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...

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 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 Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Lesley Sylvan Social emotions like admiration for another person’s virtue are often associated with a desire to be virtuous one’s self, and to engage in meaningful and socially relevant activities against any odds ( Haidt & Seder, 2007 ). These emotions can profoundly...

By K ristján K ristjánsson In the post-Kohlbergian era of moral education, a 'moral gap' has been identified between moral cognition and moral action. Contemporary moral psychologists lock horns over how this gap might be bridged. The two main contenders for such bridge-building are moral emotions...

Christopher Oveis, E.J. Horberg, Dacher Keltner Compassion and pride serve contrasting social functions: Compassion motivates care-taking behavior, whereas pride enables the signaling and negotiation of rank within social hierarchies. Across 3 studies, compassion was associated with increased perceived...

By Alan Goldman Huckleberry Finn is not irrational in being unmotivated to follow his explicit judgments of rightness and wrongness. Philosophers have previously judged Huck to be irrational, subject to weakness of will, in being unable to act on his moral judgment. But their interpretation rests on...

Jessica M. Salerno, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Margaret C. Stevenson, Tisha R. A. Wiley, Bette L. Bottoms, Roberto Vaca Jr., Pamela S. Pimentel In three studies, we investigated support for applying sex offender registry laws to juveniles. Family law attorneys supported registry laws less for juveniles than...

Corrado Sinigaglia , Laura Sparaci The paper aims at highlighting how our primary understanding of others' actions is rooted in the mirror mechanism. To this end, the anatomical architecture of the mirror neuron system for action will be outlined as well as its role in grasping goals and intentions...

By Emma F. Thomas, Craig McGarty, Kenneth I. Mavor This article explores the synergies between recent developments in the social identity of helping, and advantaged groups’ prosocial emotion. The authors review the literature on the potential of guilt, sympathy, and outrage to transform advantaged groups...

By Derek L Penwell The profoundly thoughtful—not to mention extensive—character of the scholarship historically applied to the nature of the difference between Plato and Aristotle on the issue of the tragic emotions raises the obvious question: What new is there left to say? In this article I seek to...