By Linda Grant, Wall Street Journal An excerpt: Life and Fate , by Vassily Grossman (1959) An old Russian woman, seeing a captured German soldier, raises a brick to throw at him, but at the last moment she instead hands him a piece of bread. The woman has no idea why she does this and in the years to...

3/11/11 By David Brooks, The New York Times We’re an overconfident species. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills. A survey of high school students found that 70 percent of them have above-average leadership skills and only 2 percent are below average...

By Ronald Dworkin, The New York Review of Books Plato and Aristotle treated morality as a genre of interpretation. They tried to show the true character of each of the main moral and political virtues (such as honor, civic responsibility, and justice), first by relating each to the others, and then to...

By David Brooks, The New Yorker 1/17/11 Harold and Erica got their first glimpse of each other in front of a Barnes & Noble. They smiled broadly as they approached, and a deep, primeval process kicked in. Harold liked what he saw, from the waist-to-hip ratio to the clear skin, all indicative of health...

By Natalie Angier, The New York Times An excerpt: In his 20 years as a firefighter and paramedic in Colorado Springs, Bruce Monson, 43, has had his little fist-bumps with death: a burning roof collapsing on top of him, toxic fumes nearly suffocating him. Yet far more terrifying than any personal threats...

ABC News By Dan Harris, Wonbo Woo, and Jessica Hopper An excerpt: Let a bunch of chimpanzees into a yard filled with watermelons and while a few of them may horde the fruit at first, eventually they will share. If not, their whole social system will be disrupted. "If things get totally out of whack...

By BBC News "Scientists in Scotland filmed a group of chimps grooming and caressing an elderly female who died, and remaining subdued for several days afterwards. Other researchers saw females carrying around the bodies of their dead offspring. Both studies are reported in the journal Current Biology...

by Daniel Mendelsohn for The New Yorker "Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its...

By Anindita N. Balslev from The Global Spiral. "When scholars approach a vital human emotion and shared value like compassion, they are confronted with a range of questions. First, how do we understand compassion? How has it been analyzed and interpreted in the cognitive discourses that are associated...

"Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it. One problem with this kind of approach to morality...

Book Description: Hardcover release date 22 April 2013. It is virtuous to be wise and wise to be virtuous. The Language of Human Character is a reference book, textbook and workbook in one. It contains "The Human Character Dictionary," a definitive record of the language of human character...

Book Description: Hardcover release date 12 December 2012. It is virtuous to be wise and wise to be virtuous. To Be Virtuous, Second Edition is a reference book, textbook and workbook in one. It contains "The Human Virtues Dictionary," a definitive record of 4,900 definitions representing the...

Book Description: Hardcover release date: 20 December 2012. It is virtuous to be wise and wise to be virtuous. The Language of Human Virtue is a reference book, textbook and workbook in one. It contains "The Building Virtue Dictionary," a definitive record of the language of human virtue with...

Portraying emotions at their unfolding: A multilayered approach for probing dynamics of neural networks By Gal Raza,Yonatan Winetrauba, Yael Jacoba, Sivan Kinreicha, Adi Maron-Katza, Galit Shahamf, Ilana Podlipskya, Gadi Gilama, Eyal Soreqa, and Talma Hendler Abstract: Dynamic functional integration...

By Ron Tamborini, Allison Eden, Nicholas David Bowman, Matthew Grizzard, and Kenneth A. Lachlan Abstract: Two studies examined how disposition theory-based morality subcultures predict the acceptance and appeal of violence. Study 1 used groups formed by median splits of individual difference variables...

The role of social cognition in moral judgment in frontotemporal dementia. By Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht, Teresa Torralva, Maria Roca, Mariángeles Pose, and Facundo Manes. Abstract: The role of social cognition in moral judgment in frontotemporal dementia. Abstract: Patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal...

By Markus H. Schafer Abstract: The position that people take on moral issues, such as infidelity, can be influenced by abstract principles (e.g., religious ideals) but also by their own relational experience. Conservative religious orientation provides clear moral prescripts about sexual behavior, but...

By Audun Dahl, Joseph J. Campos, and David C. Witherington Emotional action and communication are integral to the development of morality, here conceptualized as our concerns for the well-being of other people and the ability to act on those concerns. Focusing on the second year of life, this article...

By Cynthia M. Jones Health disparities exist along lines of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic class in US society. I argue that we should work to eliminate these health disparities because their existence is a moral wrong that needs to be addressed. Health disparities are morally wrong because they exemplify...

By Soile Juujrvia; Liisa Myyryb; Kaija Pessoa Abstract: The aim of this study was to investigate relationships between care and justice reasoning, dispositional empathy variables and meta-ethical thinking among 128 students from a university of applied sciences. The measures were Skoe's Ethic of...