral philosophy, Rawls maintained, can be thought of as the attempt to describe our moral capacity – the capacity which underlies “the potentially infinite number and variety of ...

The actions of a rational agent reveal information about its mental states. These inferred mental states, particularly the agent’s intentions, play an important role in the evaluation of moral permissibility. While previous computational models have shown that beliefs and desires can be inferred from behavior under the assumption of rational action they have critically lacked a third mental sta...

Introduction In this paper, I defend the importance of narrative to moral philosophy, in particular to moral realism. Moral realism, for the purposes of this essay, is the claim that there are moral truths independent of human beliefs, attitudes, desires and feelings.i Contemporary philosophers typically focus on discursive arguments and exclude narrative. But narrative is considerably more pow...

Actual behaviour is influenced in important ways by moral emotions, for instance guilt or shame (see among others Tangney et al., 2007). Beliefdependant models of social preferences using the framework of psychological games aim to consider such emotions to explain other-regarding behaviour. Our study links recent advances in psychological theory on moral emotions to belief-dependant models in ...

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers legal developments pertaining to conscience clauses and conscientious refusal. Not only has this topic been the subject of recent articles in this journal, but it has also been the subject of numerous public and professional discussions. Over the past several months, conscientious refusal disputes have had an unusually high profile not only in courtho...

This article presents a new model of culture in action. Although most sociologists who study culture emphasize its role in post hoc sense making, sociologists of religion and social psychologists tend to focus on the role beliefs play in motivation. The dual-process model integrates justificatory and motivational approaches by distinguishing between "discursive" and "practical" modes of culture...