Recent work shows an important asymmetry in lay intuitions about moral dilemmas. Most people think it is permissible to divert a train so that it will kill one innocent person instead of five, but most people think that it is not permissible to push a stranger in front of a train to save five innocents. We argue that recent emotion-based explanations of this asymmetry have neglected the contrib...

During the last decade, the Swedish health care system has undergone fundamental changes. The changes have made health care more complex and ethics has increasingly become a required component of clinical practice. Considering this, it is not surprising that many health care professionals suffer from stress-related disorders. Stress due to ethical dilemmas is usually referred to as "moral distr...

Moral dilemmas—like the ‘‘trolley problem’’ or real-world examples like capital punishment—result from a conflict between consequentialist and deontological intuitions (i.e., whether ends justify means). The authors contend that people often resolve such moral conflict by aligning factual beliefs about consequences of acts with evaluations of the act’s inherent morality (i.e., morality independ...

Promoting ethical, responsible, and caring young people is a perennial aim of education. Schools are invited to include moral teaching in every possible curriculum, such as the core subjects and sports teams and clubs. Efforts have been done to find other teaching ways other than traditional ones such as games or role play or engaging students in moral dilemmas. Computer games have been always ...

Large-scale brain networks are integral to the coordination of human behaviour, and their anatomy provides insights into the clinical presentation and progression of neurodegenerative illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease, which targets the default mode network, and behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, which targets a more anterior salience network. Although the default mode network is ...

The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ve...

We investigated whether and why the use of a foreign language influences moral judgment. We studied the trolley and footbridge dilemmas, which propose an action that involves killing one individual to save five. In line with prior work, the use of a foreign language increased the endorsement of such consequentialist actions for the footbridge dilemma, but not for the trolley dilemma. But contra...

This paper shows how moral decisions can be drawn computationally by using ACORDA, a working implementation of prospective logic programming. ACORDA is employed to model moral dilemmas, as they are able to prospectively look ahead at the consequences of hypothetical moral judgments. With this knowledge of consequences, moral rules are then used to decide the appropriate moral judgments. The who...

The present study aims to examine the relationship between the cortical midline structures (CMS), which have been regarded to be associated with selfhood, and moral decision making processes at the neural level. Traditional moral psychological studies have suggested the role of moral self as the moderator of moral cognition, so activity of moral self would present at the neural level. The prese...