INTRODUCTION To follow the progress of technology and increasing domain of nurses' duties, ethical challenges can be observed more than ever. Therefore, the growing and dynamic system of nursing requires nurses with professional and ethical competence who can provide optimal care. The aim of the present study was to define and explain dimensions of moral competency among the clinical nurses of ...

BACKGROUND Recent findings suggest that medical students' moral competence decreases throughout medical school. This pilot study gives preliminary insights into the effects of two educational interventions in ethics classes on moral competence among medical students in Munich, Germany. METHODS Between 2012 and 2013, medical students were tested using Lind's Moral Competence Test (MCT) prior t...

A new framework for the study of the human moral faculty is currently receiving much attention: the so-called 'universal moral grammar' framework. It is based on an intriguing analogy, first pointed out by Rawls, between the study of the human moral sense and Chomsky's research program into the human language faculty. To assess UMG, we ask: is moral competence modular? Does it have an underlyin...

Developmental psychologists have long argued that the capacity to distinguish moral and conventional transgressions develops across cultures and emerges early in life. Children reliably treat moral transgressions as more wrong, more punishable, independent of structures of authority, and universally applicable. However, previous studies have not yet examined the role of these features in mature...

Understanding how people form impressions of others is a key goal of social cognition research. Past theories have posited that two fundamental dimensions—warmth and competence—underlie impression formation. However, these models conflate morality with warmth and fail to capture the full role that moral character plays in impression formation. An emerging perspective separates moral character (...

BACKGROUND Ethnic diversity in schools increases due to globalization. Thus, the children's social-emotional competence development must be considered in the context of a multi-ethnic classroom. METHODS In this study, the social-emotional competence of 65 Asian-American and Latin-American children was observed at the beginning and the end of their kindergarten year. RESULTS Initially, signi...

We propose Knobe’s explanation of his cases encounters a dilemma: Either his explanation works and, counterintuitively, morality is not at the heart of these effects; or morality is at the heart of the effects and Knobe’s explanation does not succeed. This dilemma is then used to temper the use of the Knobe paradigm for discovering moral norms. Knobe presents two kinds of theories that compete ...