It seems intuitive to attribute intentionality to goal-directed actions. Sometimes, though, goal-directed actions yield side effects that actors could foresee but did not necessarily intend. Previous research suggests that people make opposing attributions to negative and positive side effects: they attribute intentionality to negative side effects but not to positive side effects. Those resear...

Moral relativism, as I understand it, is the claim that there is not a single objectively true morality but only many different moralities, just as there is not a single true language but only many different languages. Different people may have different moralities as reflected in the way they act and the ways they react to the actions of others and there is no objective way to show that one of...

India has a very rich heritage in terms of Ethics, Morals and Values, problems arise where individuals allow their personal values to interfere with their actions, thereby potentially bringing their actions into conflict with stated ethical standards. Education plays a crucial role in all round development of the personality of an individual. But the present education system needs to pay more a...

This paper considers job separations in a search model with labour market matching and moral hazard. Both workers and firms value productive matches and take actions to increase match stability: firms offer a share of match surplus to provide workers with correct incentives and workers take hidden actions (effort) negatively affecting the match separation rate. Heterogenous productivity draws c...

Gray and colleagues make two central claims in their target article. The first is that people fundamentally understand morality in terms of a moral dyad consisting of an intentionally harming agent and a suffering patient; the second is that morality necessarily involves the process of perceiving minds. Both claims underlie the broader thesis that mind perception is the essence of morality, but...

Do individuals intuitively favor certain moral actions over others? This study explores the role of intuitive thinking-induced by time pressure and cognitive load-in moral judgment and behavior. We conduct experiments in three different countries (Sweden, Austria, and the United States) involving over 1,400 subjects. All subjects responded to four trolley type dilemmas and four dictator games i...

Humans are endowed with a natural sense of fairness that permeates social perceptions and interactions. This moral stance is so ubiquitous that we may not notice it as a fundamental component of daily decision making and in the workings of many legal, political, and social systems. Emotion plays a pivotal role in moral experience by assigning human values to events, objects, and actions. Althou...

Although the role of imagination in moral reasoning is often neglected, recent literature, mostly of pragmatist signature, points to imagination as one of its central elements. In this article we develop some of their arguments by looking at the moral role of imagination in practice, in particular the practice of neonatal intensive care. Drawing on empirical research, we analyze a decision-maki...

Rules offer a convenient means of limiting the operational scope of our AI programs so as to not transgress predictable moral boundaries. Yet the imposition of an operational morality based on mere rules will not turn our machines into moral agents, just the unthinking tools of moral designers. If we are to imbue our machines with a profound functional morality, we must first gift them with a m...

Investigations into the neurobiology of moral cognition are often done by examining clinical populations characterized by diminished moral emotions and a proclivity toward immoral behavior. Psychopathy is the most common disorder studied for this purpose. Although cocaine abuse is highly co-morbid with psychopathy and cocaine-dependent individuals exhibit many of the same abnormalities in socio...