Moral distress, according to Andrew Jameton's highly influential definition, occurs when a nurse knows the morally correct action to take but is constrained in some way from taking this action. The definition of moral distress has been broadened, first, to include morally challenging situations that give rise to distress but which are not necessarily linked to nurses feeling constrained, such a...

We live in a social world. Most other animals do too. The social world affords many opportunities and challenges for decision making, from the benefi ts of collective cognition and cooperation to the costs of groupthink and cut-throat competition. Some social situations appear, at least at the moment, to be uniquely human. For instance, morality in humans has been studied for millennia, with do...

Gratitude is conceptualized as a moral affect that is analogous to other moral emotions such as empathy and guilt. Gratitude has 3 functions that can be conceptualized as morally relevant: (a) a moral barometer function (i.e., it is a response to the perception that one has been the beneficiary of another person's moral actions); (b) a moral motive function (i.e., it motivates the grateful pers...

The Müller-Lyer figure is a famous optical illusion where we think two line segments have different lengths, although the lengths are in fact equal. If our brains generate optical illusions, we might ask ourselves the question whether moral illusions can exist, how we can detect them and what we can learn from them. In this article we argue that speciesism – the difference in moral status betwe...

“What students and faculty alike need is an understanding of how morality enters into their professional lives in ways different from how it enters into our ordinary lives.” This view, which informs most of Wade’s paper, is precisely the view that it is important to challenge. Wade is correct that moral judgments must be based upon knowledge of the facts of the case, but surprisingly he writes ...

Research Findings: To test children’s use of testimony of others, 3 – 9 years (N = 227) made judgments about a potential peer transgression in which the intentions of the protagonist were ambiguous, after hearing two different forms of testimony. The 2 forms of testimony were (a) opposing opinion-based testimony from an adult authority versus a peer consensus group and (b) knowledge-based testi...