By Mark S. M. Scott John Hick transformed the shape of thinking about theodicy in contemporary philosophical theology with his conception of the world as a “vale of soul‐making.” Suffering, he argues, enables our development as spiritually and morally mature persons. Without suffering we could not cultivate...

By Carsten K. W. De Dreu, Lindred L. Greer, Michel J. J. Handgraaf, Shaul Shalvi, Gerben A. Van Kleef, Matthijs Baas, Femke S. Ten Velden, Eric Van Dijk, Sander W. W. Feith. "Humans regulate intergroup conflict through parochial altruism; they self-sacrifice to contribute to in-group welfare and...

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...

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...

By Thomas Ryan 'Compassion’—an engaging yet troublesome word? Recent studies on Thomas Aquinas prompt a reconsideration of the place of compassion as an emotion and a virtue in his treatment of the Christian moral life. Through an analysis of relevant texts in Thomas and in relation to contemporary...

By Richard B. Miller Eric Gregory’s Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship has two aims: first, to recast debates over modern liberalism as debates over the political implications of the Augustinian legacy and, second, to rationally reconstruct Augustine’s ideas...

By Laurence B. McCullough There are persistent tendencies in the bioethics literature to be imprecise about what “enhancement” means, to treat genetic enhancement as ethically sui generis . “Enhancement” in general means the improvement of human anatomy and therefore human appearance and of human physiology...

By Martin Peterson To consequentialise a moral theory means to account for moral phenomena usually described in nonconsequentialist terms, such as rights, duties, and virtues, in a consequentialist framework. This paper seeks to show that all moral theories can be consequentialised. The paper distinguishes...