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...

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...

By Oliver Putz Recent advances in evolutionary biology and ethology suggest that humans are not the only species capable of empathy and possibly morality, suggesting that the concept of the imago Dei could be extended to accommodate moral species other than our own. Read the article . Image from Flickr...

Nancy E. Snow Abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq confront us with the question of how seemingly ordinary soldiers could have perpetrated harms against prisoners. In this essay I argue that a Stoic approach to the virtues can provide a bulwark against the social and personal forces that can lead to abusive...

Felipe De Brigard, Eric Mandelbaum, David Ripley Some theorists think that the more we get to know about the neural underpinnings of our behaviors, the less likely we will be to hold people responsible for their actions. This intuition has driven some to suspect that as neuroscience gains insight into...

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...

By Mathieu Bouville "Since cheating is obviously wrong, arguments against it (it provides an unfair advantage, it hinders learning) need only be mentioned in passing. But the argument of unfair advantage absurdly takes education to be essentially a race of all against all; moreover, it ignores that...

Using evidence from experimental psychology, some social psychologists, moral philosophers and organizational scholars claim that character traits do not exist and, hence, that the moral psychology that underlies virtue ethics is empirically inadequate. Hence, the virtue ethics tradition should dispose...

"At the core of the book lies a new form of virtue theory based on the emotions. Distinct from deontological, consequentialist, and teleological virtue theories, this one has a particular theological, indeed Christian, foundation. The new theory helps to resolve philosophical problems and puzzles...