By Sam Harris from The Daily Beast. " As I argue in my new book, The Moral Landscape , questions about values—about meaning, morality, and life’s larger purpose—are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Throughout the book I make reference to a hypothetical space that I call...

By Terry Newell from Huffington Post "On March 4, 1865, with the Civil War finally approaching a victorious conclusion, Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address. Rather than satisfy the audience's thirst for celebration and revenge, Lincoln gave a sermon on the meaning of the war...

By Julian Baggini from The Independent "As soon as the identity of the Cumbria killer became known, people immediately started to ask what kind of man Derrick Bird was. And there were always going to be only two possible answers. Almost every perpetrator of an atrocity is assigned the role of either...

By Brian Palmer from Slate "Leaving aside the question of medical ethics, did any useful science ever come out of Nazi experiments on unwilling subjects? Very little. Concentration camp doctors conducted research on vaccines, antibiotics, fertility, transplantation, and eugenics. The majority of...

By Moheb Costandi from Seed "Brooklyn defense attorney David Zevin almost made legal history last month by attempting to submit functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data as evidence that a key witness was telling the truth. Zevin was defending Cynette Wilson, who claimed that the temping...

By James Risen from The New York Times "Medical professionals who were involved in the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogations of terrorism suspects engaged in forms of human research and experimentation in violation of medical ethics and domestic and international law, according to a new...

From The Economist To create life is the prerogative of gods. Deep in the human psyche, whatever the rational pleadings of physics and chemistry, there exists a sense that biology is different, is more than just the sum of atoms moving about and reacting with one another, is somehow infused with a divine...

By Michelle Roberts from BBC News. "Brain scans could be useful as lie detectors to show if a witness lies when identifying a suspect in a crime investigation, US researchers believe. Scientists at Stanford University were able to tell when a person recognised a mug shot by reading their brain waves...

By Belinda Luscombe from Time. "In the age of hyperengaged parenting, globalization and the Internet, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has become a freighted organization. Every position statement released by the group — whether about ***-feeding, autism or obesity — sends waves of fury...

By David Berreby from BigThink. "Nick Kristof has an idea for fixing the Catholic Church: Turn it "upside down"! Take power away from the "old boys' club" at the Vatican, where a dark cloud hovers because of the way the old boys handle sexually abusive priests. Give the scepter...

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 Wendell Wallach, Stan Franklin, and Colin Allen Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in general, comprehensive models of human cognition. Such models aim to explain higher-order cognitive faculties, such as deliberation and planning. Given a computational representation, the validity...

by Eugene Caruso Abstract: Logically, an unethical behavior performed yesterday should also be unethical if performed tomorrow. However, the present studies suggest that the timing of a transgression has a systematic effect on people's beliefs about its moral acceptability. Because people's emotional...

By Johnathan Haidt An excerpt: Narvaez (2010, this issue) calls for a moral psychology in which reasoning and intuitions are equal partners. But empirical research on the power of implicit processes and on the weakness of everyday reasoning indicates that the partnership is far from equal. The ancient...

By Kochanska, Grazyna; Koenig, Jamie L.; Barry, Robin A.; Kim, Sanghag; and Yoon, Jeung Eun. Abstract: We investigated whether children's robust conscience, formed during early family socialization, promotes their future adaptive and competent functioning in expanded ecologies. We assessed two dimensions...

By John D. Yoon, M.D.; Kenneth A. Rasinski, M.D.; and Farr A. Curlin, M.D. "...Providing nondirective counsel to their patients appears to have become the norm among certain obstetrician–gynecologists in the United States, particularly when dealing with morally controversial medical decisions. These...

Friends-they are generous and cooperative with each other in ways that appear to defy standard evolutionary expectations, frequently sacrificing for one another without concern for past behaviors or future consequences. In this fascinating multidisciplinary study, Daniel J. Hruschka synthesizes an array...

By Jesse Couenhoven Virtue and deontological ethics are now commonly contrasted as rival approaches to moral inquiry. However, I argue that neither metaethical party should seek complete, solitary domination of the ethical domain. Reductive treatments of the right or the virtuous, as well as projects...

By Jessica R. Escobedoa and Ralph Adolphs Abstract: Our autobiographical self depends on the differential recollection of our personal past, notably including memories of morally laden events. Whereas both emotion and temporal recency are well known to influence memory, very little is known about how...

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...