The purpose of the study was to evaluate the didactic potential, and applicability of fiction in religious education. The subject I wanted to examine was J.R.R. Tolkiens The Fellowship of the Ring and whether it could be enriching for religious studies in upper secondary school, focusing on normative ethics.The study used a qualitative research met...
Published in The Journal of Ethics
According to contractualist theories in ethics, whether an action is wrong is determined by whether it could be justified to others on grounds no one could reasonably reject. Contractualists then think that reasonable rejectability of principles depends on the strength of the personal objections individuals can make to them. There is, however, a de...
Published in Philosophical Studies
Collective action problems lie behind many core issues in ethics and social philosophy—for example, whether an individual is required to vote, whether it is wrong to consume products that are produced in morally objectionable ways, and many others. In these cases, it matters greatly what we together do, but yet a single individual’s ‘non-cooperativ...
Published in Archives of gerontology and geriatrics
As care robots become more commonplace in aged-care settings, the ethical debate on their use becomes increasingly important. Our objective was to examine the ethical arguments and underlying concepts used in the ethical debate on care robot use in aged care. We conducted a systematic literature search for argument-based ethics publications focusin...
Published in Cognition
Decades of psychological research have demonstrated that intuitive judgments are often unreliable, thanks to their inflexible reliance on limited information (Kahneman, 2003, 2011). Research on the computational underpinnings of learning, however, indicates that intuitions may be acquired by sophisticated learning mechanisms that are highly sensiti...
Published in Biology & Philosophy
Matthew Liao’s edited collection Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality covers a wide range of issues in moral psychology. The collection should be of interest to philosophers, psychologist, and neuroscientists alike, particularly those interested in the relation between these disciplines. I give an overview of the content and major themes of t...
Published in Journal of Bioethical Inquiry
In this article we critically review the neural mechanisms of moral cognition that have recently been studied via electroencephalography (EEG). Such studies promise to shed new light on traditional moral questions by helping us to understand how effective moral cognition is embodied in the brain. It has been argued that conflicting normative ethica...
Published in Philosophical Studies
Many prominent ethicists, including Shelly Kagan, John Rawls, and Thomas Scanlon, accept a kind of epistemic modesty thesis concerning our capacity to carry out the project of ethical theorizing. But it is a thesis that has received surprisingly little explicit and focused attention, despite its widespread acceptance. After explaining why the thesi...
Published in Philosophical Studies
How should deontologists concerned with the ethics of killing apply their moral theory when we don’t know all the facts relevant to the permissibility of our action? Though the stakes couldn’t be higher, and uncertainty is endemic where killing is concerned, few deontologists have an answer to this question. In this paper I canvass two possibilitie...
The current essay, belonging to the field of Normative Ethics, aims to offer a selection of relevant objections to Utilitarianism. The mentioned selection is presented by a series of authors related to the heterogeneous Virtue Ethics. Firstly, we will succinctly deal with Utilitarianism, taking into account what it consists of in its more general s...
