The cognitive science of moral action seeks accounts of moral cognition – and their conceptual and valuational structures – that explain stable or unstable, reasoned or unreasoned, moral commitments in the real world. To be successful, cognitive science requires experimental approaches that are relevant to the lives and choices of people who demonstrate stable moral commitment in real life. Fur...

Meehan, Woll, and Abbott (Journal of Research in Personality, 1979, 13, 25-38) have shown that scores on Hogan's Survey of Ethical Attitudes (SEA) are affected by instructions to simulate politically liberal or conservative attitudes. They also found that scores are affected by instructions to present one's self in a socially desirable or undesirable light, and that group ratings of the social ...

Using two 3-month diary studies and a large cross-sectional survey, we identified distinguishing features of adults with low versus high levels of moral character. Adults with high levels of moral character tend to: consider the needs and interests of others and how their actions affect other people (e.g., they have high levels of Honesty-Humility, empathic concern, guilt proneness); regulate t...

Introduction The recent EPAT issue on Peirce and education (2005, 37/2) has explored Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatism mainly with regard to the problematics of learning and acquiring knowledge. This paper will shift the focus toward the moral dimension inherent in pragmatic philosophy. I will introduce a neologism, “moral stuttering”, as pertaining to real life problem solving and ethical de...

This article provides an answer to the question of why agents make self-serving decisions under moral hazard and how their self-serving decisions can be kept in check through institutional arrangements. Our theoretical model predicts that the agents' power and the manner in which they are held accountable jointly determine their propensity to make self-serving decisions. We test our theory in t...

Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affe...

This paper reviews the complex, overlapping ideas of two prominent Italian philosophers, Lorenzo Magnani and Luciano Floridi, with the aim of facilitating the nonviolent transformation of self and world, and with a focus on information technologies in mediating this process. In Floridi’s information ethics, problems of consistency arise between self-poiesis, anagnorisis, entropy, evil, and the ...

Moral emotions are critically important in guiding appropriate social conduct. Empirical investigation of these emotions remains a challenge, however, because of the difficulty in eliciting them reliably in controlled settings. Here we describe a novel prejudice paradigm that aimed to elicit both negatively and positively valenced moral emotions in real-time. Low-prejudice females (N = 46) who ...

We surveyed well-acquainted dyads about two key moral character traits (Honesty-Humility, Guilt Proneness), as well as several other individual differences. We examined self-other agreement, similarity, assumed similarity, and similarity-free agreement (i.e., self-other agreement controlling for similarity and assumed similarity). Participants projected their own level of moral character onto t...