From New Scientist WHY do we sometimes wrestle with moral dilemmas? A twist on a classic psychology experiment suggests that our minds have two parallel moral systems, and they don't always agree. In the trolley experiment, participants are told that a runaway tram trolley could kill five people...

By Carl Zimmer, New York Times Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve. Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you...

By MacGregor Campbell, New Scientist Does free will actually exist? Or are we all just biological robots? In this video, see why modern neuroscience claims free will is an illusion and why psychology experiments suggest we may be better off believing the lie. Controlling our own destiny is so ingrained...

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 Nancy Snow An excerpt: In five chapters, an introduction, and a short epilogue, Stan van Hooft conveys in highly readable and non-technical prose most of what is important about hope. He distinguishes hope from hopefulness, and uses the Aristotelian template of virtue as a mean between extremes to...

To have a virtue is to possess a certain kind of trait of character that is appropriate in pursuing the moral good at which the virtue aims. Human beings are assumed to be capable of attaining those traits. Yet, a number of scholars are skeptical about the very existence of such character traits. They...

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...

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...

This paper argues that Anscombe and Foot were correctly skeptical of the concept of moral rightness. Two senses of morally right action are distinguished, a strong notion that has deontic implications and a weaker notion that does not. It is argued that unless contemporary virtue ethicists are embracing...

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...

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...

Thomas L. Pangle This interpretative commentary recovers the largely overlooked significance of a work that illuminates, by portraying in a subtle comic drama, the new perspective on existence, the new way of life, that Socrates introduced in and through his founding of political philosophy. The famous...

Nora Hämäläinen In this paper I discuss the viability of the claim that at least some forms of moral theory are harmful for sound moral thought and practice. This claim was put forward by e.g. Elisabeth Anscombe (1981(1958)) and by Annette Baier, Peter Winch, D.Z Phillips and Bernard Williams in the...

Alison Hill I am going to defend pessimism about moral testimony; that is, I am going to argue that there are circumstances in which you have no reason to trust moral testimony (in fact, you have reason not to put your trust in it), even if your interlocutor is reliable and trustworthy regarding the...