By Rachel Lehmann-Haupt from Slate . "The sperm bank protected his anonymity, just as it promised. But that did not mean he couldn't be found. In an age of sophisticated genetic testing, the concept of anonymity is rapidly fading. With some clever sleuthing—tests that can track down ancestral...

By Christian Perring from Metapsychology. " This excellent collection is an essential work in history of ethics and moral psychology. Editor Tobias Hoffman has brought together leading scholars in their fields to discuss weakness of will in Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Henry of Ghent,...

by Geoff Pursinger from The Tigard Times "Holocaust survivor Alter Wiener stood before a group of more than 2,000 students at Tigard High School, Jan. 11, delivering a message of tolerance and forgiveness at the school’s annual Human Rights Assembly. Wiener, 83, spoke about his early life growing...

by Evan Lerner from Seed Magazine "Today, down in the descriptively named Research Triangle in North Carolina, more than 250 scientists, journalists, bloggers, programmers, and multi-hyphenated combinations thereof are planning the future of science communication on the web. (Practicing what it...

Interview by Nathan Gardels for New Perspectives Quarterly Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish poet and essayist who died in 2004, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Just after the publication of A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry and his memoir, Road-side Dog...

By Jerome Groopman "Born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, Maja Matarić originally wanted to study languages and art. After she and her mother moved to the United States, in 1981, her uncle, who had immigrated some years earlier, pressed her to concentrate on computers. As a graduate student...

By Jason Matheny "These days seemingly everyone recognizes that our globalized society is hooked on plentiful and cheap fossil fuels, and that this dependence poses great challenges for future prosperity. But there is another addiction that goes largely accepted and often unnoticed, a hunger that...

By Jonathan Zittrain | TED "The increasing proliferation of "tethered" devices, from iPhones to Xboxes, is only one of countless threats to the freewheeling Internet as we know it. There's also spam, malware, misguided legislation and a drift away from what Internet law expert Jonathan...

By Michael Bond | New Scientist "It sounds kind of obvious, and a little trite: the world would be a better place to live in if we were all a bit kinder to each other. But how can we make that happen? This is fast becoming a valid scientific question. Psychologists and neuroscientists are exploring...

By Katherine Harmon | Scientific American "If love is said to come from the heart, what about hate? Along with music, religion, irony and a host of other complex concepts, researchers are on the hunt for the neurological underpinnings of hatred. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has begun...

Maui Hudson Ethical review is an integral part of the process of developing research and considering issues associated with the production of knowledge. It is part of a system that primarily legitimises western traditions of inquiry and reinforces western assumptions about knowledge and its benefit to...

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...

John Cottingham The virtue of integrity does not appear explicitly in either the Aristotelian or the Judaeo-Christian list of virtues, but elements of both ethical systems implicitly acknowledge the importance of a unified and integrated life. This paper argues that integrity is indispensible for a good...

By Yong Huang Focusing on the Analects and the Mencius, this article attempts to provide a Confucian answer to "why be moral?"—a question about the motivation to be moral that is neither tautological nor self-contradictory, as some philosophers claim. The Confucian answer to this question is...

James R. Otteson Adam Smith raised a series of obstacles to effective large-scale social planning. In this paper, I draw these Smithian obstacles together to construct what I call the “Great Mind Fallacy,” or the belief that there exists some person or persons who can overcome the obstacles Smith raises...

By Lauren F. Freedman and Simon N. Verdun-Jones. This article examines the implications of the body of research that asserts that psychopaths have neurobiological irregularities that are manifested by learning and fear-processing deficits as well as neurotransmitter abnormalities. While this research...

By Rachel Spronk This article presents two themes: how young professionals personally experience sexuality and issues of cultural belonging or identification; and how these issues are interrelated in their lives. I identify ways in which ‘young professionals’ as a social group are in the vanguard in...

By Alan J. Kuperman Although most humanitarians advocate more international intervention in Darfur, some analysts urge the opposite on grounds that intervention has backfired due to the problem of moral hazard. These contrarians argue that the expectation of benefiting from intervention is what emboldens...

Keith R. Brown Moral boundaries are often conceptualized as an expression of an individual's identity or belief system. However, social forces greatly influence how and when consumers activate moral boundaries. Utilizing a dramaturgical perspective, this article shows that the activation of moral...

Leslie Paul Thiele Hannah Arendt is best known for her trenchant analysis and original evaluation of political life. The sine qua non of politics is human action, which she celebrates above all other human capacities. Arendt equates action with freedom. Action in concert is identified as power. As the...