By Brian Leiter from On the Human Brain "By “moral skepticism,” I shall mean the view that there are no objective moral ‘facts’ or ‘truths.’ Moral skeptics from Friedrich Nietzsche to Charles Stevenson to John Mackie have appealed to the purported fact of widespread and intractable moral disagreement...

By William Saletan from Slate "When Elizabeth Loftus began to plant false memories to test their therapeutic benefits, the memories seemed innocuous. They weren't about families or politics. They were just about food. You went into the experiment thinking you'd always loved strawberry ice...

By Carlos A. Ball from Huffington Post. "In 1968, the pioneer gay rights activist Frank Kameny coined the phrase "Gay is Good," a slogan that was used with some frequency by gay rights proponents in the years following the Stonewall riots. The slogan, like the phrase "Black is Beautiful"...

By Sean Carroll from NPR. "With that in mind, let's think about morality. What would it mean to have a science of morality? I think it would look have to look something like this: Human beings seek to maximize something we choose to call "well-being" or "utility" or "happiness"...

By Edwin Cartlidge from Physicsworld.com. "A statistical-physics-based model may shed light on the age-old question "how can morality take root in a world where everyone is out for themselves?" Computer simulations by an international team of scientists suggest that the answer lies in...

By Paul Bloom from The New York Times. "Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the...

By Charles S. Jacobs from Forbes. "You're standing next to train tracks, and you notice that a runaway train is about to hit five unsuspecting people. You can throw a switch to divert the train onto another track, where it will hit and kill only one person. What do you do? Here's another...

By Richard Alleyne "Researchers found that "do-gooders" appear to be naturally stronger than their counterparts and that an act of heroism can actually improve your overall stamina.The findings turn upside down the idea that being altruistic can be detrimental to your own advancement.They...

By Sam Harris "Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can -- and should -- be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life." In this video, Sam Harris discusses...

By Maia Szalavitz from Time. "Increasingly, neuroscientists, psychologists and educators believe that bullying and other kinds of violence can indeed be reduced by encouraging empathy at an early age. Over the past decade, research in empathy — the ability to put ourselves in another person's...

By Mark S. M. Scott John Hick transformed the shape of thinking about theodicy in contemporary philosophical theology with his conception of the world as a “vale of soul‐making.” Suffering, he argues, enables our development as spiritually and morally mature persons. Without suffering we could not cultivate...

By Carsten K. W. De Dreu, Lindred L. Greer, Michel J. J. Handgraaf, Shaul Shalvi, Gerben A. Van Kleef, Matthijs Baas, Femke S. Ten Velden, Eric Van Dijk, Sander W. W. Feith. "Humans regulate intergroup conflict through parochial altruism; they self-sacrifice to contribute to in-group welfare and...

By Ingvild Almås, Alexander W. Cappelen, Erik Ø. Sørensen, Bertil Tungodden "Fairness considerations fundamentally affect human behavior, but our understanding of the nature and development of people’s fairness preferences is limited. The dictator game has been the standard experimental design for...

By Karl Sigmund "How does cooperation emerge among selfish individuals? When do people share resources, punish those they consider unfair, and engage in joint enterprises? These questions fascinate philosophers, biologists, and economists alike, for the "invisible hand" that should turn...

By Robert Sparrow "Since the first sex reassignment operations were performed, individual sex has come to be, to some extent at least, a technological artifact. The existence of sperm sorting technology, and of prenatal determination of fetal sex via ultrasound along with the option of termination...

By Erik J. Wielenberg "Many claim that the availability of evolutionary explanations for human moral beliefs threatens the view that humans have moral knowledge. Peter Singer suggests that evolutionary explanations can debunk moral claims.1 Michael Ruse declares: “Morality is a collective illusion...

By Frans Svensson "Conceived of as a contender to other theories in substantive ethics, virtue ethics is often associated with, in essence, the following account or criterion of right action: VR: An action A is right for S in circumstances C if and only if a fully virtuous agent would characteristically...

By Bridget Clarke "One of the most prominent strands in contemporary work on the virtues consists in the attempt to develop a distinctive—and compelling—account of practical reason on the basis of Aristotle’s ethics. In response to this project, several eminent critics have argued that the Aristotelian...

By Ragnar Francén "Motivational externalists and internalists of various sorts disagree about the circumstances under which it is conceptually possible to have moral opinions but lack moral motivation. Typically, the evidence referred to are intuitions about whether people in certain scenarios who...

By Gregory F. Mellema "There have traditionally been two schools of thought regarding moral ideals and their relationship with moral duty. First, many have held that moral agents at all times have a duty or obligation to realize or attain moral ideals, or at least they have a duty to strive to realize...