3/9/11, Science Daily A polite act shows respect. But a new study of a common etiquette -- holding a door for someone -- suggests that courtesy may have a more practical, though unconscious, shared motivation: to reduce the work for those involved. The research, by Joseph P. Santamaria and David A. Rosenbaum...

By David Brooks, The New Yorker 1/17/11 Harold and Erica got their first glimpse of each other in front of a Barnes & Noble. They smiled broadly as they approached, and a deep, primeval process kicked in. Harold liked what he saw, from the waist-to-hip ratio to the clear skin, all indicative of health...

By Meghan Clyne, Wall Street Journal An excerpt: If you've already ditched your New Year's resolution, you are not alone: These days, self-control isn't exactly America's strong suit. Our economy is hobbled because too many of us bought homes we couldn't afford. Obesity is rampant...

ABC News By Dan Harris, Wonbo Woo, and Jessica Hopper An excerpt: Let a bunch of chimpanzees into a yard filled with watermelons and while a few of them may horde the fruit at first, eventually they will share. If not, their whole social system will be disrupted. "If things get totally out of whack...

By Peter Singer, in New Scientist The Enlightenment philosopher David Hume pointed out long ago that no combination of statements about what "is" the case could ever allow one to deduce what "ought" to be. After all, in deductive arguments, the truth of the conclusion is already contained...

By Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Washington Post. "Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century...

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 Joshua Knobe from The New York Times. "...The study of human nature, whether in Nietzsche or in a contemporary psychology journal, is obviously relevant to certain purely scientific questions, but how could this sort of work ever help us to answer the distinctive questions of philosophy? It may...

By Laurie Santos from TED Talks Science of Virtues Scholar Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in "monkeynomics" shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too. See...

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, Dante,...

By Soile Juujrvia; Liisa Myyryb; Kaija Pessoa Abstract: The aim of this study was to investigate relationships between care and justice reasoning, dispositional empathy variables and meta-ethical thinking among 128 students from a university of applied sciences. The measures were Skoe's Ethic of...

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 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 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 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...

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 Loretta J. Bradley, Peggy P. Whiting, Bret Hendricks and Laura S. Wheat This article discusses the ethical dilemmas common to counseling practice with elder families and describes virtue ethics, rule ethics, and principle ethics in their application to the unique challenges of the life stage of diverse...

By Michelle Tichy, David W. Johnson, Roger T. Johnson, & Cary J. Roseth Abstract: We examined the effects of a constructive controversy compared with individualistic learning on 3rd, 4th, and 5th-grade students' (N = 56) moral development, ethical skills, academic achievement, and attitudes toward...

Bettina Hoser, Tanja Nitschke In this paper the need of awareness for and even of change in the rules of how we conduct ourselves as researchers and participants in the virtual worlds of the internet is proposed. The focus of this paper is on the ethics for online research. Our aim is to reignite the...